(NEWZIMBABWE) WikiLeaks: the implications for Zimbabwe

WikiLeaks: the implications for Zimbabwe
By Jonathan MoyoPolitics Last updated on: October 2, 2011

Lecture delivered by Tsholotsho North MP Professor Jonathan Moyo (Zanu PF) at the Sapes Seminar Series in Harare on September 29, 2011, under the topic: ‘The WikiLeaks Saga: National, Regional and International Implications’

MAY I start by expressing my gratitude to Sapes Trust for facilitating this interactive opportunity for us to debate, hopefully in an informed manner unlike what we have seen in our media, a matter that has been topical in our body politic since November 2010 when Wikileaks released a few sensational US diplomatic cables on Zimbabwe and particularly over the last four weeks following the publication on August 30 of all the 2,998 cables on Zimbabwe along with the entire batch of 251,287 cables covering some 274 US diplomatic missions around the world.

Although I am of course an active member of the political class, I propose to share with you my take on today’s topic as a trained member of the academic community without renouncing my political base as a nationalist in Zanu PF.

Indeed I should point out that in fact I offered to my brother Dr Ibbo Mandaza to make this presentation today, and so you can say I kind of invited myself so to speak, for two reasons: First there are two public discussions that have been organised over the last four weeks about WikiLeaks, one at the Quill Club featuring Dr Mandaza, and another here at Sapes featuring my good friend Petina Gappah where I hear there were a number of mainly unfounded if not malicious references to me about WikiLeaks which I believe require my response.

Second, and more important, I have spent some considerable time reading through virtually all of the 2,998 US diplomatic cables on Zimbabwe and I believe that taken together these cables are very revealing about US foreign policy in Zimbabwe and the region in ways that have fundamental national, regional and international implications for our country that are yet to be examined.

As I have indicated elsewhere on more than one occasion, the conversations that I am said to have held with US diplomats between 2005 and 2007 as shown in the relevant cables did indeed take place. There is no question about that. There is also no question about the fact that I was fully entitled to have those conversations without reference to anyone as an Independent Member of Parliament who was then in the political wilderness following the debacle of the so-called Tsholotsho Declaration that never was.

What this means is that I spoke at large to various US officials at various times in my own right as I was not then a member of Zanu PF and I was thus not in any of the party’s structures such as the central committee or politburo, nor was I in government as a cabinet official.

At the time I had these conversations, many of my colleagues in Zanu PF were not talking me due to the Tsholotsho fallout. In that context, I suppose it is fair to say that when nobody in your family wants to talk to you, you end up talking to anybody!

Otherwise it is notable that I did not have any meeting with any American official before March 30, 2005, when I was in Cabinet or when I was deputy secretary for information in the Zanu PF politburo, or even before that during or before the 1999 constitution commission or during my teaching years at the University of Zimbabwe between 1988 and 1993.

I wish to place on record that I was in fact as keen to interact with US officials as I was with SADC, African Union, British, Canadian, Australian, EU officials and indeed with private media journalists and NGO activists. I was really keen to understand this community against the backdrop of my past and acrimonious experience with them particularly between 2000 and 2005.

Some of these media folks who are writing strange stories about me these days such as the likes of the editor of the Daily News Stanley Gama even used to come to my house with Dumisani Muleya to have open ended discussions and debates about exactly the same issues that are reflected in the conversations I held with US diplomats revealed by WikiLeaks. They knew then that I was very much Zanu PF despite my being in the political wilderness, as I was before and as I am today and I have always been.

Parenthetically, with regards to Stanley Gama, whose Daily News has been unmistakably scandalous and defamatory in its reporting of the conversations I had with US diplomats as revealed by WikiLeaks, I should place on record the fact that I had to ask Dumisani Muleya not to bring him to my home.

I took this decision after I was reliably alerted that Gama is an American runner and informant of USAID in Harare (which has provided massive financial support to the Daily News including free newsprint) and that he works closely with America’s regime change outfit called Crisis in Zimbabwe Coalition founded and funded by the same USAID which recently has been paying for his trips to cover SADC summits around the region under the convenient pretext of working for the Daily News which has since replaced Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai’s Newsletter (which was also sponsored by USAID) as the official MDC-T voice.

