The soil of Zimbabwe is sacred. It is not mere dirt; it is a repository of memory, watered by the blood of the First Chimurenga and consecrated by the sacrifice of the Second. For this land, we, as a nation, endured decades of struggle. For this land, we stood defiant, weathering international condemnation, economic sanctions, and political isolation. We lost diplomatic standing, foreign investment, and global reputation, all for a single, non-negotiable principle: that the land, stolen by colonial settlers, rightfully belongs to the people of Zimbabwe. It was our defining act of sovereignty, a victory that Robert Mugabe, for all his faults, championed to his final day.<\/p>\n
One shudders to imagine the fury with which the old man would view today\u2019s grotesque spectacle. He would surely turn in his grave. The nation\u2019s very Constitution was written to sanctify this struggle, stating in Section 289 that our land policy must be guided by the need to \u201credress the unjust and unfair pattern of land ownership that was brought about by colonialism\u201d. Yet, this sacred principle is now being systematically dismantled and turned into a common money-spinning exercise. The land, once a symbol of liberation, is now being treated like another tender, another commodity to be auctioned off by the very men entrusted to guard its sanctity.<\/p>\n
The architects of this final, most profound betrayal are President Emmerson Mnangagwa and his ever-present sidekick, Kudakwashe Tagwirei. This desecration is a flagrant violation of the spirit, if not the letter, of our supreme law. The Constitution is unequivocal in Section 72, stating that \u201cAll agricultural land\u2026continues to be vested in the State\u201d. The state, and the state alone, is the custodian. Yet we are forced to witness a private citizen, a man sanctioned for corruption, chairing a so-called \u201cland tenure leadership success series.\u201d This is not a government commission; it is a shadowy parallel structure, an illegal usurpation of state power by the Zvigananda faction to control the nation\u2019s most sacred asset.<\/p>\n
The motive is as simple as it is treasonous: to build a financial warchest to stay in power indefinitely. Instead of policies that, as Section 289 demands, \u201cpromote food security, good health and nutrition and generate employment,\u201d we see a scramble for cash. As the writer Reason Wafawarova so powerfully articulated, Mnangagwa has “corrupted the very spirit of our land reform”. He devises schemes to sell plots of repossessed land to the poor, not for their empowerment, but to raise a staggering $3.5 billion to compensate the very same white farmers from whom the land was taken. It is a scheme of breathtaking cynicism: robbing the masses to reward the former colonizers, all while generating massive kickbacks to oil the machinery of a third-term presidential campaign.<\/p>\n
This is the final, logical endpoint of a party that has traded its ideology for cash. The “Leadership Code” that once condemned corruption has been erased. The principles of socialism and equity spoken of in the party’s own constitution are now a laughingstock. The party’s own constitutional blueprint, in Section 293, dictates that the State \u201cmay not alienate more than one piece of agricultural land to the same person and his or her dependants,\u201d a principle now openly mocked by the accumulation of vast estates by the politically-connected elite. When land, the bedrock of the entire liberation project, is reduced to a line item in a kleptocrat’s budget, the party has nothing left to sell but its own soul.<\/p>\n
What would the veterans of Nehanda and Chitepo say? What would the war veterans who stood on the front lines of the land invasions think, seeing the fruits of their sacrifice being auctioned off by a tenderpreneur? They fought for sovereignty, for ownership, for dignity. They did not fight so that the land could be used as collateral in a scheme to consolidate a dynasty of plunder. This is not just a policy failure; it is a desecration. The revolution has been stolen, and its most sacred relic\u2014the land\u2014is now up for sale to the highest bidder.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The soil of Zimbabwe is sacred. It is not mere dirt; it is a repository of memory, watered by the blood of the First Chimurenga and consecrated by the sacrifice of the Second. For this land, we, as a nation, endured decades of struggle. For this land, we stood defiant, weathering international condemnation, economic sanctions,<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-32","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","category-uncategorized"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/fotn.wezim.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/fotn.wezim.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/fotn.wezim.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fotn.wezim.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fotn.wezim.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=32"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/fotn.wezim.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":33,"href":"https:\/\/fotn.wezim.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32\/revisions\/33"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/fotn.wezim.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=32"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fotn.wezim.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=32"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fotn.wezim.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=32"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}