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The reason why Parliament as an institution is not leading the massive uprising against sanctions is because it has been led recently by promoters of Western-sponsored regime change disguised as “reform”.
When the MDC was born and baptised in neo-liberal dogma in 1999, its leaders clearly believed they had stumbled upon a strategy for the future which had no past.

Based on theory alone, the forces behind the formation of the MDC and its allied NGOs had already expected the Government of Zimbabwe to collapse by June 1998. When this did not happen a new prediction was set for July 2001. This also did not happen and an extension was made to June 2003, when the MDC was expected to sweep the Government from power through what was called a march on State House, “the final push”.

This failed to happen, but the same MDC in January 2004 issued its “Restart” document where on Page 25 it expected a transitional government for Zimbabwe to be in place in the first half of 2004 with the MDC taking over full powers by July 1 2004. When there were uprisings in Tunisia, MDC-T President Morgan Tsvangirai expressed his party’s wish for the same thing to happen in Zimbabwe.
These scenarios were based on a neo-liberal interpretation of developments in Eastern Europe after the fall of the former Soviet Union. The liberation movements of Southern Africa, including Zanu-PF of Zimbabwe, were, according to this theory, expected to be swept away under a wave of change led by the MDC and its NGO allies.
Therefore change and reform in Zimbabwe meant reversing the gains and values of the Third Chimurenga. But now the nation has a chance to reflect on how their Parliament failed them and what the way forward is.
Those who read The Herald for March 22 2011 will have come across Itayi Garande’s piece on legal opinions regarding the recent nullification of the election of the Speaker of the House of Assembly which took place two years ago. The two clusters of opinion on what to do next revolve around the Latin term ab initio (from the outset, from the beginning) which the Supreme Court used to describe the voidance or nullity of the irregular election result which made Mr Lovemore Moyo the Speaker of the House of Assembly.

From the point of view of the common sense of a layman, Lovemore Moyo and the so-called “party of excellence” who sponsored him were warned at the time of the irregular election and they could and should have accepted the allegations against them in order to spare Parliament and the nation the mess which has now resulted.  They cannot say they were not told. The election could have been re-run there and then.
From a layman’s view of moral credibility and authority, the way forward would be to take the term ab initio literally and seriously and to conclude that Parliament has been sitting for two years without a Speaker.

Parliament would immediately elect a Speaker and create a schedule of all the decisions it has made and either ratify or nullify them one by one, bearing in mind the interests of the people and the nation. This would restore credibility to the process and procedures of the House of Assembly.  But in terms of pragmatic politics, such a procedure may be seen as dangerous, because critical acts and decisions already being implemented might not be ratified now if the House of Assembly was to go over them again.
Leaving the legal debate to legal experts, I want to look at the moral and ideological implications of the Supreme Court’s judgment. What does it say about the role of Parliament in the future?

On March 20 2011, The Sunday Mail argued that there were too many other things which the Speaker did wrong during his two-year “illegal” reign for citizens to want to give him the benefit of the doubt. He was bad for Parliament and for the nation, and his so-called “party of excellence” must take full credit politically for choosing him in the first place, for insisting that his election was in order when it was not and for allowing him to reign over orgies of indiscipline and disrespect in the House of Assembly at the expense of citizens and the real business of Parliament.

Indeed on June 22 2009, Honourable Professor Jonathan Moyo, MP for Tsholotsho, tried to help the Speaker and the entire Parliament when he warned that in addition to the irregular election of the Speaker and his irregular way of conducting business in the House of Assembly, there were other risks facing Parliament which had to do with its encroachment on the responsibilities of the Executive branch of Government which Parliament was not capable of carrying out properly and which Parliament was not intended to carry out.

Parliament should develop its skills in and concentrate them on matters of democratic representation and oversight. But the MDC formations, in their overzealous pursuit of the alien agenda of illegal regime change, deliberately sought to usurp the powers of the Executive by engaging in nominations and appointments of persons to professional and specialised agencies in the name of making them “independent”. This became the essence of “reform”, a euphemism for illegal regime change.  The campaign to usurp the powers of the Executive was based on neo-liberal theory which has not worked here.

The theory was that professional and specialised agencies in the Executive branch would be more independent, more legitimate, more transparent and more judicious in their conduct if they were set up by Parliament than if they were organised and set up by the Executive alone. Yet the reason why the Executive had been allowed all along to make those executive selections and appointments was precisely because Parliament would come in later and exercise its oversight.

But if Parliament usurped Executive powers and functions it compromised the integrity of the results because there is no oversight over Parliament.  Parliament cannot exercise the oversight function over itself.
A review of the actual performance of those agencies would have to be carried out to verify this theory which led to the “reforms”.