I must also say as a preliminary point that I am particularly grateful to WikiLeaks for revealing the real source of the name calling that the Daily News and other regime change mouthpieces uses against me. The cables with the conversations I held with US diplomats reveal that well before the Daily News and News Day were launched between 2005 and 2010, US Embassy staff were sending cables to Washington describing me as a “flip-flopper”, “chameleon” and “rank opportunist” with “a checkered” history and so forth.

Now I can see from the Wikileaks that it is the Americans who say to the Daily News “hey boys and girls go and call that guy a flip-flopper” (an American word which is not in the Oxford or ZIMSEC syllabi). Indeed, in one instance the US Embassy in Harare sent a cable to Washington justifying US funding of the so-called independent media in Zimbabwe by pontificating that there was a need to open up media space in the country to “expose Jonathan Moyo and Zanu PF propaganda”.

Also, as revealed by WikiLeaks, it is notable that the same US government cables from Harare show that it is only in begrudging ways that these US diplomats would describe me as a “shrewd analyst” or as probably the most “astute politician in Zimbabwe today”.

I think this begrudging, and frankly unwelcome compliment, perhaps explains why after my first and only one of two meetings with him on March 30, 2007, former US Ambassador Christopher Dell described me as a “useful messenger”; which description I fully accept because I do indeed believe that I am a useful messenger with a permanent nationalist message that has always between consistent and which I gave to the Americans and their running dogs like Stanley Gama of the Daily News whenever and wherever I met them as reflected in the WikiLeaks cables. In any case, any “shrewd analyst” and “astute politician” must by definition be a useful messenger by virtue of the power of their message!

Lastly, on my preliminary points, I consider it most unfortunate that many people who have heard something to say about WikiLeaks or any of the 2,998 US diplomatic cables have actually not read any of them or have read only a handful out the 2,998 or even worse they base what they go around saying on half-baked newspaper reports which have been very selective not only about the cables they have only partially covered but also about many other cables they have not covered at all either because of inconvenient contents too close to home or because of pure laziness.

Otherwise, on the cables themselves, it is important to remember that all of the 251,287, including 2,998 on Zimbabwe, are out and they have been out since August 30. When you read a newspaper report claiming that they have a new or latest cable about so and so or this and that; they would be peddling a falsehood because all cables have been out since August 30.

While these cables extend over a 44-year period from 1966 to February 2010 covering 274 US diplomatic missions around the world, the 2,998 on Zimbabwe–which is the third largest number on Africa after Sudan and Nigeria—started in 1988, which has 2 cables, 1989 had one cable; there was none in 1990 even though we had a historic election which sealed the fate of the one party state; there are 2 for 1992; none in 1993 and one each year from 1994 to 1997; and none in 1998 the year when dialogue between the Government of Zimbabwe and the donor community collapsed and in 1999 the year of the historic Constitutional Commission was launched which is also the year when MDC was formed.

The cable floodgates opened in 2000 with a deluge that became dramatic in 2003 reaching its peak in 2005 which remained active until 2008 with the signing of the GPA after which there was a noticeable decline with the formation of the GPA government in 2009 and with the engagement of the US Embassy becoming more regionally and internationally focussed than ever before.

While most of the cables cite personalities as reference points, the whole WikiLeaks saga is nevertheless not at all about the personalities that are referenced. Rather, the cables seek to paint an American picture or to tell an American story about US foreign policy issues in Zimbabwe between 2000 and 2010.

The media in our country, and I mean all of it public and private, has done its audiences a great disservice by giving the false impression that the cables are about the individuals or personalities that are cited or mentioned in the cables. Taking that view is as mistaken as trying to understand a book with reference to its footnotes or bibliography at the expense of its thesis.

