All lasting constitutions secure the majority

When imperialism becomes desperate, its stooges go hysterical and irrational.

Just in case the desperation of the imperialists is in doubt, it helps to look at the obvious signs:
British Prime Minister David Cameron came to South Africa with a delegation of more than 300 businesspeople last week. He wanted to stay five days, but he had to cut the five days to just one-and-a-half days because the same crisis that drove him to South Africa also required him to engage in firefighting at home, in the House of Commons. In South Africa Cameron's agenda included Libya and Zimbabwe.

Back home in continental Europe, French President Nicolas Sarkozy was meeting with German Chancellor Angela Merkel to discuss the threatened collapse of the euro currency and the disintegration of entire eurozone symbolised by the Greek debt. Meanwhile, Italy, Spain and Portugal are also tittering in the direction of Greece.

The same crisis is manifested differently in the United States, where the only solution so far has been to keep on raising the debt limit for deficit spending.
There is a currency war within the US-led empire because the rise of the BRICS countries ' Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa ' has left too small a space for both the euro and the US dollar. As a result the European Central Bank has been forced to take and keep small European nations hostage within the eurozone.

But the people are refusing. The uprisings we have seen in North Africa are also erupting in Europe because it is the ordinary citizens' livelihoods which are being squeezed (on both sides of the Atlantic) in the covert war between the US dollar and the euro.
Any astute Zimbabwean patriot watching these developments cannot fail to see the paradox. The very same white racist governments which imposed illegal sanctions on Zimbabwe 11 years ago today suffer and behave as if they are the ones who have been sanctioned.

They now want to return to a new Berlin Conference and a new partition of Africa. This has already happened over Libya and Cote d'Ivoire, but Southern Africa has been tough because of the memory and legacy of the African liberation movement embedded in the security forces, the war veterans and the new generation of youths who have reacted with contempt against the generation of imperialist stooges who are following in the footsteps of Moise Tshombe, Jonas Savimbi, Alfonso Dhlakama, Frederick Chiluba, Raila Odinga and Morgan Tsvangirai.

There is a solid revolutionary alliance between young people of the generation of Julius Malema and their grandfathers who fought in the Second Chimurenga, the war veterans and liberation intellectuals represented by President Robert Mugabe. That emerging alliance causes panic within the empire and within the ranks of the empire's proxies here. What political programme can the MDC formations offer people at the next election against this revolutionary alliance?

So, Zimbabwe features most prominently in the construction of this new anti-imperialist alliance; and the disastrous setbacks in Libya and Cote d'Ivoire have helped to bring currency to that alliance.
In Zimbabwe, young people of the generation of Malema are the ones who have suffered the worst effects of economic structural adjustment programmes and illegal sanctions and have been disgusted by the white man's claim to export "democracy" and "human rights" to such places as Iraq, Somalia, Haiti and now Libya and Cote    d'Ivoire.
The result is obvious panic within imperialist circles, such as what we saw in David Cameron's quick flight to South Africa and back to London.  In doing so, he was merely repeating the frantic efforts of Henry Kissinger, Andrew Young, Chester Crocker, Colin Powell, Walter Kansteiner, Tony Blair and George W. Bush.  Recently, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton also tried her luck and ended in Lusaka, Zambia. Zimbabwe is a no-fly-zone against imperialism.

Imperialist Panic Transferred to the Empire's Proxies in Zimbabwe
The fact that the white man's panic is transferred to the empire's sponsored parties among us can easily be demonstrated by showing that each time a representative of the empire rushed to this region in panic, leaders of the sponsored parties also sneaked out of Zimbabwe to go and meet him or her. The biggest rush was in 2003 when George W. Bush came to South Africa and The Daily News on Sunday at the time announced the visit as "Cyclone Bush Hits Africa". There were great expectations but they all fizzled out.

