Increasingly, I am seeing a new level of engaging issues, one steeped in deep patriotism, too deep to be claimed by any one political party, but certainly broad enough to be owned by our beautiful country whose prospects we are all obliged to shape and deepen, as patriotic Zimbabweans. Of course the fair skin is always blighted here and there by warts, themselves not so much spots of ugliness as markers of kuputudza, adolescence in English.

As one grows, stubborn warts sprout; the voice deepens, reinforced by generalised truculence and stubbornness. And then you know you can no longer sleep in the same blanket with nubial girls, without causing human consequences! You begin to behave in the village for you to be called a person, in our parlance, zipping your undergarment so little beings do not sprout accidentally under your raging passion. So the barbs I often get (and believe me they can be copious and hurtful) are part of kuputudza of our thinking as Zimbabweans, as we slouch towards the maturity of debating issues without fear or prejudice.

I promised I was going to deal with the various initiatives on our country which appear well-meant or a part of a happy ululation of this new-found dispensation of inclusive politics. This happy cacophony has slacked somewhat our sharp thirst for the collective esteem so deeply bruised after years of unremitting propaganda onslaught. We have felt sorrier than the children of Ham, much like Ham’s undeclared issue from his adulterous loins, a besmirched issue which dared laugh at filial nudity, forgetting this is how it came about.

We seemed a compounded sin. How we hungrily leap at any hint of returning greatness betrays an acute stress from doubted and doubtful self-esteem. Therein lies the danger. Old tales recall a villager who, trying to tender an alibi during a petty theft case, told the village court that on the night in question, he had escorted his witching mother to the graveyard. An acute wish exculpate oneself often leads to ungainly conduct and worse disasters. For Zimbabwe, the evil hour cometh. The evil hour is now and, hey, I hear a snore at the guard post!

Yesterday morning I fiddled with my mouse and web-searched Enterprise Zimbabwe which is attributed to one Rich-ard Branson, famous for his powerful Virgin Label. I do not know the link between his empire and virginity, except to say this empire has been reorganising furiously, closing down certain lines. Virgin Records, the empire’s musical outlets, are no more and my musical heart bleeds for their demise.

Enterprise Zimbabwe opens with the voice of some Zimbabwean woman given as Doreen Manyumwa who revels in the land she owns, but is careful enough not to volunteer any plaudits to one Robert Mugabe who is rumoured to have had something to do with giving land to the landless in Zimbabwe. But she desperately needs money with which to develop that land, most probably virgin! Otherwise why would Rich-ard Branson of Virgin Fame have anything to do with this mother figure? She needs to establish greenhouses, irrigation systems and other supports for growing tomatoes and carrots.

"If you are standing by your own," Doreen warns, "you will not succeed." Indeed she seems to stand by Richard Branson, the global white philanthropist who started as a Briton. That makes he voice sagely commanding.

What is Enterprise Zimbabwe’s mission? Here is Branson: "Zimbabwe is a magnificent country that has had a really rough few years and either the world can continue to wait and see and not invest … or the world can help [Prime Minister] Richard Morgan Tsvangirai and the coalition government get Zimbabwe back on its feet… The idea of Enterprise Zimbabwe is to have a sort of safe haven for people to invest through … In life, people have to take risks. If everybody waits on the sidelines it will be the people who suffer … The present state of politics in Zimbabwe is by no means perfect, but it is a great deal better."

The tinge of humanitarianism is clearly captured, validated by more revelation that Enterprise Zimbabwe comes from the combined heart of three NGOs: Virgin Unite of Branson himself, Humanity United run by Pam Omidyar, wife of e-Bay founder, Pierre Omidyar and the Nduna Foundation founded by one Ms Robbins. An additional support player is ARK, standing for Absolute Return for Kids. The original plan was to launch Enterprise Zimbabwe together with Prime Minister Tsvangirai, overseen by Bill Clinton and his Global Initiative, on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly. Somehow, our Richard chose to stay at home, and the other Richard was all alone!