In other words, the Supreme Court judgment on the election of the Speaker of the House of Assembly raises a lot more than legal questions. It has forced the revelation of a historical reality now prevailing worldwide but not yet confronted in Zimbabwe.  Our House of Assembly has been forced to engage in “cleaning up after reform” at a time when most of the world is also engaged in cleaning up the costly debris of neo-liberal reforms dating back to the era of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. The world is in turmoil caused by reforms dictated by imperialism. I shall look at this reality later.

The opinions and procedures which Parliament now has to go through to normalise its business constitute this process of cleaning up after reform and I hope that citizens of Zimbabwe have learned their lesson: Why are we just now (March 2011) starting to mobilise against the Anglo-Saxon illegal sanctions when in fact these sanctions began informally in 1997 and were formalised in 2001?  These sanctions were imposed in the name of “democratic reform”, just as the changes in Parliament were also made in the name of “democratic reform”.

Each one of those citizens now massively gathering in all the provinces and districts of Zimbabwe must ask themselves this question:  Why is it that it has taken the President of Zimbabwe and his party more than 11 years to inform the people enough for them to mobilise against illegal sanctions which, according to those who imposed them, actually brought the people’s living standards down to the ancient and primitive levels of 1953?  Where were the Members of Parliament?
If they really represent the people, why did they not mobilise the people against this form of mass terror, the illegal and racist Anglo-Saxon sanctions?  Why did the House of Assembly (which in other countries is called the House of Representatives) not become the epicentre of resistance to this most diabolic attack by Zimbabwe’s perennial white enemies? The answer is that the House of Assembly had become the epicentre of subversion and illegal regime change code-named “reform”.

And the irregularly elected Speaker of the House of Assembly proudly presided over these subversion efforts, making sure that the House of Assembly did not tell the people of the mortal danger they were in because of sanctions. In other words, the nation did not receive proper leadership from the Parliament over which Mr Lovemore Moyo irregularly presided as irregular Speaker.  The greater legitimacy and integrity of government which “reformers” promised has not materialised. What we see now are frantic efforts to clean up after “reform”. The massive anti-sanctions campaign is itself the biggest clean-up effort because it awakens people to the damage done to our lives and our economy in the name of reform and against the Third Chimurenga.

The people have cleared their minds of the debris of disinformation and misinformation about “travel restrictions” and “restrictive measures”. The people see that their Parliament did not speak to them clearly about a diabolic, vindictive, indiscriminate economic war waged against them in the name of democratic change.
Indeed after his irregular election, Lovemore Moyo addressed the 2009 Annual Congress of the British New Labour party in the following words:

“We look to our friends and comrades in the UK and around the (white Anglo-Saxon) world to help us rebuild our economy and institutions. We look forward to renewing links that have been broken (by the liberation movement of Zimbabwe) and to being welcomed back into the (British) Commonwealth family.”
This is what Lovemore Moyo chose to talk about with the British instead of the illegal sanctions they maintained against Zimbabwe.
The myth of democratic change, human rights and freedom used by the Anglo-Saxon powers as the reason for the creation and existence of the MDC formations is just one more construction in a long series going back 500 years.

Anyone who understands the damage done through lies against Africa would not want to allow even one more fabrication to be spun against Africa again. Yet our House of Assembly under Lovemore Moyo became one of the sources of the most damaging lies against Zimbabwe, including the denial of the reality of sanctions.
We happen to have entered a period in history when the slave-built Anglo-Saxon economic hegemony of the last 500 years is collapsing. What is happening in Libya and Iraq is a sign of the resulting panic. Reform has not worked. Zimbabwe happens to symbolise the reality of that collapse because of its direct defiance of Anglo-American intrusion and interference. Therefore the extraordinary and global attention paid to Zimbabwe in the last 10 years is a particular consequence of global struggles and global history going back 500 years. That history and its struggles are far much larger than Zimbabwe, far much bigger than

President Robert Mugabe and Zanu-PF, far much broader than Zimbabwe’s war veterans grouping and the African land reclamation movement.
I have said that the MDC formations do not understand that the democratic change, human rights and global freedom on which they were set up, is just but the latest in a series of similar myths constructed in the last 500 years in order to enable Anglo-Saxons to cope with crisis. In Libya the US, UK, France and Nato claim the right to protect the very same civilians they are killing through their bombing.

Let me describe the latest crisis first. It covers the period 1973 to-date. In that period:

• Those states whose oil fuelled the Anglo-Saxon empire rebelled in 1973 by setting up the Organisation of Petroleum Producing Countries (OPEC);

• The United States suffered defeat in, and had to pull out of South-East Asia militarily (1974);

• Although the Arab states were defeated in the Yom Kippur war of 1973 against the apartheid state of Israel, they did demonstrate that Israel could be defeated and Palestinians could be freed if the Arab states all united against the Western imperialist states backing Israel against Palestine. The current crisis has opened that possibility yet again.

• In the same year, 1973, the UN General Assembly for the first time recognised as combatants in terms of the Geneva Conventions those African guerillas fighting for national liberation. – The Sunday Mail