Nathaniel Manheru and The White African

Local and international analysts are agreed that there is more than meets the eye to the European Union's decision to remove from the sanctions list some of President Mugabe's most ruthless supporters - ones who have directly participated in suppression of democracy either through their offices.

BBC correspondent Andrew Harding says the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) now only ridicule sanctions as a cause for Zimbabwe's economic woes in private, whereas a few years ago they would have shouted it from the mountain tops.

He says the benefits of having the sanctions is now being outweighed by the propaganda dividend that Mugabe is getting out of it. The other side of that coin is that hard-liners in Zanu-PF - the likes of Nathaniel Manheru - may now not want the sanctions lifted because their real fear is defeat in a free and fair election.

This raises the prospect of Zanu-PF actually increasing its violence so that the referendum may not happen and sanctions may not be lifted. They would win the election because of both the intimidation and the neo-colonial propaganda which provides the much-needed external enemy.

Either way Harding sees Zimbabwe hurtling towards another potentially dangerous climax.

Blogger and media analyst Takura Zhangazha says the EU decision to make the lifting of sanctions conditional on a 'credible referendum' but for the lifting to not apply to President Mugabe or any one who is linked to political violence may rile Zanu-PF and potentially SADC.

But he also makes the deft point that the onus of changing the whole sanctions issue resides in the ability of Zimbabwean leaders to negotiate for the removal of the sanctions, which so far they have failed to do.

We say it's because Zanu-PF simply will not  behave in a civilised manner, protecting its vested interests in staying in power by any means necessary. Otherwise we would have had a democratic election a long time ago already.

Zhangazha criticises the EU position's seeming assumption that the constitutional reform process is the 'only' mechanism through which free and fair elections could be held, but either way, everything depends on what the inclusive government players do.

Zanu-PF could predictably allow its hardliners to prevail by saying that the COPAC process is tainted by the designs of the Europeans which is tantamount to interference with our sovereignty or in short 'regime change agenda agenda,' while also blaming the MDC for the sanctions.

But judging by how they are going at each other with Jonathan Moyo and Goodwills Masimirembwa now totally cast out, it seems some in Zanu-PF are committed to find a middle solution, though it will entail another struggle within.

The MDCs explanation is that this "conditional lifting" is a good compromise position between the Zanu-PF's demand for unconditional removal and the hard-line American position demanding lifting of sanctions only after free and fair elections.

Both parties would however still need the blessing of SADC, though it must recognise that the MDC is powerless to influence the Europeans or the Americans.

While Zanu-PF might even be joined by some regional countries in accusing the MDC of not having done enough to get the sanctions lifted, SADC cannot pin anything on the MDC to say it has failed to deliver, although Zanu-PF can still be accused of failing to deliver a free and peaceful election.

Enter Nathaniel Manheru  breathing fire and brimstone and taking no prisoners, especially white ones whose roots in Africa only go as far as the 1800's - later half of the 1800s for that matter!

He, a black indigene who has no other root, no other place, no other country, no other continent to come from, would put the likes of Eddie Cross and Eric Bloch in their place.

From wishing to nationalise Chiadzwa diamonds, why does Cross then critise Indigenisation Minister Kasukuwere's policy "in which only in which a mere 51 percent moiety is all that is being asked for?"  Isn't it a moderate policy proposition to Cross' his call for total nationalisation of Marange Diamond fields?

I think even my driver could answer this one and save Manheru from being "conflicted" about how the mind that pushes for nationalisation of diamond fields in which private capital has partnered  with State concerns, suddenly find problems with wholesale alienation of land in favour of indigenes, but with the State holding full title.

It's elementary
A nationalisation of diamonds and their sustainable mining in a partnership with professional miners who have the long-term health of the lifeline resource and the industry that was god-given to Zimbabwe, and who have the interest of the Zimbabwean people and their economy, would by now have seen electrified schools and towns in Chiadzwa.

The government would also be harvesting its due share and using that to develop our pot-holed roads and buid descent housing for people, instead of buying $185 million-dollar bolt-holes and private jets for what passes for the royal family in our constitutional republic.