Enterprise Zimbabwe’s provenance is deeper, richer. It is part of multi-pronged initiatives by The Elders. Remember them? Yes, this is an initiative which is said to have been founded by Nelson and Graca Mandela, comprising, apart from the two Mandelas, Richard Branson, Desmond Tutu, Kofi Annan, Jimmy Carter, Marti Ahtisaari, Gro Bruntland, Ela Bhatt, Lakhdar Barhimi, Hernando Cardoso, Mary Robinson and Aung San Suu Kyi.

At the height of inter-party dialogue, this group, led by Annan, Graca, Tutu and Carter, tried to force its way into Zimbabwe before being rebuffed and stopped ignominiously. South Africa has been their base and their mission is to "offer their collective influence and experience to support peace building, help address major causes of human suffering and promote the shared interests of humanity."

On the Zimbabwe case, these were Elders made elderly by the burdens of the British Empire, as its sun was threatened with Mugabe’s eclipse. They were someone’s foreign policy tong, and it was not too pleasing.

The public, day-to-day face of Enterprise Zimbabwe is one Isabella Matambanadzo who has been programme manager for George Soros’ Open Society Initiative for Southern Africa (OSISA). She has also served on the Board of Trustees of Radio Voice of the People, the Dutch pirate radio station and now news agency targeting Zimbabwe to complement similar electronic warfare initiatives by the British (SW Radio) and the Americans (Studio7). Before then she was once Director of Zimbabwe Women’s Resource Centre and Network and spokesperson for Crisis in Zimbabwe Coalition and Transparency International, the German initiative on corruption.

Of course, many will remember her as a disc jockey at one of ZBC’s radio stations, before joining Reuters (East Africa) and Sadc Press Trust and IPS (not necessarily in that order). Soros, her paymaster, has interests in plantations in the Eastern Highlands, and is not too happy with Mugabe and his land reforms. He has been funding things here, including a thing called MISA. Recently, this rich compatriot of the now migrant President Sarkozy, released US$200m to Human Rights Watch, itself an important player in Zimbabwe’s crowded politics. How such a small girl finds her way into Branson’s heart, only the high and mighty are able to say. I am too small!

I continue fumbling with my mouse and like an aimless navigator, I bump into another site called "Masawara". Unlike Branson’s, this one comes in the name of my people’s language. We in Manicaland use the same name to refer to a crow, that one with the dark hue of native Africa, but a noose around its neck which has the whiteness of Europe, Africa’s hangman throughout our short history. That bird is ugly and noisy, always wailing presumably in hoarse and unstoppable protest over its hard fate spelt out by the heavy boot of an approaching hangman! The name is homely - indigenous enough for me to have a presentiment of great and enormous things for my race so buffeted by ill-winds of history.

I browse through and hiya-a, the name begins to have faces and my heart beats with anticipation. Seven directors all told: David Suratgar, Maureen Eramsus, Shingi Mutasa, Julian Vezey, Francis Daniels, Iqbal Rajahbalee and Jason Harel. I immediately recognise Shingi Mutasa, immediately associating him with Tobacco Africa, T.A. for short; with Sables: that sore structure between Kadoma and Kwekwe so notorious for irreverently puffing white smoke to the high heavens, Almighty God’s footstool. More spectacularly, I link him to Joina Centre: again another vain and pretentious human challenge to the Lord’s demesne! Maureen Erasmus I am told, is a Missus whose birth and girlhood was in "Umtali, now renamed Mutare, in Zimbabwe".

Further on, I gather that Julian Vezey is a Zimbabwean professional who is now with Innscor Africa after spectacular sojourn at a reputed international auditing firm. Two from the list are Mauritians while the last but top one seems British but with universal Caucasian characteristics found on all sides of seas and oceans that make Europe and America at home and in the permanent Diaspora. Something very interesting shared by this assortment: to the person, they have had something to do with hot money and the business of managing it. They come under the auspices of a well respected British tycoon.

