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indigenisation and empowerment programme were rather condescending and politically unsound. The premier did not only highlight his unflinching disdain for the empowerment drive and the entrepreneurship of Zimbabweans but also took the opportunity to proffer what he thought was his party’s alternative to the current programme.
According to him, his party’s plan “is of jobs and starts by encouraging investment”. These pronouncements inadvertently and instantly brought flashes of the pre-colonial and colonial practices of exploitation of African labour.

Yes, the MDC-T plan bore some unmistakable resemblance with the pre-colonial and colonial tactics of systematically using local people as a bottomless pool of cheap labour for their “investments”.
To ensure that their investments remain viable and cost effective, white settlers designed and came up with a raft of measures to coerce the Ndebele and Shona into submitting themselves as cheap labour in mines and farms.

Part of the despicable measures included a deliberate and well-calculated plan to dispossess the natives of their source of livelihood. The gist of this plan was to disempower the local people and as a result make them desperate and susceptible to the labour seeking whims of the capitalists.
This devious plan gave birth to the expropriation of fertile land and the subsequent arbitrary grabbing of the natives’ livestock by the settlers. Among other measures, the imperialists used various laws as strategy to create a property-less native community that will exclusively depend on selling labour for its survival.

The Land Apportionment Act of 1930 and the succeeding Land Husbandry Act of 1951 become vital pieces of legislation that were used to take away the natives’ land and livestock so as to coerce them into cheaply selling their labour.

Historians are agreed that the implementation of the Land Husbandry Act meant the depletion of highly valued herds of cattle, reduction of the land under cultivation, and the forced uprooting of families and entire villages.

To further scuttle the natives’ agricultural production, the settlers bundled and dumped the natives into arid, infertile and inhospitable reserves like the Gwaai and Shangaan reserves.
In addition, the imperialists also employed heinous taxation strategies to pummel the natives into submission. Various unprecedented taxes like the Hut tax and Dog tax were levied against the natives so as to force-march them into selling their labour in order to raise cash to meet their tax obligations. These coercive means of securing cheap labour become collectively known as Chibaro or Isibalo.

Before colonialism, the imperialists had previously captured black people and forcefully shipped them out to various capitalists’ destinations where they used them as free labour for the unfettered development of the white race. The black people were used as slaves to satisfy the labour needs of the imperial agricultural and mining establishments.

It can be discerned from the foregoing that imperialists have from time immemorial employed devious methods to force Africans into the capitalist labour market. Availability of cheap labour, the disempowerment and dispossession of local people were vital preconditions for the deployment of white investments.

Viewed against this backdrop, the MDC-T’s spirited opposition to the indigenisation and empowerment programme should be seen as a deliberate ploy to perpetuate economic conditions that favour the success of imperial interests. The party has conspicuously paraded itself as a front of imperialism.

Its fervent defence of imperial interests can also be traced back to its energetic opposition to the land reform programme. Like the indigenisation programme, the land reform programme sought to correct historical imbalances created by colonialism. It threatened imperial interests by restoring local people’s ownership to their fertile land and livestock.
The land reform programme and the indigenisation and empowerment policy are an affront to white capital. They threaten to undo measures put in place decades ago to facilitate the establishment of imperial businesses.

They particularly threaten to empower the worker who has been the central cog to the success of the imperial machinery. By empowering the worker, it threatened to wipe away the bottomless pool of labour which was the backbone of imperial operations.
In a way, the MDC-T’s job centred ‘empowerment’ programme is a naked attempt to forestall the historic pan-African policies by Zanu-PF to redress colonial imbalances. It is a glaring and daring bid to protect and promote white capital.

Like their colonial forbearers, the MDC-T would like to restrict the peoples’ access to land and natural resources so as to confine them to the periphery of the economic activity. The party has shown that it is prepared to brazenly subordinate the interests of local people for the benefit of the profit seeking and disempowering western investors.
On this note, it can safely be argued that despite the popular belief that the party is ideologically vacuous, it is actually pursuing neo-imperialism.

It conspicuously stands as an organisation formed to champion imperial interests in Zimbabwe while at the same time oppose any pan-African initiatives in the country.
Its ideological paucity only appears on the unassailable fact that it has no ideological position of its own divorced from its master’s machinations.

The people of Zimbabwe should never support such a condescending ideology. Why should we abet a policy that undermines our entrepreneurship?
Why should we allow ourselves to be turned into a country of workers in a naturally gifted and rich country like ours? Why should we repose the control of our natural resources to the so called investors? Why should we be afraid to take our destiny into our own hands?

On this basis, those who attended the Rudhaka stadium rally and others who later read Tsvangirai’s disdainful remarks on indigenisation should by now have dismissed him as a failed presidential candidate. He does not have the patriotic mindset to rule this country on our behalf. Instead, he believes that this country should be run not for our benefit but for the benefit of the western investors.

Inasmuch as we need investors and jobs in our country, we must not surrender our destiny into foreign hands. We must learn to balance the need to attract foreign investors with our own sacrosanct need to be in full control of our own resources. We cannot ingratiate the investors at the expense of our sovereignty.