Harare — "Now, like all of you, my responsibility is to act in the interest of my nation and my people, and I will never apologise for defending those interests." This was what US President Barack Obama told fellow Heads of State and Government in his inaugural speech at the United Nations General Assembly on September 24, 2009. Interestingly, when this shoe of national responsibility is on President Mugabe's foot it is not supposed to fit.

The Land Reform Programme is entrenched in the foundations of Zimbabwe. Zimbabwe is land, land that was taken from its people about a century ago.

Land reform is the fulfilment of promises made by Mbuya Nehanda, by the men and women who died fighting for their stolen property, and by our leaders at the turn of the century to restore honour and dignity to the children of Zimbabwe who had been turned into drawers of water and hewers of wood in their country.

Incessant propaganda based on distortions and lies have given white commercial farmers respectability that they do not deserve. By romanticising white farmers in Rhodesia and Zimbabwe the voices of the real victims in the land issue are drowned out and all that remains it a diet of lies and misconceptions. This is worsened by house negroes who have been trained to sit, fetch, and bark at the flash of the greenback and the promise of an award or two.

The land issue has been oversimplified by the West and its media embeds through the help of certain groups in Zimbabwe who benefited from an imbalanced agrarian system and those who see benefits in siding with those that can finance their political ambitions.

White settlers came to dispossess and amass wealth. They systematically enriched themselves while ensuring that blacks had no say in the economy and politics of the time all with the support of their Queen and government.

It is that same political hierarchy in Britain that has refused to clean up the mess her children left in Zimbabwe and instead chosen to punish the blacks for wanting to have tea and crumpets like their "betters".

The Lancaster House Constitution that Zimbabwe was saddled with at independence sought to maintain this skewed system while giving a façade of gradual land redistribution through the willing- buyer, willing-seller clause. What good is it to buy a piece of land that has been tilled for many decades and has lost all its nutrients and with tufts of grass growing here and there?

The willing-buyer, willing-seller concept was good on paper but very bad in practice. Promises of gradual agrarian reform defused emotions of the black majority and held them back from confronting white farmers in order to get their land back. It is unfortunate that Britain and her children thought that their plan had worked and, put together with the hand of reconciliation offered to them by the black government, it was business as usual.

Instead of looking ahead white farmers used the prevailing reconciliation mood to continue with their misguided systems of unbalanced economic activities in the agricultural sector.

Today the white farmer has been given the undeserving status of victim while the real victims are suffering under a harsh sanctions regime. Fairy tales of white settlers are recounted as news and many of these clamour around seeking compensation for what was never theirs in the first place.

White farmers never transported any livestock from Britain, they instead stole and confiscated livestock from Africans, and they burnt their homes and forced them to inhabitable parts of Zimbabwe while forcing them to work on their former lands as cheap labour.

How many blacks died defending their lands? How many children died from hunger and suffered from malnutrition because white settlers burnt crops in fields and food granaries? Who should pay compensation for all those cattle, goats, and other livestock that was confiscated by the white settlers? Who should pay for the desecration of shrines and graves of the black majority?

The white farmer in Zimbabwe continued where his forefathers' left off, nothing was done to improve the lives of their workers most of who lived in huts strewn around compounds on farms with no decent sanitary facilities. It is these farm workers who worked hard to produce the best tobacco in the world and yet they served in the most humiliating conditions.

Many a person witnessed white farmers in their pick-up trucks with their dogs as passengers while the farm worker was relegated to the loading tray, exposed to the harsh elements. Today the CFU has the nerve to say that white farmers are concerned about the welfare of their former workers. It might come as a surprise to them but many of their former farm workers now own the their own pieces of land and are now farmers and not farm workers.

The song that Zimbabwe used to be the breadbasket of Southern Africa should be banned because it continues to reinforce negative stereotypes about black farmers. Stealing land and making Zimbabwe a breadbasket does not legalise the act of grabbing native land. It took white farmers over a hundred years to achieve agricultural success and yet they have already condemned the new black farmer because of five years as a failure.

The new black farmer unlike the white farmer has no cheap labour; he has been faced with one problem after another as all sources of outside funding have been shut from him. Trying to farm under this harsh sanctions regime has been an uphill struggle for the black farmer but as evidenced this past season he has survived.

If the many voices in the Western media are to be believed, democracy in Zimbabwe means anything that is not President Mugabe and Zanu-PF. The "Build Democracy in Zimbabwe" Project is meant to destroy everything Zanu-PF and its leader on the understanding that whoever replaces it as the ruling party will be a "good African" and not rock the economic boat.

No matter how many times the MDC denies it, they called for the economic sanctions and helped craft the US sanctions law, the so-called ZDERA, which is the "mother of Zimbabwe's economic ills". Former MDC parliamentarian Gabriel Chaibva categorically stated that ZDERA was the brainchild of the MDC-T party and was drafted by top officials from that party at a hotel in Nyanga, Zimbabwe.

Surprising Senator Gutu, who was on the discussion panel, did not a say a pip to defend the MDC-T and yet he is one of the many who has been shouting from the rooftops that there are no such things as illegal sanctions in Zimbabwe.