This time, the MDC formations indeed sent representatives to meet David Cameron in South Africa on the eve of Lindiwe Zulu's trip to Zimbabwe, supposedly to facilitate in the Zimbabwe dialogue on behalf of Sadc. But Zimbabweans wondered why Ms Zulu did not come via Namibia where the chairman of Sadc is. Why did the South Africans entertain the arch-enemy of Zimbabweans on the eve of their Sadc facilitation mission to Zimbabwe? And the signs of panic were everywhere. Just as the old Daily News wanted George Bush to finish off Zimbabwe like a cyclone in 2003, the current Daily News on July 20 2011 told us "Zuma threatens Mugabe" following South African President Jacob Zuma's meeting with David Cameron.

Panic can make people stupid. How does the appointed facilitator of agreement among Zimbabweans facilitate by threatening the major party to that agreement? Threatening is not facilitation.

Linking the Panic Buttons
The white empire and its proxies here are in panic; and for the people of Zimbabwe to know how to handle both, they must connect the various panic buttons being pushed. What connects them is fear of the power of a reawakened majority, fear of the popular majority, who are determined to defend revolutionary interests and gains against those of the white empire and its Rhodesian and Boer cousins.

So, the local proxies of the empire have to deceive the people by sometimes paying lip service to their interests while betraying and undermining the same in terms of real actions. So, the following are some of the separate panic buttons pushed at different times. But they are all linked to the imperialist fear of the popular power of a reawakened majority. Most of the panic buttons concern the Constitution and elections, as follows:

    Elections should be delayed for three to five more years because "people" are not ready, even though this violates the law.

    Elections can be free and fair only if they are administered and supervised by outsiders, even though it is one key objective of every country's constitution to protect national elections from external influence and interference.

The just concluded constitutional outreach programme was supposed to enable the nation to craft a "people-driven" and "people-derived" constitution, but the people's views should either be abandoned altogether or valued less because especially rural people did not understand constitutional issues. Most of what they contributed has nothing to do with constitution making.
If we use what ordinary people said, we should use it only qualitatively and not quantitatively: again because the majority do not and did not understand constitutional issues. So their numbers and the number of times they expressed certain needs and concerns should not matter. What was demanded by only two persons, for instance, should count as much as what was demanded by 10 000!

Soldiers, other security personnel and war veterans should be excluded from constitution making because the constitution is about freedoms and not about security or war!
In order for free and fair elections to take place in Zimbabwe, the army, the airforce, intelligence services, prison services and the police should be overhauled, if not disbanded and reorganised from scratch.
In order for free and fair elections to take place in Zimbabwe, all security forces and agents should be restricted to their barracks or new "keeps" for a period starting before the elections and ending after announcement of results.

Why Constitutional Debate Has Become So Weird
If the constitution debate seems strange to the majority now, it is because it has become the opposite of what a constitution debate is normally concerned with. It has become weird precisely because the proxies of the white empire want us to craft and adopt a constitution for self-destabilisation and regime change while the majority want a constitution to consolidate their revolutionary gains, their independence and their sovereignty. The majority want a constitution to recover and own their economic resources.

In other words, the empire and its proxy parties want a constitution to deepen our insecurity and dependency; while the majority want a constitution for their security in economic, commercial, legal and physical terms.

What We Learn From History
Some Zimbabweans forget that the Zimbabwe-Rhodesia Constitution outlined in the March 3 1978 agreement between Ian Smith and his three African collaborators (Bishop A. Muzorewa, Rev N. Sithole and Chief J. Chirau) was a disaster precisely because it was meant to exclude, criminalise and destroy the very same revolutionary cadres who are now being referred to as "securocrats", "rogue soldiers", "Zanu-PF thugs" and war veterans. The Zimbabwe-Rhodesia constitution was a constitution in name only because it lacked hard-nosed and realistic inputs on the security of the majority.

It is astonishing to find people who claim to be constitutional experts in the Eurocentric sense still failing to appreciate that King John's Magma Carta of 1215 AD and the Habeas Corpus Act which they celebrate as pillars of the unwritten English constitution were both about security.
It is unfortunate that the white imperialist powers specialise in teaching others to do what they will never do themselves. The West sponsors NGOs and individuals among us who teach our people that constitutions are all about rights, privileges and liberties without duties. They want us too believe that constitutions are only about ideals and beliefs with no tangible guarantees of security.