With this background, what then are the major issues that arise or feature prominently form 2000 onwards as revealed in the cables leaked by WikiLeaks on August 30? They include:

# Leadership change in Zanu PF and the government;

# Regime change activities in the country;

# The sanctions saga;

# The collapse of the Zimbabwe dollar and the attendant economic meltdown; and

# The dynamics of political violence engineered by the MDC with the knowledge of the US government but blamed on Zanu PF.

The leading interlocutors in the cables include Zanu PF cabinet ministers, politburo and central committee members and MPs (including one then independent MP as I was); MDC leaders, and a cross section of church leaders, businesspeople and ambassadors mainly from SADC, EU, China, Japan, South Korea, etc.

Interestingly, NGO and so-called independent media interlocutors (with the notable exception of media moguls such as Trevor Ncube, Strive Masiyiwa and Gideon Gono) hardly feature. One gets a distinct impression that NGO and so-called independent media interlocutors do not feature in the US diplomatic cables leaked by WikiLeaks because they are seen as part of the American establishment with nothing to offer of their own outside American thinking whose interests they serve.

Otherwise, without any doubt whatsoever, the most pervasive issue in the cables between 2000 and 2008 is the obsession with President Mugabe’s succession as the focus of three processes which the Americans saw as complementary:

Leadership change in Zanu PF and the government (by promoting factionalism or personalities as most defined in a telling 2003 cable involving the late national hero Cde Eddison Zvobgo whose sum and substance foreshadowed the birth of Mavambo along the lines of what Zvobgo then defined as “a party within a party”);

Regime Change through MDC politics of violence, economic sabotage and intrigue whose thrust throughout the cables since 2000 is anti-nationalist and anti-the legacy of the liberation struggle and whose public exposition was proffered in succinct and paradigmatic terms by Ambassador Ray only last June as “not just about changing the roof of the house (which can only be done through democratic elections) but also about changing the foundation of the whole house and rebuilding it from down upwards — the essence of regime change as something different from leadership change)”;

Again, it must be emphasised that there are many cables dealing with the fluctuation of the Zimbabwe dollar which started predicting its collapse as early as 2000.

In one of the most telling cables, RBZ Governor Gideon Gono is quoted as having referred to the RBZ’s contradictory policies “that had propelled economic collapse” in 2007 as “the necessary precursor to real change”. What this means is that the cables have provided the clearest window into what appears to have been a treacherous role played by an unaccountable RBZ which became a threat to Zimbabwe’s national interest and national security in ways that are yet to be fully understood.

The clear US policy objective that runs throughout the cables was to effect “regime change” (destroying Zimbabwe’s foundation in terms of its liberation legacy and replacing it with a neo-liberal pro-market foundation opposed to indigenisation and economic empowerment) as the first prize and “leadership change” (electoral change of leadership to provide a new roof without changing the foundation of the house) as the second prize.

The tittle-tattle in the cables about President Mugabe’s succession reached a peak in 2005 when the chatting became a free for all and even more robust with calls from across the political spectrum but especially from within Zanu PF, as witnessed at the party’s 2006 Goromonzi annual people’s conference, that President Mugabe “must go”.

The reasons for this peak included the following:

# Although Zanu PF got a two thirds majority in the 2005 election, this electoral milestone neither strengthened President Mugabe’s position in Zanu PF or the government nor consolidated the power and capacity of the State. The fact that President Mugabe was not a candidate in the 2005 elections, having secured his term three years earlier in 2002, was as much a factor as was the fact that by 2005 the civil service or state bureaucracy had become compromised and redundant as power had shifted to the RBZ which by then had set up parallel State structures reproducing and reflecting the entire government system to become a mini State.

# The 2005 Parliament, in which Zanu PF controlled two thirds, was dominated by vocal Zanu PF elements that were agitating for leadership change at the echelons of the party and government. Their agitation was quite pronounced at the party’s annual conference in Goromonzi in 2006 where the roots of Mavambo were sunk deeper after their germination in 2003 when the idea of “a party within a party” was first mooted by the late Eddison Zvobgo.

# The fallout from the 2004 Zanu PF Congress was ubiquitous in 2005 and there are US diplomatic cables showing that Zanu PF parliamentary ranks became quite unstable because of that fallout and the divisions it engendered.

