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(HERALD) May 25: Africa's denouement or upward dash?

May 25: Africa's denouement or upward dash?
Friday, 27 May 2011 22:15

THIS week - the week of Africa - saw the MDC-T leader, Morgan Tsvangirai, paying a visit to an unusual quarter, Gabon.

For those of us not too familiar with maps and places, Gabon is a beautiful coastal central African state abutting the Atlantic, and standing between the two Congos and the aforesaid ocean.

Apart from being an African country, there has not been much traffic between Gabon and Zimbabwe, although there was quite some warmth between its long long-serving President, one Omar Bongo, now late, and President Mugabe.

The late Omar Bongo was succeeded by his son, Ali Bongo, in August 2009, getting formally sworn in on October 16 after resolution to disputed elections. Until now, the last contact between Zimbabwe and Gabon was in 2007 in Portugal, in the context of the EU-Africa Summit when the late President sought Zimbabwe's support for the candidature of Jean Ping as Chairman of the African Union Commission.

In February 2008, Ping succeeded Alpha Konare as AU Commission Chairman, with the support of Zimbabwe.

The irony of representation

Apart from producing a high-ranking official for the African Union, Gabon, alongside South Africa and Nigeria, represents the African sub-continent in the United Nations Security Council.

Both Gabon and Nigeria won the right to represent Africa in the powerful world body when Libya was President of the General Assembly. Read against the subsequent decision by these three African countries - Gabon and Nigeria included - to support Resolution 1973 which legitimised the Nato assault on Libya, nothing could be more ironic.

Important, classified!

As should be apparent already, there is little connecting Zimbabwe and Gabon, which is what made the MDC-T leader's visit there quite curious. Importantly, the visit evolved after it became clear Tsvangirai was not going to be invited to the Windhoek Sadc Summit held last week, towards which his party had invested and deployed heavily. The information that Tsvangirai would not be invited to Windhoek, reached him while in South Africa, which is where he then picked a private jet to get to Gabon. That leg of his private jetted itinerary kept him away from the all-important Tuesday Cabinet meeting. That suggests whatever he was transacting in Gabon must have been important, very important.

Back home that same Tuesday, Tsvangirai never shared with the media what it is that had taken him to this striking destination. To this day, he has not done so. That, too, suggests that whatever it is he transacted in Gabon must have been classified, very classified. I will come back to both points.

Africa Day

I called this week Africa Week. The Organisation of African Unity (OAU) was launched on May 25, 1963 in Addis Ababa, the Ethiopian capital. Then on, May 25 became an important day for the continent.

We call it the Africa Day and all countries endeavour to mark it variously as the continent's birthday.

Zimbabwe did no less this year and heartily, one notes that the national media went out of the way to educate the public on the importance of the day.

When the burkhah ornaments someone's war

But what marks off this particular commemorative day from preceding ones is that it found a part of the continent under armed attack from Nato countries, led principally by the United States of America, France, Britain and Italy, apart from smaller states from the enlarged EU, including one or two from the Nordic.

I am referring to the UN-sanctioned attack on Libya by Western countries, which is thinly legitimised by the participation of little Arab states of Jordan, UAE and Qatar. Turkey, a big Muslim country, is proving a difficult customer, but has, nevertheless been used to sell the invasion.

It has refused to lift any of its fighter planes, battle ships, to drop any of its ordinances, against Libya, even though it stands with the invaders, Jordan, Qatar and UAE have made a combioned contribution of 125 soldiers in a campaign whose personnel strength is 12 909; contributed 32 fighter crafts to a combined total of 309; have not made made a single sortie between them since the beginning of hostilities, as against 5 857 done until May 5.

Headache on creation day

Read all this against 8 507 US servicemen, 1 300 British military personnel, 800 Frenchmen, 560 Canadian, 500 Spaniards, 170 Belgians and 120 Danes, and then you know whose war this is.

