(STICKY) (ZIMPAPERS) AFRICAN FOCUS: MDC-T and the sabotage of Zim’s foreign policy
AFRICAN FOCUS: MDC-T and the sabotage of Zim’s foreign policySaturday, 18 June 2011 20:49
Dr Tafataona Mahoso
On June 12 2011, I was interviewed on SABC’s Interface programme as a member of Zimbabwe’s strategic communication delegation sent to South Africa. The interviewer was one Eusebius McKaiser, who was trying to imitate on Interface the format and style of BBC World Service’s Hard Talk programme.
Almost all of McKaiser’s questions were premised on MDC-T anti-Zimbabwe propaganda in South Africa and therefore easy to anticipate and to answer. One particular question which messed up the host’s line of questioning concerned His Excellency President Robert Mugabe: Whether MDC-T’s allegations were not true that the President had been in power too long; that he was too old; that he had lost control of the reins of government; and that he should leave office immediately.
I had calculated that McKaiser would focus on mere opinions and would also seek to lure me to go on and on expressing mere opinion which he would simply denounce and dismiss as either personal or representing only the views of Zanu-PF which would then enable him to dismiss me as just a “Zanu-PF pseudo-intellectual” and “pseudo-academic” who has no choice but to simply repeat Zanu-PF propaganda.
In fact, I had already seen a hint of this MDC line of thinking in an internet briefing by one of the many NGOs representing the anti-Zimbabwe front in South Africa.
Reacting to news of the deployment of the Zimbabwean strategic communication delegation headed by Professor Jonathan Moyo, Crisis in Zimbabwe Coalition in SA had said:
“We understand Zanu-PF has dispatched their so-called high-powered delegation to Johannesburg — comprising the venomous Jonathan Moyo and pseudo-academics Tafataona Mahoso and Vimbai Chivaura, together with Ambassador Chris Mutsvangwa. It appears Zanu-PF wishes to intensify its lobby to get Sadc to set aside Livingstone Troika resolutions.”
Significantly, the view of the President implied in McKaiser’s question on SABC came from MDC-T’s report to the Sadc Troika at Livingstone, Zambia. So, my reply was first to say that His Excellency President Robert Mugabe was elected in the June 2008 Presidential run-off election which MDC-T willingly boycotted for fear of losing.
But more devastating against the interviewer and the MDC-T lies being peddled in South Africa was my reference to Section 20.1.6 of the Global Political Agreement which all three parties in the inclusive Government signed in 2008 and made constitutional through Constitutional Amendment Number 19 of 2009.
I said all three parties signed and swore to an agreement which includes the following:
“There shall be a President, which office shall continue to be occupied by President Robert Gabriel Mugabe. There shall be two (2) Vice-Presidents, who will be nominated by the (same) President and/or Zanu-PF (that is, the President’s party).”
In other words, the defence of the propriety and legitimacy of President Robert Mugabe’s incumbency should not be a matter of one person’s opinion or even one party’s opinion. It derives from an election, from a unanimous tripartite agreement and from a subsequent constitutional amendment passed by a tripartite Parliament of Zimbabwe.
Contrary to this clearly documented information, MDC-T and the NGOs affiliated to it have been telling the SABC and most South Africans they interact with that President Mugabe is an unelected leader who imposed himself on the country, imposed himself on his own party, and somehow forced the other political parties to endure his leadership as President.
So it was critical to show SABC’s McKaiser that the very same people claiming to oppose President Mugabe’s leadership and actually campaigning to sabotage his conduct of Zimbabwe’s foreign policy in fact signed a document accepting the very same President as their President before enshrining that agreement in the Constitution of Zimbabwe and swearing allegiance to the same in front of the same President. They knew the President’s age and they knew how capable he was of leading them. How can they now conduct an external campaign claiming that he is too old or that he has no control over government?
That Interface programme on SABC was just one incident. Prior to that there was the seminar organised by the so-called Institute for a Democratic Alternative for Zimbabwe (IDAZIM) in Sandton on June 8 2011 which was also reported in The Herald on Friday June 10 2011 under the heading “Blow for MDC formations at summit”.
The overall theme of the supposed seminar was “Sadc’s final hurdle to a democratic transition in Zimbabwe: Engaging with security sector reform”.
In a genuine seminar, one would expect that among the presenters there would be someone sent by the Zimbabwe Defence Forces (ZDF) to present the current institutional voice of the ZDF in Zimbabwe. But that was not the case. The presenters were:
* Mr Wilfred Mhanda or Dzinashe Machingura, who absconded from the liberation war and is now head of an NGO called Zimbabwe Liberators’ Platform. His topic was: “The role played by the security sector during and after the 2008 elections in Zimbabwe”;
* Mr Aubrey Matshiqi, whose topic was “Can Sadc through the facilitator, South Africa, tackle security sector reforms in Zimbabwe?”;
* Mr Dewa Mavhinga of MDC-T affiliate Crisis Coalition Zimbabwe, whose topic was “Sadc’s final hurdle to the roadmap: Engaging with the security sector”; and
* Dr Cheryl Hendricks, of the South African Institute for Security Studies, who was to be the discussant.
