(TALKZIMBABWE) Happy birthday MDC
Happy birthday MDCMdelelwa Mdelelwa–Opinion
Sat, 06 Sep 2008 23:27:00 +0000
THE MDC celebrates its ninth birthday this week. The party launched in 1999 by representatives of the white farming community, varsity students and lecturers, workers union representatives and some civic organisations has grown within a decade to be formidable political power in Zimbabwe’s politics. While the phenomenal growth of the party is as breath-taking as they come, it remains an unedifying fact of life that all its achievements have come on the back of much suffering and sacrifice on the part of ordinary Zimbabweans.
The ideology of the party is essentially against everything that Zimbabweans as a people have fought three liberation wars beginning in 1893 for. Its views on issues such as social justice and the distribution of national resources and national sovereignty remain basically un-African and diametrically opposed to the view of the majority of the Zimbabwean population.
The party that gets its funding from the West has proven to be a Trojan horse by which the West can extend its influence in Southern Africa. However, it would be infantile to start blaming the West for using this willing tool to further its interests and values. The global village is a tough neighborhood where only those with some muscle fare well. Those who can bribe, bully and bomb their way into the riches of other nations are not lacking in numbers and all recorded human history is about the powerful stealing from the least powerful in every epoch of human existence.
The people to blame for the birth of the MDC and the national catastrophe its existence has occasioned on our nation are the founding fathers of the Zimbabwe in Zanu PF. Indeed President Mugabe and his party are fully responsible for the birth of this political swine that is the MDC. When students in the student movement in the early 90’s were showing signs of rebellion and workers were revolting against the government, the government of the day mysteriously failed to read the warning signs.
In Mandela’s words there was a failure of leadership somewhere in the early 90’s right up to the birth of the MDC. It was clear from the onset that some elements in the then Commercial Farmers’ Union were spoiling for a fight over land. It was clear which embassies were involved in the so-called promotion of national democratic institutions a.k.a mass brainwashing of the born-free generation.
Everyone knew that the American dollar was flowing fast in one direction between some NGOs and some office bearers in the ZCTU. We all remember all those conferences on leadership training, development and other silly notions that were thrown and hosted about casually in that period. Very hostile anti-government newspapers became a blight on street corners. Because the NGOs were casual in their sponsorships and never audited accounts of recipients, we all know which individuals started showing signs of affluence, driving Nissan Hard body twin cabs etc. in that era. It became a done and fashionable thing to receive the dollar in exchange for one’s conscience.
Even young villagers were drawing up “project proposals” to get donor funding only to blow the money away in some growth points. To the donors, this was fine as long as they came en-mass to attend some voter education schemes in which they were openly taught to challenge the government of the day and agitate for “change”.
Yet the government decided to go on an extended holiday and failed to check these sell-outs from the onset. They were allowed to fall in the hands of former Rhodesians and coalesce into the behemoth that is the MDC. One wonders where the national intelligence services were when our people were being bought and corrupted like this in broad daylight.
Were President Mugabe and the Presidium being made aware of the developments leading to the founding of the MDC? Was the ruling party’s Politburo aware of the goings on? Where was everyone else?
Zimbabwe’s tragedy must be a lesson to other African countries especially South Africa. They must realize that if the national leadership fails to connect with the younger generation, hostile external forces will come in and fill the void. We need the revolution to continually re-new and re-assert itself and continue to appeal and be attractive to succeeding generations.
Structures and traditions of the revolution must be in place to celebrate the long road we have travelled all the way from the first uMvukela/Chimurenga wars of the 1800s to the present. In short new ways of reinforcing the mentality that as Africans we have a rich history, legacy and values to protect must be found to win back our young people from the seductive appeal of the Western propaganda and morally decadent values of the MDC. Modern governments can fund all these organisations that are wracking havoc in Zimbabwe, why can’t African nations also have about counter organisations that inspire African children about our doctrines of uBuntu and national pride?
