The Sunday Mail
Zimbabwe has made it again, defying all odds staked against it by the prophets of doom.
We are in 2015, a decade-and-a-half into the West’s malicious offensive against our economic aspirations.
We have held the line and are regrouping for the transformative offensive, thanks to the tenacity of Zanu-PF’s founding ideology and objective of total independence.
Having dealt with the external political threat to the 2013 elections, Zanu-PF has turned its gaze within.
The party has ushered us into a new year in which it is regrouping, reasserting ideology and reinvigorating the primary objective of economic independence upon an indigenous economy. On the eve of 2015 – at the party’s 6th National People’s Congress — Zanu-PF’s psyche reasserted this revolutionary ideology around which the winning 2013 election manifesto was formulated.
The economic development agenda captured in the manifesto is one the Zanu-PF Government is now mandated to implement under Zim-Asset to achieve an “Empowered Society and Growing Economy”.
At congress, the party faced the reality that it was under siege from within.
The ogre of egocentric factionalism fed on insatiable corruption and debilitating ineptitude had infected the party’s veins, going to the very heart of Government.
Loyalties long founded on shared sacrifice for an ideology and revolutionary objective that achieved political independence in April 1980 were being lost rapidly to power-mongering, greed and corruption.
Worse still, comrades in leadership positions had begun to lean uneasily toward the same Western interests against which they had committed life and limb in pursuit of national independence. Such conflicted interests have undermined Zanu-PF’s objective to “create conditions for economic independence, prosperity and equitable distribution of the wealth of the nation”.
Meanwhile, 35 years into political independence, the indigenous majority has remained economically restless, with its aspirations impeded by local fronts enlisted from within the party to the treasonous cause of Western capital interests, only to sabotage Zanu-PF’s economic revolution.
Zanu-PF must come to terms with the reality that should it retain governing authority over Zimbabwe into the future, its economic revolution cannot afford doubting Thomases within nor can it be allowed to tolerate sabotaging self-interests in its rank and leadership. The party has been mandated by the people of Zimbabwe to facilitate a developmental State, to effect socio-economic transformation. The administration of such a State can never be achieved under the authority of a fractured party sabotaging its own objectives and policies in Government. It took the boldness of the party’s new Secretary for Women’s Affairs, Dr Grace Mugabe, for Zanu-PF to reflect and set upon a no-holds-barred Congress.
The party had been enlightened on comrades lost to the ideological cause of the party, whose self-interests were impairing its socio-economic agenda.
Ineptitude and corruption concealed behind claims to seniority and liberation hero status have been paralysing Zanu-PF, making the revolutionary party a sitting duck in a regime-change open season.
In bold response, Congress made surgical incisions to the party’s veins, to bleed out the poison that had settled and afflicted Zanu-PF’s revolutionary ethos. An economic agenda was the sweeping undercurrent at Zanu-PF’s 6th National People’s Congress.
“It is baseless” was the obsessive charge in the private media, while pseudo-analysts shamelessly claimed that the congress was a “damp squib”, with little concern about the economy and the future of the country.
To use this cliche, “It’s the economy, silly!”
The people rallied behind their First Secretary and President Mugabe to defend and reassert the party’s ideology and economic objective.
President Mugabe’s person and vision were under siege from ideologically-bankrupt factionalism driven by corrupt self-interests geared to appease foreign economic interests.
The President warned: “We cannot countenance a situation where Zanu-PF risks being succeeded by something that we cannot define within its ideology, some other contraption that is not Zanu-PF, but calling itself by its name and claiming to be Zanu-PF.”
He reiterated that: “The ruling party’s ideological footprint must be visible and it must have a direct say in all the outputs of its functionaries deployed to Government or elected to any position within the party.”
The congress resolutions have set precedence on leadership accountability.
Those whom the party appoints to Government must safeguard the Zanu-PF ideology and objectives.
The resolutions emphasise that the party constitutes and presides over Government, and is effectively “supreme over Government” such that the party’s duly elected policies must preside within Government to direct the affairs of its institutions and agencies. Congress effectively called upon Government appointees to regularly report to Zanu-PF and remain accountable to its ideology and policy objectives.
It is not surprising that the private media was lost to the economic intent of this Congress, which declared “zero tolerance to incompetence, gross misconduct, corruption, disloyalty and treachery at all levels in the leadership”.
The gathering essentially reaffirmed socio-economic transformation through accelerated implementation of Zim Asset and a reinvigorated indigenisation programme. Indeed, indigenisation had lost momentum after falling victim to confusion and lack of clarity caused by inconsistent, conflicting statements by Zanu-PF representatives in Government.
Congress has called upon Government to enhance broad-based inclusive participation of indigenous people in the economy and to unlock value in abundant natural and human resources.
It also said Government should “create conditions for economic independence, prosperity and equitable distribution of the wealth of the nation”.
Zanu-PF has reached its bridging point; a point when its body politic and expression of political authority can no longer be an obstacle but the conduit and means through which Zimbabwe effectively embarks on a developmental state and establishes a sustainable indigenous economy.
Only a cohesive party in Government can achieve such a task.
Ultimately, Zanu-PF must prune dry branches from its administrative institutions to renew a bold advance to national economic aspirations.
Zanu-PF can no longer afford, literally, to be apologetic in the economic agenda.
Government should no longer be allowed to cry “sanctions” and “unwilling foreign investors” while sleeping soundly on a cushion of wealth in natural and human resources whose worth was being eroded by ineptitude and corruption.
Government spokesperson Professor Jonathan Moyo recently called upon those appointed to and employed by Government to consciously and deliberately exercise their “duty to assist President Mugabe to consolidate his legacy through service delivery promised in Zanu-PF’s 2013 election Manifesto upon which President Mugabe’s electoral mandate is based”.
Zanu-PF’s 6th National People’s Congress has set the party on a path of consolidating its economic agenda. Such an agenda cannot be blurred by shades of grey cast by doubters and saboteurs within the party. It can only be hot or cold; for warm will only be spat out by the people come 2018.
Question is: What now for Zanu-PF in Government?
◆ Rangu Nyamurundira is a member of the Zimbabwe Youth Council Board. His views are his own and do not necessarily reflect or represent the views of institutions he is associated with.