Where the purpose of the line of questioning during my Interface interview with McKaiser was to criminalise President Robert Mugabe’s incumbency, that of the IDAZIM seminar was to criminalise the role of the Zimbabwe Defence Forces (ZDF) under the cover of an academic discourse. Ironically, it was only the white woman presenter, Dr Cheryl Hendricks, who succeeded in keeping her academic cover by refusing to engage in invective and hyperbole against Zimbabwe’s foreign policy and the ZDF. All the three African presenters betrayed a rabid hatred of Zimbabwe and a burning desire to criminalise the reputation of the ZDF. And to do so, they had to abandon academic pretences and engage in open propaganda.
The first glaring omission was that there was no one on the panel who knew the ZDF in detail and could speak with authority on its nature and characteristics, let alone anyone who knew enough to attempt to say whether or not it should be “reformed”, how it would be reformed and whether the reforms being demanded had not already been carried out since 1980.
The second glaring omission was clear from Mhanda’s presentation which was constructed in such a way as to make it seem as if the history of the ZDF began with the 2008 harmonised elections. Among all the presenters, the few references to real history which were made at best went only as far back as 2002! When some mention of the dissident war of 1984-1987 was made, it was done in isolation and entirely out of context, as Gukurahundi.
The third glaring distortion was the assumption that Zimbabwe’s Inter-party Agreement (GPA) of 2008 is a post-war settlement or peace agreement. This was assumed by the presenters and it was also implied in the book, The Security Sector in Southern Africa, which the organisers distributed for free at the seminar. The introduction to that book, which is jointly sponsored by the Institute for Security Studies (ISS) and the British Department for International Development (DFID), says, for instance:
“In Zimbabwe, despite the formation of a government of national unity, the political atmosphere remains tense. It is instructive that the peace agreement (of 2008) did not specifically include efforts to ensure that the security sector abides by its constitution and laws and the basic precepts of civil security relations.”
This is a lie. There is a thriving judiciary in Zimbabwe and the courts enjoy independence. Mavhinga, for instance, deliberately conflated the functions of the entire security sector in Zimbabwe with the role of certain specialists from the ZDF who are or have recently become medical doctors, engineers, IT specialists, communications experts or academics. The presence of any one or two of these in a civilian institution is therefore taken by MDC formations and Crisis Zimbabwe Coalition as evidence of the “mass militarisation” of civil institutions.
Mavhinga’s allegation of the military takeover of the electoral system was presented as “a declaration of war by Zanu-PF against all its opponents”, as if all the officers of the Air Force of Zimbabwe, all the members of the Zimbabwe National Army, and all the members of the Central Intelligence Organisation, somehow abandoned the borders of Zimbabwe and other posts and concentrated all their personnel on running elections! This was preposterous, but for some reason, no one among the regular audience challenged it. It remained for the special media delegation from Zimbabwe to show that even the basis of the entire seminar was unfounded and unjustified. How could the MDC formations say that the people of Zimbabwe should not hold any elections until the entire security sector is “reformed” when such “reforms” usually take 10 to 15 years?
Other features omitted from the presentations at the seminar were the role of the MDC in perpetrating violence in 2007 and 2011; in fact one main reason for the 2008 agreement was to stop external Anglo-Saxon intrusions into the internal affairs of Zimbabwe and this particular seminar itself represented a continuing invitation to the very same external forces, especially the British, to intervene in Zimbabwe’s internal affairs.
So the purpose of the proposed reforms must be to disarm the forces who liberated Zimbabwe in order to make illegal regime change easier?
Finally, listening to the presenters at the Sandton seminar on June 8 2011, a person from Mars would think that the GPA was a post-war settlement on a country where the judiciary was destroyed by the war and no longer functioning. The presenters alleged that the security forces were a law unto themselves.
But above all, the anti-Zimbabwe campaign is primarily a war against Zimbabwe’s foreign policy and defence policy. The war is focused on President Robert Mugabe and the Presidency precisely because it is the President who is mandated by the constitution to direct Zimbabwe’s defence policy and foreign policy.
In fact the imposition and maintenance of illegal Anglo-Saxon sanctions against the country means that the MDC formations and their sponsors did succeed to a great extent in damaging Zimbabwe’s foreign policy by sowing the lies to justify imposition of sanctions in the first place; by sowing the lies which made it possible to claim that the illegal sanctions were targeted only at certain individuals and therefore of no economic consequence; by sowing the lies which made some people believe that even if the sanctions were real and causing enormous damage to people’s livelihoods — in the end the damage would be worthwhile because the same Anglo-Saxon powers would bring “democracy” and massive “foreign aid” to the people and quickly end their suffering.