# The economic meltdown was by 2005 taking its toll as the collapse of the Zimbabwe dollar loomed large on the horizon.

# Although Zanu PF had two thirds majority in Parliament in 2005 that did not translate into any usable or actionable political clout as national decision making on key economic and national issues (including on such things as elections) inexplicably shifted to the RBZ and its governor Gideon Gono whom the WikiLeaks cables portray as the then de facto head of government.

# The fact that the RBZ itself was not accountable to anybody within the executive, legislature or judiciary made a bad situation worse and raised very serious national interest and national security questions many of which remain to this day. There are many, many startling cables which demonstrate this point beyond any doubt.

The narrative of the cables shows that by 2007, the quest for leadership change in Zanu PF and the government became mixed up and even confused with the regime change campaign in the US coordinated donor community, in MDC circles, among businesspeople, student organisations, NGOs, media, churches and even within SADC. That confusion is still with us, especially in the media which has proven to be unable to make the otherwise very clear and necessary distinction between leadership change and regime change.

A turning point, which is captured in various cables, happened on March 7, 2007, when MDC-T leader Morgan Tsvangirai was beaten up at a police station in Harare. The media image of his swollen face became a rallying point in and outside the country and it gave the MDC a new lease of political life at a time when the party was virtually dead with Zanu PF controlling a two thirds majority in Parliament following the 2005 elections.

But, as already pointed out above, this two thirds majority was not enjoyable or meaningful in terms of defining the national agenda as evidenced by the fact the March 7, 2007, Tsvangirai incident led to the convening of an extraordinary SADC summit on March 29, 2007, in Dar es Salaam. That summit launched the Zimbabwe Interparty Dialogue between Zanu PF and the two MDC formations which were then styled as “Pro-Senate (Mutambara) faction and anti-Senate (Tsvangirai) faction” under former President Mbeki’s facilitation.

That Interparty Dialogue eventually led to the GPA negotiations and the formation of the GPA government. The point to note with emphasis about this is that for the first time in the history of SADC, and indeed in the history of modern states, we had a governing party with two thirds majority in the legislature failing to use that majority to govern in a cohesive and decisive way.

The WikiLeaks cables show that following the historic extraordinary Dar es Salaam summit in March 2007 that imposed a process of Interparty Dialogue, the United States, working with the MDC Anti-Senate faction, embarked on a three-pronged strategy entirely focussed on President Mugabe whose components were to isolate President Mugabe from:

Zanu PF (which was already confirmed by Zanu PF’s growing challenges of factionalism and the party’s inability then to use its 2005 two thirds majority in Parliament to influence and direct national decision making).

SADC (which had finally come on board in March 2007 by putting Zimbabwe under its facilitation and thus permanent agenda of the regional body’s organ troika on politics, defence and security).

Security Establishment (which has remained elusive to this day and is now impossible to achieve as a result of the WikiLeaks disclosure that the so-called security sector reform is in fact an American regime change project).

And so the US diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks show that by the time of the 2008 harmonised elections, the three pronged strategy had succeeded to isolate President Mugabe from Zanu PF and SADC but had not succeeded in isolating him from the security sector.

This dynamic started changing after the inconclusive results of the first round of the March 29, 2008, presidential election and the fact that the parliamentary election on the same day produced a hung Parliament. Two developments caused the change in very defining ways whose consequences are now playing out in our national politics.

In the first place, the way the US and its allies, especially the French, the British and other EU members responded to the inconclusive results of the presidential election by declaring the MDC-T leader as the winner and urging him to form a government without going through the legally-required run-off prompted nationalist forces within Zanu PF and elements of the so-called hardliners who had fallen out with President Mugabe after the 2004 Congress to regroup and support his re-election in the run-off to prevent regime change which we have never wanted and which we will never ever want.

For example, even though at the time I had just been re-elected Independent Member of Parliament for Tsholotsho North who was yet to be sworn-in and even though I was not at that time a member of Zanu PF, I willingly, proudly and fully supported President Mugabe and I drafted his re-election manifesto which was titled, “100 reasons for Voting Zanu PF in the June 2008 Presidential Election”.

