(TALKZIMBABWE) Tsvangirai is Prime Minister of NGOs, not Zimbabwe

Tsvangirai is Prime Minister of NGOs, not Zimbabwe
Sun, 28 Jun 2009 00:56:00 +0000

WHILE Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai’s three-week tour of some European countries and the United States has come and gone, it has left behind a lot of dust over its purpose and achievement, which are now the subject of political mystification and media hullabaloo.

Against this background there are six irresistible observations that stand out as having critically defined the Prime Minister’s mission and which, therefore, warrant critical scrutiny to help clear up the growing confusion and controversy over the tour.

The six compelling observations are these:

1. What was supposed to be a Government trip led by the Prime Minister ended up as his ego-trip.

2. The tour was hijacked by the United States and its European allies, who suddenly became new-born champions of the very same September 15 2008 Global Political Agreement (GPA) that they, in fact, oppose.

3. While the trip was expected to raise critically needed financial support for the inclusive Government’s US$8,3 billion Short-Term Economic Recovery Programme (Sterp), it ended up as a fund-raising campaign for American and European-created NGOs in Zimbabwe that are linked to the MDC-T.

4. The Prime Minister transformed the tour from being about seeking the re-engagement of Zimbabwe’s inclusive Government with Western governments to facilitating his own personal re-engagement with the governments of the United States and its European allies.

5. To appease his European and American hosts at the expense of the suffering ordinary people in Zimbabwe who are now living like hunter-gatherers, Prime Minister Tsvangirai abandoned the core purpose of the trip which was to seek the removal of the devastating illegal economic sanctions imposed by the countries he visited; and

6. The tour was poorly planned, premature and too long.

First, it is now quite clear that, viewed from the standpoint of the inclusive Government as a national body defined by collective responsibility, the Prime Minister’s tour did not have a strategic content that the public could readily identify with.

In fact, the tour came like a bolt from the blue without any visible advance planning or preparation. Added to this, the composition of the Prime Minister’s delegation was made up of novices and lightweights with no diplomatic experience that was necessary for such a high-profile tour with huge national interests at stake.

Rather inexplicably, the timing of the tour was premature, not least because it took place even before the start of the Zimbabwe-EU dialogue for re-engagement at ministerial and official level initiated by Zimbabwe to seek the removal of the illegal economic sanctions and to restore normal relations of mutual recognition and respect. The prematurity of the tour was made worse by the fact that it lasted for much too long.

While some MDC-T propagandists have celebrated the Prime Minister’s extended tour, they have hopelessly failed to appreciate that Mr Tsvangirai’s prolonged stay outside the country in a tour during which he has brought back home precious little and when nothing at home collapsed in his absence has served to dramatically demonstrate his irrelevance as a key player capable of making things happen for Zimbabweans in or outside the country. Any leader who can spend some three weeks away from his country globe-trotting without being missed is not at all important in the everyday scheme of things.

The second observation is that, given the worsening state of the economy that has robbed ordinary people of their national currency, there was no need for the Prime Minister to undertake his extended tour if its core objective did not, by definition, include that he would specifically seek the removal of the illegal economic sanctions that have broadened and deepened the country’s political and economic meltdown.

On this point, nothing would be gained by resorting to the false and discredited propaganda that the Prime Minister did not address the sanctions issue during his tour allegedly because they are an individual matter as they are said to be only targeted at Zanu-PF persons. Even if this claim were true, which it is not, the GPA is clear that all sanctions must be removed and that is enough to enjoin Mr Tsvangirai to uphold all and not just some provisions of the GPA as Prime Minister of Zimbabwe.

But more importantly, Prime Minister Tsvangirai was at the very least expected to seek and obtain from his traditional supporters overseas the removal of financial sanctions against Zimbabwe as a country, and sanctions against companies, some of them listed in various stock exchanges, imposed at the behest of the United States and its European allies directly and through multilateral institutions such as the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the African Development Bank (AfDB).

The fact that he did not even talk about these sanctions during his tour and, instead, sought to hide under the false cover of sanctions that are allegedly only targeted at individuals, shows beyond doubt that he abandoned the core objective of his tour, given the on-going economic crisis in the country due to financial sanctions targeting the whole country and affecting some of its leading companies. This alone means that Prime Minister Tsvangirai cannot be trusted to represent at all times all Zimbabweans regardless of their political affiliation.

The third observation is that, maybe because he was neither guided by the national interest nor by the principle of collective responsibility in the inclusive Government, Prime Minister Tsvangirai ended up changing the focus of his tour from being about seeking the re-engagement of Zimbabwe’s inclusive Government with Western governments to facilitating his own personal re-engagement with these governments that used to support him for regime-change purposes when he was the opposition leader of the MDC-T.

It is common cause that the Prime Minister’s regime-change engagement with the power establishments in the Western countries that make up the anti-Zimbabwe alliance was dented when he signed the GPA on September 15 2008 and things got worse when Tsvangirai joined the inclusive Government some four months ago on February 13.