Read all this against 153 American warplanes which have done combined 2 000 sorties; 28 British warplanes accounting for 1 300 sorties; 29 French crafts with 1 200 sorties and Italy's 12 crafts with their 600 sorties, and you have an idea who is incinerating that portion of the continent.

US' 12 battleships, France's 6, Italy's 4 and UK's 3 have lobbed 246 missiles to reduce Libya to a finer, well-scorched desert. This is the little homework that the West has served Africa on the eve of its creation day.

The Obama of Mayflower roots

The beauty of the cynicism does not end there. On Africa day, Obama and Cameron paid more tribute to Africa by announcing they would ratchet up pressure against Gaddafi who must be found and killed, in the name of founding and launching a new Libya.

Attack helicopter gunships would now be dispatched to engage units of Libyan Government troops while insurgents of the Benghazi-based Transitional National Council (TNC) would be trained and equipped by Nato, so as to tilt the balance towards a "democratic outcome".

With costs surpassing the 100m-pound mark, Libya is beginning to play home for Cameron whose generals and admirals are getting agitated by a Muammar Gaddafi who won't fall quickly. They want the UN mandate expanded to allow boots on Libyan soil, which means boots on African soil.

Obama, our Obama, is an aggressive part of the piece, the most aggressive part in fact. You would think his grandparents stepped out of Mayflower, this first black President of America, roots well bedecked by lumpy nodes of Kenyan soil. What a way to mark Africa day!

Did this column not make the point in that speculative phase of Obama's presidency? That America had given itself an Afro-Arab president so it can assault both peoples without the charge of racism? How sad it is to be vindicated! Any cynicism, good Lord!

All those buzzing fighter planes are enforcing a no-fly zone threatened by a Libya that has not a single plane in the air, that cannot have a single plane in the air without being foolhardy and quixotic!

And, civilians are protected by massive bombs and eyeless missiles lobbied on Tripoli from the sea! A brave new world indeed!

A French president for Africa

The preceding would make Africans, any thinking African, hopelessly existential. Misanthropic even. You cannot celebrate your being this way without feeling your own humanity collapsing.

Few weeks back, the continent faced another bout of humiliation in Ivory Coast when another war, little this time, was settled by France's Force Republic, bearing UN helmets and epaulettes.

I don't care what you think about Gbagbo, but no one - no one - has the right to be put in an African office by volleys from the same guns that colonised us. Ouattara can win many times, become Ivorian a thousand times but the fact is he is France's president for Ivory Coast whom Sarkozy picked in neighboring Burkina Faso, gave over to the IMF for training, before foisting him on Ivorians through force of French arms.

Ecowas acquiesced, Africa acquiesced. Both were unclear that far, far worse than an undemocratic Africa is an enslaved neo-colonial Africa. So overall, there was lots of food for thought for Africa on it's creation day, but hardly any for its stomach, to adapt words of a well-known Nigerian writer.

When misanthropy does not make history

As Africans, we must resist pessimism or misanthropy. Both sentiments do not make history. After all, Africa today cannot be worse than Africa of the 1960s when most of it was under colonialism and when all seemed bleak.

Someone surmounted that engulfing bleakness to see the hope beyond. Almost 40 years later, Africa became politically free, creating the new situation we now have today. It was precisely those stolid challenges in the 1960s which defined struggles for the founding fathers of the continent.

Similarly, it is the challenges of today - Libya included - which must define present struggles. And these struggles are being fought gallantly, with real victories registering.
The only difference is that these fights are still incipient and isolated, vis-a-vis the scope of the problem, and the extent of the continent.

The week preceding Africa's week, and the African week itself saw two major breakthroughs which are indicative of brighter things to come, against the backdrop of the seeming bleakness.

Dismantling the UK Tribunal in Sadc

The recent Sadc Extraordinary Summit held in Windhoek, Namibia took a far-reaching decision regarding Southern Africa's restitution programme, especially as this relates to the land question.

Simply, it dismantled the so-called Sadc Tribunal, which in its working reality had become UK or White Colonial Farmer Tribunal, reinforced of course by German and Afrikaner landed interests.