Tired of the mouse, I go looking for bigger rabbits. I do not go very far before starting to flip through the Zimbabwe Independent of week ending September 30. Stoutly resisting its provocative political headlines, I go for its puffery, better known as Business Digest. With the delicate ego such as I am equipped with, this for me is a real comfort zone: no barbs, no expletives, only superlatives for marketed goodness. It is always a compilation founded on extravagant faith in transacting humanity, commercial humans.

The language is benign, pleading even to open your hearts, itself the only way to ripping open your wallets. I meet something called ABAZ and its "Just Business" Conference. Curiosity gets the better of me and I explore a little more. In no time I begin to know that ABZ stands for American Business Association of Zimbabwe, with "Just Business" as its exhortation to those who might think Rambo is after something else.

My heart immediately sinks and reluctantly I read on: "ABAZ is a not-for-profit organisation that aims to encourage business links between Zimbabwe and America. It is open to all companies interested in doing business with the States, not just those with North American links."

The next paragraph as much steadies me as it knocks me down completely: "The firm’s chairman Fred Mutanda said the keynote speaker will be Greg Lebedev, chairman of the Centre for International Private Enterprise in Washington."

Steadied by the mere mention of one of ours, wekwanguwo: Fred Mutanda. Knocked over by the sudden transformation of a "not-for-profit organisation" to a "firm". More names are spewed: Minister Mashakada as a speaker, Scott Eisner of US Chamber of Commerce, Professor Mervyn King, chairman of the King Commission of Corporate Governance (S.A.), Judge Mark Bomani, chairman of the Tanzanian Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative, and one Thierry Kalonji of Comesa’s investment arm.

The heavily pictorial communication carries a face I recall from my University days, that of Dr. Godfrey Kanyenze. The UZ and UK-educated don used to be a ZCTU economist during its watershed years of 1998-99, just before the labour centre became tired of being mere labour and became a political party we now call MDC. These were years of violent riots by which the MDC announced its coming into this world, yes, weeping but also kicking and convulsing the world that awaited it, its habitat. It still does to the same to this day.

The "Just Business" Conference, I am also told, will take place at the Celebration Centre. As I study the pictures, I begin to recognise two heads: one with a powdery white, the other one steadily tall and decidedly richly black. The former I plant on the torso of American Ambassador Charles Ray; the latter I give to Fred Mutanda, the figure who had steadied my nerves at the beginning. My mind plays on and slowly I begin to reconstruct his identity in the local context, well away from his transcendental role as chairman of this at once not-for-profit organisation and firm.

I begin to remember him as a war veteran foremost, who served under Zipra, Zapu’s armed wing. I also recall him playing various roles in structures of our national security and I choose to be sparse on this one. Beyond all this, I associate him with a group of ex-fighters operating as a coordinating committee for war veterans. This is the group which contests Jabulani Sibanda’s chairmanship of the war veterans body.

Apart from passing a vote of confidence in the Jabulani Executive sometime last year, the group has been responsible for very expressive advertisements splashed in our print media, challenging the notion of national healing as shaped presently; making a case for a comprehensive compensation not just for war veterans, but their children and possibly grandchildren; more importantly, sending a chilling subtext to the liberation-time leadership for betraying the fighters and giving them a bad name. The group’s executive has been very flux but has included people like Bastin Beta, Major Chimanga (Rtd), Chimeri and at one time Joseph Chinotimba.

What perhaps is unknown to most people is that at the height of the inter-party dialogue around August/September, 2008, this group as permutated then, wrote to then President Mbeki as Sadc facilitator, urging him to discipline and rein in President Robert Mugabe for intransigence, and thus for standing in the way for a negotiated settlement. As is the nature of such communication, that document found its way back to Zimbabwe and became quite a nuisance issue at the time. The group played pressure group against Zanu PF. But where they for the opposite side or simply Zimbabweans anxious for unconditional peace?