No wonder then that the Prime Minister and his hosts during his three-week tour took advantage of the opportunity to re-engage each other in the light of the new situation of the inclusive Government which has resulted in new political dynamics on the ground that they think require new strategies of seeking regime-change from within the inclusive Government.

As such, while nothing was achieved to re-engage the inclusive Government with the governments of the United States and its European allies, quite a lot was done to re-engage the Prime Minister and his MDC-T with the governments of the countries he visited. This is why Mr Tsvangirai’s hosts were happy to shower him with trinkets for the NGO community as if he had gone there as the Prime Minister of NGOs for whom he raised some US$202 million when we all know he went as the Prime Minister of Zimbabwe under the auspices of the inclusive Government.

The fourth observation is that, as a direct consequence of his failure to be guided by the principle of collective responsibility within the inclusive Government, and because of his inability to rise above hostile foreign interests for the sake of all Zimbabweans regardless of their political affiliations, Prime Minister Tsvangirai failed to raise even a cent for the inclusive Government’s US$8,3 billion Short-Term Economic Recovery Programme (Sterp).

Of course, the Prime Minister raised US$202 million for NGOs and when he was on his last visit in France on Thursday, he claimed that how that money he had raised would come to Zimbabwe or who would use it "was neither here nor there" as long as it was coming to the country.

But such a posture is, of course, not leadership material expected of a Prime Minister because it is manifestly juvenile and delinquent in a partisan way and is therefore irresponsible in every respect, however you look at it. Where does Prime Minister Tsvangirai imagine money for Sterp will come from when he was not able to raise even a cent towards the US$8,3 billion he has said the inclusive Government needs to turn around the economy?

The fifth observation is that the Prime Minister’s three-week tour was hijacked and abused by the United States and its European allies who, without any challenge from Mr Tsvangirai, turned it into a propaganda event to opportunistically pose as GPA supporters with Machiavellian pledges that they would consider supporting the inclusive Government only after some "outstanding GPA" issues had been implemented. Indeed, the same dodgy pledges found their way onto conditions for re-engagement that have been set by the EU on its dialogue with Zimbabwe.

What is instructive about this is that the public record shows that the United States and its European allies have never supported the September 15 2008 political agreement because of its unequivocal confirmation of the irreversibility of the land reform programme and its call for the removal of the illegal sanctions and the end of propaganda against Zimbabwe from pirate radio stations that are based in Europe and America.

It is also a public secret that America and Europe see the GPA as an unwelcome triumph of South African diplomacy, which they are determined to reverse even by hook or crook.

Prime Minister Tsvangirai should have understood that the notion that the United States and its European allies are eager to see the implementation of "outstanding" GPA issues before supporting the inclusive Government is akin to the devil quoting scriptures claiming to be eager to go to heaven!

The sixth and final observation is that, from the totality of the issues arising from the foregoing, it is abundantly clear that the Prime Minister’s three-week tour of some European countries and the United States, which should have been a well-planned strategic national trip on behalf of the inclusive Government in the interest of all Zimbabweans regardless of their political affiliation, ended up being an unfortunate ego-trip that has left Tsvangirai exposed as a poor leader who just does not get it.

The unprecedented heckling that the Prime Minister suffered in London from a traditional MDC-T audience was because he falsely presented himself as the only person who has suffered the most in the so-called struggle for democracy in Zimbabwe.

For some reasons the Prime Minister does not get the fact that being in Government is not an individual thing but about being the custodian of the national people’s agenda as an expression of the legacy of the liberation struggle. There are no half-way points or half measures about that: you either get it or you don’t. Tsvangirai doesn’t.

Somehow, and this might turn out to be its only positive outcome, the Prime Minister’s tour has brought into sharp focus the fact that Zimbabweans have over-tolerated the mischief by MDC-T’s neo-colonial donors and media hacks who routinely treat the history of Zimbabwe as if it begins in 2000 and who claim that the worst atrocities in the history of the country have been committed only since and make nonsensical claims that the struggle for democracy in Zimbabwe started in 2000 when people like Tsvangirai supposedly made unparalleled personal sacrifices as leaders of that struggle.

All the European and American leaders who hosted Prime Minister Tsvangirai during his three-week tour, notably Barack Obama, Gordon Brown and Angela Merkel, went to town pushing the neo-colonial line whose sub-text is that the struggle for democracy in Zimbabwe is as recent as 2000 and its trophy is the return of "expropriated white land".

If Prime Minister Tsvangirai and his MDC-T believe this neo-colonial hogwash and want to make it their own agenda, then they are totally doomed.

This is because the gods will never be as crazy as to allow mercenary politicians to reverse the gains of the liberation struggle by falsely claiming to be leading the struggle for democracy and human rights in Zimbabwe when its true leaders are former colonialists who have never accepted the consequences of their colonial pillage of our country.