Our national security sector also became involved because what was initially supposed to be a democratic election reflecting the will of the people, and after what was clearly a free and fair election; whose result was inconclusive, changed to become a national security situation when the US and its allies sought to interfere by declaring a presumed winner outside our law.

What this means and the cables bear the point is that in the first place, the so-called Zanu PF hardliners who had been isolated from President Mugabe after the fallout from the 2004 Zanu PF Congress reconciled with him in 2008 during the campaign for the presidential run-off election to stop regime change. This is captured in the cables and I can confirm it as one of those who was directly involved. This development struck a blow to what until then had been a successful strategy to isolate President Mugabe from Zanu PF and to accordingly weaken the party by dividing it to render it incapable of cohesive action.

In the second place, and in addition to the regrouping of Zanu PF nationalists to support President Mugabe’s re-election in the June 2008 run-off, the cables show that following the signing of the GPA in September 2008 and the formation of the GPA government in 2009, several MDC-T leaders, especially Cabinet Ministers including Prime Minister Tsvangirai, considerably damaged the three-pronged strategy of the US to isolate the President by privately and publicly declaring, as did Tsvangirai on several occasions, that “President Mugabe was part of the solution and not part of the problem” in Zimbabwe.

The practical translation of this view is that the MDC-T’s mantra that “Mugabe must go” had changed to that “Mugabe must stay” as a transitional leader while ways are found to deal with “his so-called hardliners and the security sector”.

What has added impetus to this development in which the MDC-T sees President Mugabe as the best positioned and able so-called transitional leader is that the constitution process has been considerably stalled in order to forestall early elections. The de facto implication of this anti-early election position is that “President Mugabe must stay” for as long as is necessary up to 2013 or even 2016 without an election.

The irony here is that the US and its European allies and MDC supporters want President Mugabe to stay in power under the GPA and therefore outside an election when the best arrangement is that it is far better for him to stay as a result of an election which is now long overdue.

But what are the national, regional and international implications of the foregoing on Zimbabwe?

In terms of the global balance of forces, it is very clear from a strategic reading of the US diplomatic cables on Zimbabwe released by WikiLeaks on August 30 that the US government is abusing its position as the perceived solo global superpower to pursue dangerous unilateralism against those countries, like Zimbabwe, which pose ideological threats to American national interests but which do not have nuclear weapons or which are not in alliance with countries that have and can use nuclear weapons against the US or its allies.

While Zimbabwe under President Mugabe and Zanu PF and under the legacy of the ethos of the liberation struggle does not pose national security threats to the US in any way whatsoever, in fact the cables show how Zimbabwean authorities have cooperated with the US against so-called global terrorism including preventing North Korean money from being deposited in Zimbabwean banks, they nevertheless show that the US government does see Zimbabwe as posing a serious threat to American national interests to secure sustainable access to strategic minerals. This is because the US sees Zimbabwe as a strategic part of the minerals equivalent of oil in the Gulf: The Persian Gulf of Minerals in Southern Africa!

What is most unfortunate about the US policy on Zimbabwe as it emerges out of WikiLeaks is that it is entirely personalised and is all about President Mugabe’s succession. There’s something amiss about having a whole superpower basing its foreign policy on a key country on the succession of an individual. That is old politics last seen in the Allende days in Chile.

The obvious implication from this is that as Zimbabweans, we have a golden opportunity to reassert our nationalism whose consequence is that much of what is seen as Mugabe policies is in fact our shared national heritage and ideology. In particular, Zimbabwe should strategically seek durable defence partnerships with friendly nuclear powers such as India, Brazil, China and Russia or even Iran for that matter.

Regionally speaking, the implications of the release of the WikiLeaks cables on Zimbabwe is that the US policy thrust to isolate President Mugabe from SADC, which had made quite some significant inroads by March 2007, is now up in smoke. The strategy is now in the public domain and its architects and participants stand exposed.