Significance of MDC-T’s Campaign against Zimbabwe’s Foreign Policy
Both at the IDAZIM seminar in Sandton on June 8 and during the SABC Interface programme four days later on June 12 — it was clear that the framing of attacks on Zimbabwe’s foreign policy derived from the false report smuggled to the Sadc Troika in Livingstone, Zambia, through the Sadc facilitation team on March 31 2011. In fact the British and US-sponsored MDC demonstrations in South Africa in June 2011 all focused on trying to force the full Sadc Summit to adopt and endorse the discredited, fraudulent and now abandoned Livingstone report.
What the people of Zimbabwe need to know is that
the Anglo-Saxon powers sponsoring the MDC’s debauchment of Zimbabwe’s foreign policy will never allow multiple political parties to generate multiple and contradicting foreign policy positions.
They never allow such positions to be articulated, let alone campaigned for by NGOs and political factions on foreign soil.
And in situations of foreign opposition to or attacks on that foreign policy, the Anglo-Saxon powers do not hesitate to deploy their military and security establishments in defence of their president and his direction of the same foreign policy.
For example, the September 2004 Report of the Defence Science Board Task Force on Strategic Communication of the United States Defence Department states openly on Page 62 that:
“A unifying Presidential vision and broad bipartisan Congressional support are the critical starting points in transforming (the US) strategic communication. Only Presidential direction and the focused actions of Congressional (that is, Parliamentary) leaders can create the political will needed to build the long-term strategic communication capabilities America needs . . . Leadership from the top must drive widespread understanding that national security policies will fail unless interlinked with strategic communication.”
This then explains why the same US government persists on instigating the MDC formations, the NGOs and the Western-sponsored media to focus on denigrating and criminalising the President and the Zimbabwe Defence Forces.
This is why it was necessary for me to tell SABC that all the three parties in our Parliament signed the GPA and swore allegiance to Zimbabwe in front of President Mugabe whom they endorsed through their signatures as President of the entire nation responsible for driving one foreign policy for one Zimbabwe. And the countries sponsoring these parties and their allied NGOs would not allow the sort of treasonous behaviour which we saw among the MDC formations and their affiliated NGOs in South Africa in early June 2011.
According to the 2004 Report of the Defence Science Board of the US Department of Defence already cited:
“Only White House (that is, Presidential) leadership, with support from Cabinet Secretaries (that is all ministers) and Congress, can bring about” a coherent and effective foreign policy.
“Nothing shapes US policies and global perceptions of US foreign and national security objectives more powerfully than the President’s statements and actions, and those of senior officials . . . Swift and sustained Presidential direction is also required to connect strategy to structure.”
Therefore, in the Zimbabwe case, it is treacherous and criminal for the MDC formations to campaign abroad against Zimbabwe’s foreign policy when in fact at home they are sitting on a whole agreement (the GPA), in which they have sworn that President Mugabe should be their President, too, and should direct foreign policy and defence policy on behalf of all Zimbabweans.
It is wrong to denigrate any team sent abroad by that same President to explain and defend that foreign policy to the outside world. People sent by the President to explain and defend Zimbabwe’s interests abroad are no longer just Zanu-PF emissaries, even though the President who sends them happens to be also the leader of Zanu-PF.
That was why it became necessary for me on June 12 to tell McKaiser of SABC that President Mugabe was elected in a poll which MDC-T boycotted for fear of losing; that nevertheless all the three parties to the GPA subsequently endorsed President Mugabe as everyone’s President; and that all the three parties sponsored a constitutional amendment which included acceptance of President Mugabe as President and which the full Parliament passed into law. To the extent that these same parties were now telling the world otherwise, they were not only lying but also refusing to take full responsibility for their own decisions.
As for the Anglo-Saxon powers and African academics, we may cite Blessing Miles Tendi’s book, Making History in Mugabe’s Zimbabwe, in which one academic confessed that the donors have corrupted some academics and intellectuals in Zimbabwe. The academic was quoted as saying:
“I do consultancy work for NGOs and I bend my analysis to please them. I tell NGOs what they want to hear. I tell them Mugabe is bad and there is a serious crisis and I say it loudly so they are satisfied. That way they will come back again next time for my analysis and even bring me new clients. That is how I survive.”
This is the disease which the white donor countries have spread.
We saw it on our trip to South Africa this June 2011.
-The Sunday Mail
Labels: COLOUR REVOLUTIONS, DFID, MDC, NEOCOLONIALISM
posted by MrK @ 5:19 PM
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