He failed to challenge Chaibva on live TV and many have interpreted this to mean he was afraid that he would have to face retribution from his fellow MDCs if Chaibva started naming those present at the sanctions roundtable.

Sanctions are part of the "let's build democracy in Zimbabwe project". In fact, they are the foundation that holds all other aspects of the project together. Through denial of developmental aid, blacklisting of companies and individuals, sanctions have strangled Zimbabwe's economy in the hope that these things "separate the people of Zimbabwe form Zanu-PF".

Sanctions busting is the reason why certain sectors on Zimbabwe's political arena want Gono removed. Gono put a halt to their glees over the "crash and burn" prophecy of one frustrated CIA agent Christopher Dell.

The second pillar of the "build democracy in Zimbabwe project" is the funding of groups that will continually bring attention to Zimbabwe for all the wrong reasons in the hope of creating an environment that will justify international intervention.

Western apologist George Ayittey in his articles bemoans the fragmentation of African opposition groups, which he says, is the reason why they never succeed. In Zimbabwe opposition forces are a dime a dozen in order to spread the money around, every other NGO or civic group produces a report about this or that alleged abuse by the Government and this is all co-ordinated from the US embassy.

These little groups have gone further and formed umbrella groups that also milk more money from their sponsors. If there is one thing you cannot fault Zimbabweans it is their ingenuity. The one thing that gets you paid in Zimbabwe is to call yourself a reformer or democrat and the only qualification you need is to speak against President Mugabe and Zanu-PF. If you get arrested in the process you make it straight to the hall of fame and pick up a humanitarian award or two.

The media have been the other pillar of the "Build Democracy in Zimbabwe Project". The Western media have played the see no evil, hear no evil, and speak no evil game about the war being waged by Western governments on blacks in Zimbabwe. Recent interviews of President Mugabe during his visit to the United Nations are but a piece of the machinery of journalists who are paid not to report facts but seek to foist opinions of the white elite as the gospel truth.

One report after another on Zimbabwe is full of twisted lies and creates negative attitudes about Zanu-PF while creating victims of its opposition. Pirate radio stations churn out hate speech day in and day out on the hope of distancing the electorate from Zanu-PF.

Media have created personalities whose sole role is to denounce Zanu-PF at every turn, many of them who are meant to be teaching students at our universities have not seen a lecture hall for months and yet continue to call themselves University of Zimbabwe lecturers. They are better called University of Studio 7 lectures because that is where they are imparting "words of wisdom".

MDC-T, which is the vehicle that is meant to see the regime change agenda in Zimbabwe, needs to get its house in order for it to be taken seriously by the people of Zimbabwe. Morgan Tsvangirai and his party will never be able to live down the image of them being representative of the hopes of white farmers to reclaim what they stole from blacks in Zimbabwe.

The image of white farmers excitedly surrounding Tsvangirai to offer him financial support is at the back of the mind of every Zimbabwean. This was not helped by announcements by the MDC that the Land Reform Programme was an act of genocide and ethnic cleansing in order to attract global attention. The BBC took this to heart and went to the extent of accusing the Government of carrying out ethnic cleansing of whites in Zimbabwe.

What the MDC, BBC and other Western media forgot was that land was an emotional issue to many Zimbabweans who had been waiting for their Government to redress a colonial wrong. The violent dispossession of land by white settlers was done according to a rule of law that gave blacks no rights and yet the Land Reform Programme saw the Government attempting to offer some form of compensation to usurpers who spurned that offer.

The continued parroting of the so-called outstanding issues in the GPA has only increased awareness of just how shallow the MDC is. Not many people had read the entire GPA until the MDC started calling for the removal of Gono and Tomana.

Well, Zimbabweans have read the GPA and nowhere in the document are the two individuals or the posts they hold mentioned. Instead what many have discovered is the chief outstanding issue in the GPA is for MDC-T to call for the removal of sanctions, the same sanctions they are calling a phantom of Zanu-PF and Zimbabweans' imagination.

The MDC is pushing the boundaries and now the Prime Minister is calling for individuals from his party to be appointed into the civil service when they lack the required qualifications. Some of the people he has forced the Public Service Commission to employ are now being investigated by the PSC for having presented forged certificates. Not only that he has allowed his friends from the civic society to work from his Government offices and they are being paid by the very Western governments who have imposed sanctions on Zimbabwe.

MDC-T functionaries continue hallucinating in public that they are the answer to Zimbabwe's problems and, in turn, expose their party for what it is -- a pillar to a project meant to further elite interests to the detriment of Zimbabweans.

By continually throwing accusations that are false to generate rabid interest on Zimbabwe the MDC-T is losing its supporters. Their friends around the region who like them are paid to be "good Africans" have done a great job in unmasking a party masquerading as democrats and reformers to be nothing but puppets.

One does not become a democrat by selective application of the law, neither does having the support of the US and Britain make on a democrat, history has shown that the US and Britain will embrace any despot who gives them free reign to exploit his country's resources, human and material.