In particular, the GPA process through which the US has sought to isolate Zimbabwe from SADC via South Africa is now compromised. America’s effort to use the GPA to achieve its foreign objectives in Zimbabwe is no longer a viable option given the mountain of evidence of US machinations disclosed by the cables released by WikiLeaks on August 30.

What this means is that Zimbabwe now has a real opportunity to regain the initiative that was lost at the March 2007 SADC extraordinary summit in Dar es Salaam and which has been steadily taking root since then and almost took a turn for the worst at a summit of the Organ Troika on Politics, Defence and Security in Livingstone earlier this year before it was effectively halted at the SADC annual summit in Angola last August.

A related regional implication that stands out from the US diplomatic cables leaked by WikiLeaks is that the US has caused South Africa to suffer from a regional and even continental identity crisis by making South Africa in general, and its successive Presidents in particular, feel like they are America’s “point man” in the region.

While former President Mbeki handled this American neo-colonial expectation with some skill, the same cannot be said about President Jacob Zuma who, from the WikiLeaks, appears to have been only too eager to please the US at the expense of regional interest.

In one telling cable US Ambassador Charles Ray reported to Washington after meeting with the then South African Ambassador in Harare that South Africa wanted to join the so-called Fishmongers Western donor group in Zimbabwe so that the two parties could rationalise their policies on Zimbabwe as if to suggest that South Africa has common interests in Zimbabwe with the US and its allies. The underlying thinking explains why South Africa voted with imperialists at the UN Security Council on resolution 1973 against Libya.

It appears, and there’s a lot of evidence on this in the US diplomatic cables leaked by WikiLeaks, South Africa wants to be Western and African at the same time. This is why South Africa has left South Africa with a serious identity crisis and thus unable to provide any leadership in the region.

Meanwhile, and notwithstanding the challenges it has experienced since 2000, Zimbabwe has continued to provide ideological, policy and intellectual leadership in the region and this has worried the US with fears that its national interests will be harmed by Zimbabwe’s radicalisation of the region with respect to issues such as land reform, indigenisation and economic empowerment of the masses through total control of the very same natural resources that the US want for itself.

On the national front, the first major implication of the US diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks is that the whole three-pronged US strategy to effect either leadership change in Zanu PF and the government or regime change in Zimbabwe has come to grief. This is because a strategy against your opponents is useful only if they don’t get to know anything about it. Now we know not just something but everything about the US regime change strategy in Zimbabwe.

Isolating President Mugabe from Zanu PF is now neither workable nor possible because those Zanu PF leaders who were key to this strategy have been exposed and their only option is to cooperate or perish. They now have nowhere to hide and the only thing they can do is to seek President Mugabe and hope and pray for his understanding by supporting him in tangible ways beyond mere rhetoric.

The second major national implication of WikiLeaks is that there’s no way we are going to have the so-called security sector reform because, thanks to our guiding spirits of Mbuya Nehanda and Lobengula, we now know from the cables that the agenda is entirely American. SADC will not have any moral authority to insist that Zimbabwe should adopt an American project and make it its own. That is just not on.

The third national implication is that all so-called outstanding GPA issues have fallen by the wayside as a result of the leaked US diplomatic cables. The only truly outstanding issue is the next harmonised election; anything else is just mambo jumbo.

As such, all the games that the MDC formations have been playing to delay the COPAC process have become things of the past. The drafting of the new constitution will now proceed in earnest and the much awaited referendum on the new constitution is now truly on the horizon after which Zimbabweans will finally have their chance to vote for indigenisation and economic empowerment as a matter of their livelihood and sovereignty.

The fourth national implication is that while only dilettantes will expect any political party affected by the WikiLeaks to take obvious or public disciplinary measures against its implicated members, there are very clear cases which border on violation of our national laws and some of those cases impinge on our national security interests which will most definitely be addressed by the relevant arms of the State.

It would be naïve for anyone to think that those cases are not getting the attention they deserve as we speak. Surely, the law must take its course and let the chips fall where they may. It is one thing for anybody to offend against their party and quite another thing for the same person to offend against the State. National security is national security. It is asserted and never negotiated. If you violate it, you must pay the price regardless of who you are. Full stop.