For his share of the crumbs off that the royal family's table Manheru must demonise Cross for the historical wrongs of his ancestors, like a magic rattle that every time it is rattled manna falls in the form of another radicalised youth who will go and terrorise any white person he sees.

If Eddie Cross was involved in planning the orderly resettlement of villagers and small-scale farmers to Gokwe and Zhombe, and ensuring that they were qualified and resourced to start new productive lives on those plots, which makes Gokwe one of the proudest contributors of cotton and maize to the marketing boards, then he is well-qualified to tell Manheru a thing or two and call Kasukuwere and Made "clowns" or worse.

That the resettlement's objective was to de-congest Tribal Trust Lands which could not be expanded without encroaching onto prime land already allocated to white farmers of Rhodesia, was nothing to do with Eddie, but was the policy of the government of the day - a government which at least planned its dispossession of the native without relegating them to total penury.

While demonising Eddy Cross for this, Manheru contradicts himself by being "stunned" by how what he calls Government policy being implemented by Kasukuwere is attributed to Kasukuwere, man - never mind that his "government policy" was never agreed by the government and that his implementation is being done to further personal interests and those of his nearest and dearest.

It was again one of their own who this week referred to them as the ones who have never missed any empowerment initiative that ever came through the government  In their ignorance and pure avarice they have taken perfectly good farms and companies and reduced them to rabble and taken money meant to build capacity and squandered it.

And they have gone back to the government and taken $200 million of money that did not even belong to the government. Now when their own Parliamentary Committee chairman Paddy Zhanda was asking what they did with that money, all that Gideon Gono could do was hide behind a finger.

Parliament should shoot that finger and get to the bottom of who received the money and equipment from the Reserve Bank and whether they are not the same farmers who are still demonising Finance Minister Biti for not supporting indigenous farmers.

Far from Eddie holding a racist image of the native as a self-destructive animal, it is a characteristic that Kasukuwere and his lot have earned by their own doing, and in the case of Kasuwere, he is sadistic or whatever it is that Erich Block called him. I am not the only one who remembers him wearing "Paraquat" shirts in a celebration of how his gang tortured MDC activists and rubbed the pesticide into their wounds.

It is for people like them that sanctions were enacted by the EU and the US, not forgetting Australia, and should never be lifted until they lift up their hands and say they are genuinely sorry, and at least compensate their victims. Ideally they should compensate all of us for two lost decades of development.

Inciting racial hatred, just like inciting tribal hatred is symptomic of a weak character who would even resort to scolding another by referring to their physical attributes which cannot be changed. It is beneath dignity. Whites are now as much a part of the party, so we now need a scientific transformation that holds promise for all of us, including Bloch to who whom a century of conquest and racial discrimination has already given a priviledged status.

We talk in terms of growing the cake, not not cutting it up into ever-diminishing pieces while those garulous enough grab huge chunks with their bare hands and run off with half the cake, while multitudes are waiting for the same cake.

A preacher of hatred, Manheru urges pursuit of alternative discriminatory practices against those whose ancestors were guilty of such practices in the past. "How do you repair those of us whose life chances in the continuing present remain handicapped by the discriminatory policy of the past and and its baneful legacy," he asks.

If it was a genuine rather than rhetorical question I would answer him by saying everyone's life needs repairing, not just him, but also the beneficiaries of colonial legacy, by building a society in which we indeed become one, harnessing each other's strengths and pulling together, after all we have a majority government which can make laws, courts which can interpret them and government to operationalise our consensus.

If you ideas of how we should take over LonRho and Anglo or Bertrams Engineering, all built from colonial exploitation, if your ideas were indeed superior and not tainted by an orderless smash and grab mentality, we would respect them.

Have you stopped to ask yourself how much you have benefited at the expense of those being discriminated against by this very regime? Maybe we should engineer some reverse of that as well? So let us not go there. We could build the better world, better than what we have now, for all of us, each asserting their rights as defined in our constitution which we can amend as we wish. Our country is so rich, but in our greed we are destroying the very richness of it.