But if we look at their own history, we see that what they preach is not what they practise. The US constitution originated in the popular quest for security for the white settler against British imperial interference which was military, political, economic, commercial and ideological. Zimbabwe is fighting Anglo-Saxon imperialist interference which is also military, political, economic, commercial and ideological.
Let me cite, for instance, Lawrence Friedman's A History of American Law:
"Within a short time after the war [with Britain] broke out, eleven of the states [colonies] had drafted and adopted new constitutions. To some, a constitution was a rallying point, a symbol of unity during war.

"The New Jersey Constitution of 1776 put it this way: 'In the present deplorable situation of these colonies, exposed to the fury of a cruel and relentless enemy, some form of government is absolutely necessary, not only for the preservation of good order, but also the more effectively to unite the people and enable them to exert their whole force in their own necessary defence'."
If we move on to Chapter 3 of Alfred H Kelly and Winfred A Harbison, The American Constitution: Its Origins and Development, we find the popular quest for collective security as the key motive force behind constitution making. The grievances of the colonies which congealed in the 1776 Declaration of Independence and 1787 Constitution was all expressed at first as popular demands for security in all its dimensions:

"The underlying basis of the American objection to the British programme was . . . a conviction that the new measures [taken by Britain] would prove economically ruinous, but in accordance with Anglo-Saxon tradition the colonies couched their objections very largely in constitutional and legal terms."

What the authors are saying is that the legal language and constitution form which the collective grievances of the colonies assumed represented packaging, a packaging which the conventions and mores of the elites made necessary.  But the substance and motives came from the popular security concerns of the people.
Now, because of the derivative nature of neo-colonial African elites here, we learn that the packagers and decorators of people's concerns and needs are now looking down upon what the people said and the way things were said during the Copac outreach.

The authors go further concerning the beginnings of the US constitution:
"The developing crisis [between the colonists and the power threatening them] thus had somewhat the appearance of lawyers' quarrel, though it is scarcely conceivable that the colonists would have pursued the argument so vigorously had they not felt the immediate severity of the new tax laws and the commercial menace of tighter trade regulations."

Going further, we learn that people's sense of a shifting geopolitical situation also increased their boldness against Britain. Zimbabwe felt the same boldness when it encouraged its people to reclaim their land and its Government to leave the British Commonwealth. The common people of Zimbabwe in 2011 have forgotten that they were ever part of that body. In the case of the North American colonies:
"The destruction of French control in Canada removed much of the old sense of military insecurity and dependence on Britain . . . "

The authors conclude the chapter on the North American revolution by saying that its bedrock was a new culture distinct from that of Britain. "The Revolution was therefore an internal social upheaval as well as a political break with Britain."

In other words, a lasting constitution must be the embodiment of popular revolution and the popular demand for security for the majority against its enemies. That is what the US break with Britain proved.
That break was summed up in the constitution.  That break also brought the acute awareness that the new nation now had to provide for the security of its people in all respects.
Now, the unwarranted noise against Brigadier Douglas Nyikayaramba, coming mainly from the proxies of the empire, arises from a similar situation. Both the ethos and the security arrangements which enabled us to defy the Euro-American empire are represented by those who fought for our liberation and proceeded to found one integrated body called the Zimbabwe Defence Forces.

Never mind the claim that we can produce an authentic national constitution by first kicking Brigadier Nyikayaramba and others like him from Copac.

The real truth lies in the allegation that it is donors who insisted that Nyikayaramba be kicked out. Why, because it is his type who are the real Zimbabwe Constitution. The security establishment is the guarantor of the constitutional order! The donors don't want a real Zimbabwean Constitution because it would throw away all the alien "benchmarks" which imperialism's proxies and our derivative elites have placed in the way of our revolution. Without security, a constitution is not worth the paper it is written on. Ask the Libyans or Iraqis.