I shall not mention the group’s other initiative just after March 2008 elections, again for obvious reasons. But in the Independent, the head of this group had this new American identity, presumably in his own right as a businessman. He once bought Caps Holdings, but I cannot quite say whether he still has it to this day. I have not known Dr Kanyenze as a businessman. Quite the contrary, I have known him as a campaigner for workers’ rights. How he fits into this new outfit, and on the side of capital – foreign one at that – only Ambassador Ray and other Americans may possibly tell. Meanwhile, the link between America, a faction of our war vets and labour personnel in the new high-noon politics of this country, cannot be missed.

I am very conscious that I risk overloading you my reader. Unfortunately, it has to be so on matters such as I am about to broach. To this equation I have drawn above, add something called IMARA, a Fund Manager which recently gave Zimbabwe a new status as a hot market for real deals, well away from its perennial gone-to-the-dogs tag. To that again add the recent British Economist Initiative which was addressed by the Prime Minister, Trevor Ncube and others. With all these initiatives in focus, you begin to have a sense of lately so blest we are and have been as a new country emerging from a prolonged decadal blight, as we have been made to read internationally.

Further on – and this is where I am most grateful to one of my readers – you have USAID and its initiative on small-scale agriculture. USAID’s operations are always impenetrable, a real entangled skein, only obtruding as disparate and even seemingly unrelated initiatives, yet so cognate and interconnected towards one major outcome, usually seismic. USAID is dirty America pursuing own goals in the name of its victims and philanthropic righteousness. Apart from the taxing task of chasing its far-flung arcane initiatives, you also have to plough through a jungle of acronyms, all meant for hard-to-break opaqueness.

This week USAID, itself the principal vehicle for America’s regime change programme in Zimbabwe, announced a new initiative called PRIZE, Promoting Recovery in Zimbabwe, which it is handling in partnership with Catholic Relief Services, CARE and other well-known NGOs. PRIZE is a two-year program through which Usaid’s Office of Food for Peace (FFP) seeks to address the urgent food needs of vulnerable Zimbabweans while laying a foundation for recovery and food security. The programme will look at irrigation schemes, livestock and livestock infrastructure, building rural savings and credit schemes, targeting over 90 000 households.

The 50-year old FFP derives its philosophy from late Senator and President of USA, John F. Kennedy whose South Dakota speech in 1960 underlined: "Food is strength [read power], food is peace, and food is freedom, and food is a helping hand to people around the world whose goodwill and friendship we want." FFP has developed a paper where this lofty policy finds grounding in Zimbabwe.

The paper makes a case for ZIM-AIED, the Zimbabwe Agricultural Income and Employment Development Program and its sister program called ACP, Agricultural Competitiveness Program. Interestingly, both programs have been awarded to two American companies to implement, and these are FINTRAC for ZIM-AIED, and DAI for ACP.

When you go through the project document for both initiatives, you are struck by how close it is to the thinking of the Zimbabwe Government. In fact you would think its coming from Minister Made’s office. It targets smallholder farmers to enhance food security and innovative agricultural systems that yield high value, marketable crops for greater rural incomes and linkages to formal agro-industries. Its premises are faultless, its complement to Zimbabwe’s agrarian reforms so perfect.

Yet the project is decidedly American and regime-change focused. It seeks to wean away the peasantry from Zanu PF, including the agricultural unions which have been pro-land reforms. More interestingly, this initiative could very well succeed in uniting the two black unions and the all-white CFU, a development which successive ministers of agriculture failed to do over the years. The CFU no longer has the numbers or the influence. It is at its nadir and thus most amenable to linkages. But it is important as a vehicle for mobilising white extension skills and white-black partnerships which America would want to be promote.

It is important as a lifeline to whites displaced by land reforms, keeping them in the wings until the regime changes. The idea is to stabilise the white-led agro-industrial part of our economy, orientating it towards America’s food needs, so much stressed by land shortages and land grab world-wide. But that is the superficial side. America’s deeper objective is clearly spelt out: "The Zim-AIED is consistent with the USG foreign policy goal of a restrictive country such as Zimbabwe by "promoting a market-based economy."

Attempting to reach Zanu PF’s mind, the paper adds: "Many, if not most, of Zanu PF supporters are committed to these recent key reforms (pricing and multicurrency changes) because of the recognition that price controls and government monopolies have only served to destroy the economy in general and agriculture in particular."