The fifth national implication that comes out in a glaring way from the cables is that our national politics are too personalised across the political divide. That’s why Simba Makoni thought he could be elected President as an independent candidate without a political party. That is also why Tsvangirai and his backers think that the courage or bravery to be arrested is an election manifesto. It is also why Gono is presented by certain sections of the media as Zanu PF when he is not. Furthermore, that is why the US has crafted a personalised foreign policy on Zimbabwe targeting President Mugabe as an individual.

It is in this vein that party factions in Zanu PF and the MDC are about individuals and not ideologies or policies. The historic land reform policy programme was demonised and personalised as a Joseph Made affair to politically benefit President Mugabe. Now the equally historic indigenisation and economic empowerment policy programme is being personalised and demonised as a Saviour Kasukuwere thing on behalf of President Mugabe.

The time has come for us as a nation to focus on policies over faces and then it won’t matter whether the leader of our party or country is old or young; or whether he or she is formally educated or not. Policies must matter over personalities.

Parenthetically, the idea that it is duplicitous or wrong for one whether in Zanu PF or any other party to oppose President Mugabe today only to emerge supporting him tomorrow is truly primitive. Practical politics is not a religion but it changes like the weather informed by a stable climate. Everyday politics is like the weather. Yesterday’s weather has nothing to do with today’s weather or tomorrow’s weather for that matter.

Why is it that nobody calls the MDC-T the anti-Senate faction or the other smaller formation the pro-Senate faction? Is that not because it’s yesterday’s weather which is now irrelevant? So I am not interested in yesterday’s weather but I am very interested in tomorrow’s forecast and that is not flip flopping, it is reality with only one constant called change.

Barrack Obama and Hilary Clinton savaged each in the primary elections for the democratic presidential election ticket in 2008 but since then they have worked together as if they never ever savaged each other. Our media applauds their cooperation in the same way they applaud the cooperation between Nick Clegg of the Liberal Democrats and David Cameron of the Conservatives in the UK when the two literally wanted to kill one another in the last UK election.

Why is the same dispensation not given to Zimbabwean politicians? What gives rise in our body politic to the primitive instinct that if I criticise President Mugabe today, I must criticise him every day and forever, and to be unwilling to work with him or appreciate his iconic leadership in order to be considered consistent?

The sixth national implication arising from the cables is that, looking forward to the years ahead, we need a party and national political culture that enables citizens to be able to express their legitimate private thoughts without requiring courage or diplomatic cover to do so. Criminalising political choice is not a civilised thing to do.

The seventh national implication of WikiLeaks is that we have a very poor public discourse dominated by a partisan, self-indulgent, American-compromised private media which does not value literacy, truth, honesty and integrity. You know you have a big problem when you find your country burdened with a so-called private and independent media such as NewsDay which, according to WikiLeaks, has been bankrolled to the tune of US$4 million and when its competition in the same so-called private and independent media, such as the Daily News, has access to free newsprint and has American-sponsored top-up salaries and other capacity building niceties costing a whooping US$3 million not to mention its gift from Strive Masiyiwa who himself has been exposed big time by WikiLeaks as an American stooge who abuses Econet to illegally support the MDC-T.

The eighth and last national implication of the US diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks is that the three-pronged strategy to isolate President Mugabe from Zanu PF, SADC and the Security Sector is precisely what is exposed by the WikiLeaks thereby leaving President Mugabe stronger than ever before. Yes, the strongest politician in Zimbabwe today, thanks to WikiLeaks, is President Mugabe.

But the real issue about WikiLeaks is that like yesterday’s weather, they are now yesterday’s news and are destined to suffer the same fate as the 2008 descriptions of the MDC factions as “pro-Senate” and “anti-Senate”. Nobody cares about those descriptions anymore.

The only lesson to remember as we consign the US diplomatic cables on Zimbabwe leaked by WikiLeaks to the dustbin of history is that anyone who forgets history is doomed to repeat it as a farce.