As always, we stumble and stagger our way to correctness. Having been tasked to re-examine the role of the Tribunal and its judgments, ministers of Justice and the region's Attorneys General inexplicably decided to farm out this most sensitive assignment to a white Briton - as a consultant - regardless of all considerations of history and ethnicity, sorry, of kith and kin. I had forgotten children of the Missis have no ethnicity. Only natives do! As expected, the report and its recommendations were just outrageously offensive, but helpfully defined how-not-to-do-it for the Grouping. After all it takes an ugly girl to appreciate a village beauty! That bad report stirred regional nationalist feelings which guided Sadc to the correct decision.

Wholly British funded

A Tribunal which had no law to guide it, had catapulted itself to transnational, trans-justice status that made it a court of first and last instance. Before its ethereal stool, all Chief Justices and all Supreme Courts in the region had become mere groveling mortals, mere buildings respectively. For here was one Court, wholly British funded, wholly white in legal sensibility, wholly anti-liberation in politics, perched at the helm. Its jurisdiction would be as expansive as God's, all not just in current and forward time, but also in time past. This explained why its judgments on Zimbabwe challenged the goals of our founding process, the liberation struggle, to three cheers from Rhodesians first, and Afrikaners and Germans who saw whirlpool events in Zimbabwe as a terrible augury of things to come.

It did not need to be deterred by the region's multiple legal traditions: Roman Dutch, French, Portuguese. It did not need to be detained by the question of which body of law, which tenets from these diverse legal traditions it was going to rely on for adjudication. But on that ordinary Friday in Windhoek, Sadc took a decision for Africa and its founding goals.

When democracy is a sovereign challenge

The following week on a Wednesday, itself Africa Day, Africa convened in Addis Ababa. More history was made and we must take note. I isolate three decisions and the accompanying sentiments.

The Western assault on Libya, much like the British consultant's report, got Africa to examine its values, instruments, accession and membership to international treaties and bodies respectively.

Africa grappled with the issue of democracy, arguably for the first time deeply from the perspective of her own interests, as opposed to the interests of prescriptive, overweening imperialists.

Examples were summoned: Uganda under Idi Amin; South Africa under apartheid; and, Ethiopia itself under Mengistu. In all these situations and many more, democracy came from internal forces in struggle. It never dropped from Nato fighter crafts, rained on democracy-starved climes like missiles off the Mediterranean, as is the case presently in Libya.

That kind of democracy, underlined President Zenawi, himself a symbol of post-independence armed democratic struggles, is simply bogus. He went further: the achievement of democracy in a country is the sovereign right and challenge for those who belong to it.

If they want it now, well and good; if they want it much later in generations to come, tough luck. But no country, great or small, neighbouing or faraway, friendly or hostile, has a right, any right, to demand, struggle for, or impose democracy on another.

The Constitutive Act, our Koran as the AU, shall be revisited to clinch that principle which is consistent with the UN principle of non-interference. Anyway, Africa had the same principle before the ill-wind of donors blew it away.

Protests of insurrections

Balancing off that major point of principle, was a recognition that a people to whom avenues to peaceful protest, assembly and expression are closed, reserve the right to take up arms against an unjust, oppressive system.

But Africa drew a clear distinction between bona fide protests - themselves legitimate avenues in a democratic society - and armed insurrections, as happened in Libya.

Attacking army barracks and aligning oneself with foreign forces amount to a new situation which the AU cannot condone in the name of democracy or that of ousting a dictatorship.

Africa is opposed to coups; Africa is opposed to invasions. This could not have come any clearer than it did in Addis.

Challenging Africa's geography

Foreign interference in the affairs of Africa was roundly decried, with the Summit lamenting the sidelining of Africa in the resolution of the Libyan situation. A few days before, security councils of both Africa and EU had met in the same city. It became very clear Europe had little respect for the natives whom it collectively and contemptuously regarded as "its natives".

