EDITORIAL COMMENT: By any means necessary

22 Feb, 2015 - 00:02 0 Views

The Sunday Mail

Yesterday is the day that Malcolm X died. It is also the day that Robert Mugabe was born.

Malcolm X was killed, but his ideas of emancipation live on. President Mugabe is alive, and we should not let his ideas on uhuru die.

Our President turned 91 years old on February 21. And his life is testament to something that Malcolm X said in the last year of his short but brilliant life.

That was in June 1964, and he was now going by the name El Hajj Malik el Shabazz after having already rejected the slave name of Malcolm Little and also shedding the ‘‘X’’ adopted when he joined the Nation of Islam.

Speaking in New York, after visiting Mecca and Accra, Malcolm X said: “That’s our motto. We want freedom by any means necessary. We want justice by any means necessary. We want equality by any means necessary…

“Anytime we know that an unjust condition exists and it is illegal and unjust, we will strike at it by any means necessary. And strike also at whatever and whoever gets in the way . . .

“We declare our right on this earth to be a man, to be a human being, to be respected as a human being, to be given the rights of a human being in this society, on this earth, in this day, which we intend to bring into existence by any means necessary.”

This was a bold and definitive statement, encapsulating the major difference between this under-celebrated icon whose unabashed self-determination has resisted the corporate reinvention that has sanitised Martin Luther King Jnr and Nelson Mandela to the extent that they are embraced by empire.

It is this same unapologetic ideological forthrightness that makes President Mugabe remain the champion of the oppressed not just in Zimbabwe but the world over.

After taking a political nationalist approach, unleashing the military alternative and adopting the diplomatic approach to spearhead Zimbabwe’s political and economic liberation, this is a man who captures the spirit by any means necessary when it comes to advancing our development agenda.

Because when it comes to achieving our developmental aspirations, no option should be taken off the table.

We forge forward by any means necessary, as we have been taught by President Mugabe.

It is unfortunate that within this quest, we have people in Government and Zanu-PF who waver, who baulk at the thought of confronting head-on this great commission that we have.

People in positions of authority still shrink at the thought of making the hard decisions that inform the empowerment and indigenisation agenda.

These are people who think that Zimbabwe cannot develop without the goodwill of the United States and Britain, that we must bow to the whims of those who would have us remain hewers of wood and drawers of water.

But there is no goodwill.

Every country must serve its own interests, must do those things that ensure its people reach the promised land of real economic and social development.

It is by any means necessary that we must direct all our attentions to our own national interests.

And by the same token, by any means necessary, we must resist anything and anyone, any idea and any suggestion, that we must negotiate our sovereign right to empower our own people.

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