This is the mind shift which ZIM-AIED is meant to grow on, in order to create a new cadre able to "lobby" government for better policies, such as on title deeds and land audits. Situating this effort within the broader context of other donor states like Britain and the EU bloc, the paper concludes: "USG interventions in agriculture will contribute to the USG foreign policy objective of advancing transformational diplomacy by promoting a market-based economy."

I wrap this rather heavy piece by adverting the reader’s attention to a USG policy paper of October 2007 by one Michelle D. Garvin, entitled "Planning for Post-Mugabe Zimbabwe," which continues to guide the Obama government in its dealings with our country. Essentially, the paper urges the USG to maximise its influence on Zimbabwe in readiness for eventual change, by embarking on a series of moves during the tenure of current President whom it dislikes, to ensure it secures a foothold before the end of the current presidency and also to be able to influence whoever succeeds President Mugabe.

Admitting that it is very difficult to visualise a post-Mugabe Zimbabwe without Zanu PF, the paper warns though that President Mugabe’s successors may not be committed to the fundamental changes the US and its western allies want, namely to make the heavily mineralised Zimbabwe pro-markets , pro-western. The market ethos would have to be inculcated both to influence Mugabe’s successors and also to create a momentum for such an ethos before hand so whoever takes over will face market dictates as an accomplished fact of daily governance.

This is America’s far-reaching goal, to which the issue of who governs Zimbabwe is so superficial and inconsequential. It is investing in the destruction of the Zanu PF unleashed liberation and empowerment ethos, and its attendant Look East policy which has marginalised Europe and America.

More revealingly, donor unity is required for maximum traction for such changes and France’s Nicholas Sarkozy is brought into the equation to harmonise old Europe which is divided over Zimbabwe. France shall be an important player in Zimbabwe’s politics, in spite of the fact that it has no history in this part of the world.

Almost echoing ZIM-AIED, Gavin says of Zanu PF: "Elites [Zanu-PF] who are interested in their own long-term financial security need more favourable investment climate, decent relations with major economic powers, and a reliable pool of high-quality labour if the private businesses and parcels of land they have acquired are to realise their full economic potential. President Mugabe’s decisions make a certain king of self-interested sense over the short term. But elites with longer-term horizons have a different set of interests. They know that the road from the present situation to a functional economy requires support of the major donors and international financial institutions ... perhaps driven by their calculus, people within Zanu PF are looking for an alternative to the party’s present, Mugabe-dominated course."

Alienating a critical mass within Zanu PF from its founding liberation ethos is so key. It is about more than leaders. It is about giving them a new citizen who is committed to the market ethos. We are set to see the overthrow of the peasant as we have had him in history: a creature given to a nationalist agenda, indeed a creature ready to offer sons and shelter to the struggle for Independence. The Unions of mudhara Hungwe and Nyabonda are key to this thrust and there is heavy courtship going on.

The paper provides an endnote to this piece: "At a point of transition – virtually any transition – the donor community possesses clout, because any new leadership will need to change the economic conditions that triggered change in the first place. To play its role effectively, the international community needs to organise itself and to map out not only its strategy for meeting thorny economic recovery challenges, but also for linking assistance to improved governance. Those governments and organisations that have watched the country sink into misery with such dismay have not been able to prevent the slide. But they can be ready when change happens."

Noteworthy, Zimbabwe’s re-engagement team which met with Johnnie Carson recently in New York were given free copies of the paper I have just quoted, to take home. And in Carson’s delegation was one Michelle D. Gavin, the paper’s writer. What is more, Tendai Biti, the Finance Minister’s first interlocutor from the American government in Washington this week has been one Michelle D. Gavin. Gavin, Gavin, Gavin, and no doubt Gavin sometime in our future.

In a few days’ time, our Prime Minister shall be in France, Sarkozy’s France and hiyaa-a, we shall talk, you and me. All this needs digesting, hopefully next week. Otherwise, Icho!