(ZIMPAPERS) How Britain got hoodwinked

How Britain got hoodwinked
Saturday, 08 October 2011 22:34 Opinion

ACCORDING to unimpeachable sources in the Zimbabwean capital, Harare, between 2001 and 2003, the British were duped of a whopping US$15 million in a scam involving five retired “Nigerian” generals who offered to organise a coup against President Robert Mugabe on behalf of the British government. The British, under Tony Blair, bought it hook, line and sinker, and in the end got their hands dirty in a 419 scam! Memory Godobori reports:

REPORTS citing impeccable sources in the Zimbabwean capital, Harare, say a “military coup” project involving five alleged “Nigerian” generals left the British government US$15 million poorer when it did not materialise at the appointed time in 2002.

According to the reports, the coup project started in 2001 in South Africa, where a meeting involving British and American intelligence officials and some members of Zimbabwe’s then opposition party, the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), was convened for a briefing by the five Nigerians on how a coup against President Robert Mugabe could be organised.

The five “generals” claimed credit for bringing General Ibrahim Babangida to power in Nigeria. They also claimed they knew most of the senior officers in the Zimbabwe Defence Forces (ZDF) since they trained many of them during Zimbabwe’s war of liberation.

To strengthen their case, the Nigerians gave a clear account of the various Zimbabwe National Army units and the names of officers occupying senior positions in those units.
Thus, the Nigerians laid out their strategy for the proposed coup against President Mugabe. They said US$I2m would be initially required to pay off the command element at both senior and lower levels of the Zimbabwean army.
The most senior officers would be paid a minimum of $100 000 each.

As the British were in a hurry to stop Zimbabwe’s land reform programme (which had seen British-descended white Zimbabweans lose their land and farms), shortly after the meeting in South Africa they released the $I2m to the Nigerians who deployed themselves in the various provincial capitals of Zimbabwe, allegedly for ease of communication with army units throughout the country.

The Nigerians, however, advised against any unsolicited contact between themselves and MDC officials inside Zimbabwe.

The date for the coup would be the day Zimbabwe’s 2002 presidential results were announced. Opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai and his close aides would be booked into a central Harare hotel, the Meikles, a strategic point from which to drive to State House, just under two kilometres away.

The hotel was considered the safest place for Tsvangirai and his family during the coup process. Even if Tsvangirai did not win the presidential election, there would still be the coup to take him to State House.

Tsvangirai did not win the 2002 election, but according to sources, what got the British worried was not his defeat, but that the promised coup did not happen.
In the event, Tsvangirai is said to have waited impatiently in Meikles Hotel for the cue to move to State House, but it never came.

In a sudden twist, the “Nigerian generals” explained that to “operationalise” the coup plan, a “trigger” was now necessary.

For the record, just before the election, the “Nigerian generals” had demanded an additional $3m to pay off the balance of military personnel that they claimed still needed to be paid.
The British obligingly sent the money, thus
raising their coup commitment to $I5m.
And then, they spent the next few days twiddling their fingers, waiting in vain for a development.

But things still took too long to happen.
The “trigger”, according to the Nigerian generals, was to be found in a “Final Push”, a planned MDC march on State House slated for the first week of June 2003.
It was calculated that, swamped by numbers, the Zimbabwean police would, in panic, fire live rounds into the crowds, thereby providing the necessary “trigger” for the military coup.
The “Final Push”, however, never saw the light of day for lack of marchers.

Meanwhile, as they waited for the “Final Push”, after the coup did not happen following the announcement of the election results, sources say the British and the MDC became anxious to find out if, in fact, the Nigerians had communicated anything to the Zimbabwe military.
To seek confirmation, two MDC officials were dispatched to meet the Zimbabwean Air Force commander, Air Marshall Perrance Shiri, to deliver a message that Tsvangirai was interested in working with him when

he became president.
Unbeknown to the MDC officials, the meeting with the Air Marshall was recorded on tape, after Shiri had notified his political superiors and Zimbabwe’s intelligence service before the arrival of the officials.
Sadly for the MDC, the Air Marshall rebuffed their overtures.

According to sources, the more important outcome of that encounter was that the Air Marshall showed no knowledge of the coup plan by the Nigerians.

This, more or less, confirmed that the British and the MDC had become victims of a 419 scam; an expensive hoax!

Then the Nigerians disappeared into thin air. But before their disappearance, they did two other things.

First, according to sources, they demanded an additional $5m which they claimed would be given to senior coup leaders to agree to hand over power to Tsvangirai.

The British were said to have refused to hand over any more cash, but instead offered to open off-shore accounts for the coup leaders.

Second, the Nigerians, seeking a quick exit to the hoax, referred Morgan Tsvangirai to one Ari Ben-Menashe, an Israeli national who lived in Montreal, Canada, who apparently was hired by the Nigerians to be Tsvangirai’s Judas Iscariot.

Tsvangirai was made to believe that Ben-Menashe was part of the communication system of the “Nigerian generals”. So he dutifully travelled to London and Montreal to meet him.

In meetings held in the two cities, recorded secretly on video by Ben-Menashe, Tsvangirai confirmed that he wanted President Mugabe “eliminated”.

Ben-Menashe later reported Tsvangirai to the Zimbabwean authorities (including supplying the tapes and all), which led to Tsvangirai being indicted for treason back home in Harare. (He was later acquitted.)

According to sources, the real intention of the Nigerians appears to have been to extort money from the British, which they succeeded in doing, and to have Tsvangirai locked up for a long, long time.

Soon after the meeting with Air Marshall Shiri, one of the two MDC officials who went to see him fled to Britain as life out of prison looked increasingly uncertain.

There was, however, one more serious development from the bogus coup bid. Sources say when Welshman Ncube, then secretary-general, got to know about the coup plot, he protested and refused to be party to the project as, he believed, it would not produce a democratic government. Ncube is now the leader of the breakaway MDC faction, now popularly called MDC, which split from the main body in 2005 and won 10 seats in Parliament in 2008.

Thus, according to sources, the MDC split of 2005 was, in fact, a consequence of the differences between Tsvangirai and the others over whether or not to carry out the military coup against Mugabe.

At the time of the split in August 2005, it was popularly believed that internal MDC disagreement over whether or not to participate in the then impending Senate elections, was the cause. But sources now say that that was only a red herring.

— New African Magazine.