Wednesday, 22 May 2013 21:13
THE MDC-T has just come up with its policy position for Election 2013, and the party has emphatically validated its long-time political tag of being an attack dog for ousted white commercial farmers and for Western capital.
“We can’t build an economy that survives on peasants. Having everyone going into farming is not sustainable. We have to remove people from the farms to the industries than removing people from the industries to the farms because I don’t see that working,” ranted Morgan Tsvangirai at a political rally three days ago.
“In order to develop an economy, there is a need to have most people employed while a few who want to get into farming can go there,” he continued.
On Zanu-PF’s popular indigenisation and economic empowerment policies that have so far resulted in the establishment of 59 community share ownership schemes brokered between multinational corporations and the communities in which they are exploiting natural resources Morgan Tsvangirai had this to say:
“We can’t talk of indigenisation without empowerment, indigenisation without empowering the broad majority is selfish and only meant for a few. I want to assure you we will review that indigenisation law so that we create an empowerment law for the majority of the people of Zimbabwe.”
The on record understanding of the concept of majority empowerment by Morgan Tsvangirai is an economic environment that absorbs most if not all Zimbabweans into an urban employment sector owned by “proven investors,” by which he refers to colonially privileged Western corporations dominating Africa’s extraction and processing industrial sector.
Describing the objective of US funding of international aid programs in a paper titled “Exercising US Leadership: Democracy Funding in a Time of Global Change,” Congressional Affairs Manager Sarah Trister recently wrote:
“The US Congress should fully fund the Administration’s request for US$56 billion to support international affairs for Fiscal Year (FY) 2013, a two percent increase over FY 2012. This budget is one of the primary tools the United States uses to maintain leadership abroad, pursue its international priorities and promote American values.”
It is people like Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai that are targeted for this kind of funding — puppet leaders committed to compliance with this unmitigated and unbridled form of imperialism. One would have thought the blatant blundering of the MDC-T over the popular land reform program in 2000, coupled with the party’s acquired experience in governance through a five year coalition with Zanu-PF are enough factors to influence some level of maturity and policy depth on the party of Morgan Tsvangirai and his colleagues. But it looks like some people cannot learn.
It turns out that the only political script the MDC-T is alive to is the one provided by its Western funders, and the party is fool hardy fixed on this conviction to drag an entire Zimbabwean population into puppet subjugation to its Western financial masters; even trying to do so through an election that every political analyst worthy the name says the MDC-T is bound to lose.
Instead of mobilising people around their needs, the MDC is unambiguously and unequivocally trying to mobilise Zimbabweans around the needs of ousted white commercial farmers and Western investors. Selling white supremacy for votes sounds quite misplaced for a revolutionised society like Zimbabwe.
In explaining who is targeted by US imperialistic funding Sarah Trister wrote:
“As Americans display growing fatigue over costly military interventions abroad, the Obama Administration has appropriately placed greater emphasis on diplomacy and development to advance US foreign policy and national security objectives. In order to do so effectively, a robust foreign assistance budget is needed, along with carefully targeted use of available funds.”
Morgan Tsvangirai seeks to align Zimbabwe in the US grand plan of global domination (sanitised here as global leadership), and he has the unadulterated audacity to try his luck by doing so via a national election – hoping to win it in the process. The man has a knack for bravery, but this latest behaviour borders on indecent stupidity.
Tendai Biti has vowed to fight the return of the Zimbabwean dollar and the man has no plan whatsoever to work towards the restoration of a local currency. While it is given that a return of the Zimbabwe dollar must be economically strategic in its timing, it is quite another thing to adopt a policy that “unambiguously and unequivocally” fights the return of the Zimbabwe dollar. This seems to be the position of Biti, as shown by his unguided overzealousness and his notoriously loud mouth.
The current ZCTU Secretary General Japhet Moyo has publicly rebuked Biti over his reckless and ill-measured utterances that are fast becoming habitual.
Biti also says his party seeks to “democratise” the popular land reform program by “slashing farm sizes and ending multiple farm ownership.” Meanwhile his leader Morgan Tsvangirai is vowing to return the “peasants” on the farms to the cities where he wants them to be employed by white investors from the West.
The man has this inexplicable moral supremacy to publicly proclaim that in fact the resettled Zimbabwean farmers prefer employment under white investors to farming.
Africans belong to the jobs by definition. This is the colonial legacy Tsvangirai cannot grow out of.
Without addressing the how part of the policy, Biti says an MDC government would provide free education for the first 12 years of every Zimbabwean’s educational life – and that presumably includes those that prefer to have an education in private schools and colleges. The MDC-T’s approach to policy is so uncommitted and ill-thought that even dreaming works perfectly.
And the party hopes to win an election by announcing job cuts for civil servants and members of the Defence Forces in the unlikely event it wins this year’s election. Biti says his party will “rationalise” the size of the army, and downsize the civil service. The rationale for the latter is not provided, but we are told that the chance of Zimbabwe ever going to war are “nil”; so the army is a burdensome luxury that needs to be thoroughly trimmed and “confined to the barracks.”