Challenged on the sidelining of Africa on the issue of Libya, the Europeans stated bellicosely that Libya was no just African; it was Mediterranean and Arab also. It then became clear to sleepy Africa why Sarkozy was pushing for an association of Mediterranean states a few years back. It also became clear why the resolution of the Arab League was pushed for by Europe in the run-up to aggression against Libya.

In that meeting, Europe challenged Africa's view of its own geography, of Africa, the extent of its territorial claims and integrity. Besides, Nato had also stopped an AU ad-hoc committee from reaching Libya, just a day or so before the attack on Libya.

French Ambassador to Mauritania, itself leader of the AU Committee, told African leaders they could no longer reach Libya as hostilities would commence shortly. In other words, the AU could not reach a part of Africa without a say-so from Nato!

The fools who rushed

But that is not the issue, painful though that is. The issue is Africa took a decision to forcefully oppose what is happening in Libya, including forcing a review action in the United Nations.

Africa showed the courage to confront its past naivety when it shared signatures with imperialism, all against itself and its well-being. It also emerged from that meeting that countries who committed Africa to UN Resolution 1973 are now regretful of their actions, more or less the same way the three countries which had ratified the Sadc Tribunal regretted and recanted positions in Windhoek.

As the Mauritian leader said in Windhoek, like a fool, Africa was now paying the price of treading where angels fear to!

ICC, another string on an unholy bow

Matters went much further. As if pulverising Libya was not bad enough, the assaulting nations also deployed the International Criminal Court against Gaddafi, to make sure if he is not killed in action, he is put out of circulation through phony legal processes.

It has become clear to Africa that apart from soldiers, guns, warplanes, battleships, helicopters and missiles, ICC is another string on the western bow. Its history, its victims, does illustratively tell the sorry story. Africa is contemplating a drastic and dramatic one against this western kangaroo court.

Africa needs courage and the intervening months will definitely show and test Africa's resolve to be anything but an underdog.

Endnote and our Prime Minister

Back to our Prime Minister and his Gabonese peregrinations. What is the man up to? What is he looking for in the beautiful marshes of Gabon? To answer this, you have to know why the two MDCs and their Western handlers hailed their preferred reading of the Troika Summit held in Livngstone. Britain, helped by France and the US, badly needs and is frantically cultivating a rupture between Zimbabwe and Sadc in a way reminiscent of a similar one between Ivory Coast and Ecowas, or Libya, the Arab League and, cirumstantially, Africa.

Divest of its regional cover, any country becomes vulnerable, although not necessarily conquerable. The latter depends on its resources, on its defences. France is or has taken over the presidency of the UN Security Council. It thinks it can return the British favor on Ivory Coast and on Libya. Sarkozy has already given Zimbabwe notice. But, these countries need the UN in the Zimbabwe situation, if not by way of peacekeepers and election supervisors, certainly by way of a resolution, preferably under Chapter VII.

South Africa, Nigeria and Gabon become key. In the case of Gabon, it is doubly key in that it delivers a UN vote and a Jean Ping. A second Libya on the continent needs a fumbling AU. The hope is that Gabon becomes another Burkina Faso in the 2008 attempt to put Zimbabwe before the UN Security Council, an attempt which collapsed so spectacularly, but without foreclosing any such attempts in future.

The dangerous blunder-and-regret approach of our southern neighbor means Zimbabwe's eggs need a wider African basket, need a wider world basket than it needed under Thabo's South Africa.

After all, as became very clear in the case of Libya, Resolution 1973 could have been defeated with better African judgment, coupled with a more progressive Libyan policy than that of futilely seeking to appease the West.

There was enough goodwill and readiness to vote against or veto 1973. What lacked was Afro-Arab leadership, and better diplomacy from Libya. What also lacks now is creative national defence strategies on the part of Libya. As for our Prime Minister, well, well, well! He has no blood on his clean hands, has he?
Icho!

nathaniel.manheru@zimpapers.co.zw

Labels: FRANCE, LIBYA, NEOCOLONIALISM

posted by MrK @ 7:25 PM