Most of the people now active in the MDC were won over by money and nothing else. However, there are some who believed they were genuinely doing something positive for the nation. These were young, impatient and energetic patriots who were let down by the government that failed to connect with their young inquisitive minds. As a result they ended up with the wrong mob. Our Southern African liberation movements like Zanu PF, SWAPO, FRELIMO, MPLA and the ANC must not continually bank on their past glory as emancipators of the people. A person born in 1980 obviously has no recollection of the degrading and inhuman life the black people were forced to endure before Nkomo, Parirenyatwa, Chinamano and others decided enough was enough and formed the NDP way back in 1960 after engaging for a long time in nationalist politics under the banner of the African National Congress and workers’ union politics way back in the 1950s.
Our nations’ fathers must find new ways to engage these children and inspire them to be committed and proud Africans. It is not an impossible task. President Putin did it recently in Russia giving back to his country the pride and dignity that had been lost during the embarrassing Yeltsin years. Our leaders have a duty to win back our children from the perversity that is the MDC and set them on a new path of national honour and pride.
African governments must fund new projects and organisations that are nationalistic and proudly African in their outlook. They can for example fund new international publications that are owned and controlled by true Africans to counter the rubbish that emanates from the West. In short they must fight back against Western propaganda using the same instruments employed against us.
We have squandered a decade as a nation because the MDC was given a fertile environment in which to breed by our fathers. They now have an obligation to see to it that the MDC does not come in and finish off what is left of the fruits of our liberation war. They have a duty to revert to the drawing board and see how they can win over progressive elements within the MDC. Then when the MDC is done with, the nation has a duty to allow the birth of truly African and plausible opposition party.
We have seen the dangers of allowing outsiders to come in, found and fund an opposition. It has disastrous consequences. We need a home grown opposition whose leadership espouses our uBuntu. One whose leader can travel on a diplomatic Zimbabwean passport to promote the country abroad. What we do not need is a political psycho who travels abroad to promote the destruction of the country via sanctions. The Zanu government had the opportunity to allow a better opposition to emerge over the years. They failed in that duty and must now make amends. The rest of Africa must take note and learn from Zimbabwe’s tragedy-Western funded political opposition parties are bad news!
The MDC is nine years on the 11th of September. I hope in another nine years they will be a negligible footnote in the nation’s history. For that to happen, the nation’s founding fathers in Zanu must take a long hard look in the mirror and be honest about what went wrong. They must recognize that they took their eyes off the ball and allowed political upstarts like the greedy leadership of the MDC to emerge and hold our country to ransom. Surely as seasoned revolutionaries we expect and should have been led better by our leadership. Having fought and defeated imperialists in previous rounds, they must have been ready for the next round but unfortunately President Mugabe and company took their gloves off midway during the fight in the 90’s. Now that they have their gloves back on, let’s hope the MDC and its handlers do not last the distance. Another nine years of this unpalatable entity is hard to imagine. Somehow it must be thrown to the rubbish tip where it belongs.
Then Zimbabwe will live again.
Labels: MDC, NEOLIBERALISM
posted by MrK @ 11:12 PM
1 Comments:
This is a very important article. The reason Zimbabwe and any African country is open to such blatant manipulation, is because we allow our natural resource and their management to be farmed out to western organisations of which we do not have full control. Not just government control, but popular control. Such organisations should be headed by people who are respected in the community itself. We do not own all the natural resources and the companies that mine them. As a result, there are claims of 'national interest' made by foreign powers when these companies are threatened. We farm out local government tasks to 'NGOs', and finance our development through 'development aid' instead of mining company taxes. We have lost billions of US dollars through uncollected taxes and profits. That is the future for Zimbabwe under the MDC.
Development aid as we have seen can be stopped overnight if the country in question doesn't like our policies, or our lawmakers refuse to implement foreign policies. This happened not only in Zimbabwe, but in Zambia twice, in 1991 (the year the neoliberal MMD came to power) and again in 1999, when the IMF demanded that the country's mines were sold to western corporations. As a result, we have seen a collapse of the currency (K1/$USD in the 1970s, K113/$USD in 1991, K4800/$USD in 2006). There is still 80% of the population living on less than $2,- per day. This is the result of neoliberal policies, the same policies the MDC wants to implement in Zimbabwe - with the same results.
In short, 'donor aid' comes with strings attached, and depending on it is another way of transferring power to the west.
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