Beautiful ones not yet born

The launch in Harare earlier this week of a new-but-not-so-new party on Zimbabwe's political landscape left this pen, an avid student of liberation politics, with a feeling of déjà vu all the way.

But perhaps only those people whose rational minds were hijacked by naivety could ever have expected miracles from the new political baby on the scene.

It is an indisputable reality that at least three, but at most two, major political organisations taking turns to govern a country, with the third bolstering the chances of one of the parties, make democracy flourish long and indefinite.

At least that is the formula from the West that African and other nations are continually being exhorted by its exporters to adopt, supposedly in order for political peace and stability and unimpeded social and economic development to take place.

Thus, multi-party democracy is viewed as possessing the potential for keeping party state rule with its attendant tendencies for dictatorship remotely distant, so that the masses may use their trump card at elections to choose a political party of their choice to rule them.

The democracy ushered into this country in 1980 by the armed revolution brought to an end once and for all to the dictatorship of white racist rulers who regarded the indigenous people on whose backs they rode as it were as second class citizens too immature to shape their own destiny.

But having thrown away the yoke of colonialism and racial oppression by a foreign ruling culture, it will be foolhardy of any new entrant into Zimbabwe's revolutionary political arena to try to make a free, independent and sovereign people eat their political vomit.

That, in a nutshell, is what any imperialist lackey like yearning to make Zimbabwe rejoin the Commonwealth is tantamount to doing.

In 2003 Zimbabwe broke with the Commonwealth – a club of former British colonies – because this country could no longer brook Britain's god-fatherly treatment of a sovereign state as though it were still at the beck and call of British imperialism under the camouflage of the so-called Commonwealth of Nations.

Those fishing for British and other Western aid money and political support should beware dangerous political pitfalls that they dig for themselves by promising to reverse Zanu-PF's land reform programme and killing its black empowerment initiative – both of these revolutionary hallmarks of independence and self determination – in order to placate the British and settler farmers of mainly British stock whose land the government repossessed for redistribution to the black majority who needed that asset the most. The government repossessed land after Britain reneged on its promise at Lancaster House to pay compensation to the white settler farmers.

In fact it is nothing short of political suicide for any opposition political party openly to talk about its plans to take food out of the mouths of thousands upon thousands of Zimbabweans for whom the land reform programme is the true manifestation of the country's renaissance or rebirth on the warm ashes of white oppressive, racist rule.

But surely do these people honestly expect that povo groaning with want will give them the thumbs up?

At any rate the small political parties in this country have so far failed to introduce radically new and appetising policies to replace those of Zanu-PF, in order to position themselves as potential replacements for the ruling revolutionary party in power.

For instance, what these parties appear to be doing is applying their own coats of paint on Zanu-PF's programmes and policies to make these appear as though they are the opposition parties' own colours.

But, of course, these political parties might take some but not all the people of Zimbabwe for a ride by rehashing Zanu-PF's policies and programmes as though they were their own initiatives.

No breath of fresh air can be expected to pervade the minds of right thinking Zimbabweans and persuade them to dump the devil with whose political pedigree they are all too familiar, to say the least.

Then there is this strange animal called "grand coalition", a Western concept, being bandied around to get political parties opposed to Zanu-PF to team up to effect regime change on behalf of those countries that imposed sanctions on Zimbabwe but have failed on their own to remove President Mugabe and his party from power and pave the way for the reversal of land reform.

Given that political scenario, will Zimbabweans in the final analysis say the opposition parties some of which comprise Zanu-PF rejects have metamorphosed politically as new-born saviours of the people of this country, or will not the masses continue to say, in the words of Ghanaian novelist Ayi Kwei Armah; "the beautiful ones are not yet born"?

In fact, does the new Zimbabwe People First party see itself as a boulder cast in a large body of water with ripples changing the constitution of the water, or does it not think the people view it as a pebble cast in that water?

Yes, while the new political party and other obscure outfits long in existence might appear nondescript to some in this country yet their presence looms large in Zimbabwe's political jungle when juxtaposed with the despicable indiscipline of some elements in Zanu-PF. The latter, already lambasted by their own top leadership for being factionalists-cum-tribalists, are prime candidates for the axe to chop them off in the same way as a gardener prunes wild branches of a fruit tree in order for it to bear succulent fruit to feed the family.

These people are a political cancer and the longer they remain within the ranks of that party the wider the cancer will spread threatening doom to the ruling party as well as to its revolution that has been for more than three decades a compass for Zimbabwe's journey into the future.