Now Zanu-PF will simply need to scare the hell out of the soldiers and the civil servants, telling them in no uncertain terms that they risk being “rationalised” out of employment should the MDC-T ever come to power. It would be interesting to see which civil servant or soldier would prefer voting their job away.
There is a Dutch historian by the name Johan Huizinga who once wrote, “We live in a world possessed. And we know it.” This was just before Europe plunged into what history has termed World War II.
Just like the Nazis claimed to promote deep love of country and people, the MDC-T makes impressively passionate claims about democracy and people’s liberties as its core values.
Just like the patriotism of the Nazis turned demonic and destructive, the MDC-T’s path of democracy and personal liberties is becoming a haunting demon seeking to annihilate the popular needs of Zimbabweans, and quite dangerously too.
Just as Nazism accomplished the very opposite of what it sought, the MDC-T is increasingly facing a destiny of endless shame rather than national honour. It is very hard to marry a party of politicians who are corrupt by definition to any concept of democracy or personal liberty.
Just how the MDC-T continues to miss the global mood swing around Zimbabwe’s land reform program boggles the mind.
There is a serious problem that always comes with donor-funded thinking, and that is the major crisis at the MDC-T, apart from the legendary mediocrity.
Fighting for “liberty and equality,” French revolutionary Maximilien Robespierre said the terror him and his colleagues were carrying out was “nothing other than prompt, severe, inflexible justice;” that is before Robespierre himself was made a victim of his own idea of justice.
It is important that our policy makers in politics abandon the path of vindictiveness when pursuing policy goals. We cannot assume an absolute love only for our people.
Absolute love for one’s own people easily turns into racism, and this is what gave this world slavery, colonialism and apartheid.
Love for equality is desirable and honourable, but when we turn it into the most supreme thing, we risk breeding violence and hatred against those we perceive as privileged. We have to take great care on how we wish to deal with the rough edges and the undesirables of the otherwise noble and fairly successful land reform program; otherwise we face a real prospect of becoming hate-driven in our own conduct. Such signs are clear in the utterances of MDC-T leadership.
For all its puppetry and hopeless insidiousness the MDC-T is still a Zimbabwean political party and it is important for every patriotic Zimbabwean to consider Morgan Tsvangirai and his colleagues as simply mistaken, not evil.
Those Zimbabweans who consider Zanu-PF policies unsound must of necessity consider the party perhaps mistaken, not evil. We as Zimbabweans must come to a time when after an election we accept whoever is elected as our president, not this “Tsvangirai is my president” hysteria we often hear in between elections.
Tsvangirai is concerned that in the unlikely event that he wins this or any other election to come, the Zimbabwean army may fail to endorse him as the Commander -in-Chief. From the look of things it appears the army will not allow any situation where it will report to any person of Morgan Tsvangirai’s insidious political inclinations.
Perhaps Morgan Tsvangirai should learn to abide by the letter and spirit of the constitution his party co-sponsored with Zanu-PF for endorsement by the people of Zimbabwe recently.
In its preamble the new constitution that was assented to by President Mugabe yesterday reads:
“Exalting and extolling the brave men and women who sacrificed their lives during the Chimurenga/ Umvukela and national liberation struggles, Honouring our forebears and compatriots who toiled for the progress of our country.”
Just how does the army exalt and extol the brave men and women who sacrificed their lives for Zimbabweans to have self-determination while saluting a politician whose thinking is funded and directed by the very people at whose brutal hands these departed ones lost their dear lives?
How does the army honour our for-bearers and compatriots who toiled for the progress of our country by saluting a Tsvangirai who thinks it is a brilliant idea to send land beneficiaries back to work for white capitalists in the cities? Morgan Tsvangirai’s handlers must hand him the book “Zimbabwe Takes Back its Land,” by Professor Scoones of Sussex University – hoping the man can read.
The army’s position is not about Tsvangirai the person, but more about the core principles upon which our nation is founded. The Americans are founded on their idea of the search for freedom and liberty, as well as the notorious doctrine of American exceptionalism. We have our own foundations based on our liberation struggle legacy, and on that we stand founded.
No single politician can succeed in trivialising or overriding these co-values, Tsvangirai included. The matter of the liberation legacy and its co-values is not an election matter. It is the mother of many children, elections included. As such it cannot be tempered with or modified by the diktats of imperialism, be these in the name of American global leadership or that of the overly glorified nobilities of Western democracy.
It is important that the MDC-T reads the co-values of our foundations when the leadership goes through such pro-people policies like the land reform program and the indigenisation of the Zimbabwean economy.
These are no policies to rubbish or ridicule – and certainly no policies to even dream of reversing. The issue of who controls our land and our economy cannot be put to vote. It is defined by the aspiration of those who lost their lives so that a country by the name Zimbabwe can be on the face of this planet.
Zimbabwe we are one and together we will overcome. It is homeland or death!
Reason Wafawarova is a political writer based in SYDNEY, Australia
Labels: MDC, MDC TREASON, NEOCOLONIALISM, NEOLIBERALISM
posted by MrK @ 7:39 PM
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