(HERALD ZW) Wafawarova wants full hearing in Zwambila case
January 4, 2014
Herald Reporter
AUSTRALIA-BASED Zimbabwean journalist Reason Wafawarova wants the courts in that country to set aside a default judgment by a Canberra judge which found him guilty of defaming Zimbabwe’s outgoing ambassador in that country, Ms Jacqueline Zwambila.In a statement yesterday, Wafawarova said he wanted the matter to proceed to a full hearing so that he could justify his claims.
Ms Zwambila sued Wafawarova for defamation after the journalist reported that the envoy stripped in front of embassy staff during a heated argument. But Wafawarova said there was overwhelming evidence against Ms Zwambila.
“The application by the claimant to have my defence struck out on obnoxious technicalities is nothing but a cowardly attempt at escaping a full hearing of the case, a shameful fleeing from glaring and irrefutable evidence,” said Wafawarova.
“That will not be allowed to happen. The Zimbabwe Embassy in Canberra still stands with allegations it raised against Ms Zwambila on November 11 2011 and in its latest media statement the embassy has categorically stated those allegations as fact, and that makes it more compelling for the court case to be heard on its merits.”
Wafawarova said there had been misleading and inaccurate reports by The Canberra Times about the judgment by the judge.
“Firstly, it is absolutely unfounded that it is the ACT Supreme Court’s position that I am ‘an agent of the Mugabe regime’ or that any allegations raised against Zwambila were “false”.
“These words belong entirely to Ms Zwambila and her handlers at Canberra Times. They are not the court’s position.”
“Essentially, the words are a pathetic attempt at smearing my image, and they are part of a larger conspiracy that once led to two court cases in 2007 and 2009, where attempts to have me removed from Australia were thwarted after protracted court hearings.
“It is Ms Zwambila that accepted to serve the Mugabe-led government as its ambassador, and for her to label someone outside that government an agent of the same is plain ridiculous.
“While it is the option of anyone facing destitution to try everything in the book to avoid such a predicament, it is highly preposterous that one would try to hoodwink immigration authorities into granting them a protection visa by publicly pretending that the ACT Supreme Court has discovered ‘an agent’ of Mugabe when the court has not even heard the merits of this case.
“You do not make such ludicrous politicisation of a purely civil matter of this nature without making a complete fool of yourself,” said Wafawarova.
He accused Ms Zwambila and her legal team of avoiding a full hearing of the case because they could not confront the evidence against the latter.
“What the Supreme Court did was to strike out my defence on the technicality that I had refused to submit certain documents demanded by Ms Zwambila’s legal team, which in my opinion have nothing to do with the case.
“No allegation raised against Ms Zwambila was found to be false by the court because the matter did not go for hearing. Any suggestion by the Canberra Times or any other media outlet that allegations against Ms Zwambila were proved to be false are nothing but a pathetic sense of mischievous imagination.
“It does not take a rocket scientist to figure out that The Canberra Times are doing Ms Zwambila’s bidding in the hope that the paper can help her escape a fate of hopelessness back in Zimbabwe where the only thing she needs to be protected from is the awaiting poverty.
“The ongoing court case has nothing to do with Ms Zwambila’s unemployment woes, and trying to buttress her case for access to Australia’s social welfare benefits by using this court case as basis for whatever pretensions is frankly puerile,” he said.
Ms Zwambila claimed the article by Wafawarova injured her reputation and profession adding that the story was motivated by malice.
Ms Zwambila is reported to have reached a confidential settlement with The Australian newspaper which carried a similar story.
Wafawarova’s story was published in November 2010.
Labels: AMBASSADORS, AUSTRALIA, COURTS, JAQUELIN ZWAMBILA, REASON WAFAWAROVA
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(NEWZIMBABWE) We are the masters of decoloniality
15/08/2013 00:00:00
by Reason Wafawarova
WHEN some of us write about decoloniality and post-coloniality, there are those that are quick to point out that it makes little sense to write all this stuff “from the comfort of imperialist countries,” and the presumption here is that Western countries are comfortable by definition.
It is as if we are seeking intellectual legitimacy by writing from Western capitals, and this writer has been reminded that prominent writers like Aime Cesaire and Frantz Fanon wrote their influential books “from the comfort of France,” and based on this reasoning we have been reminded over and over again about the “rank hypocrisy” of writing on decoloniality and anti-imperialism from the heartlands of former colonial masters.
Frantz Fanon was actually in Algeria when he wrote the famous book “The Wretched of the Earth” in 1961, but he has nevertheless been criminalised for daring to criticise the West from its own comfort.
The point about ideology is not exactly where one resides but where one dwells.
Just like Cesaire and Fanon resided on the Island of Martinique, this writer resides in the western suburbs of Sydney in Australia. However, this writer does not dwell in the colonial history of the English convicts that invaded Australia on January 26, 1788. This writer does not dwell in the culture of imperial expansionism and capitalist banditry. Rather, this writer dwells in the history of colonial Africa, of the bottleneck colonial education of Rhodesia, of the chibharo slave wages of the colonial era and of the oppressed African.
This writer dwells in the history of a dispossessed Zimbabwean nation that once haplessly watched its fertile lands occupied by blatantly unempathetic white colonial settler farmers like arrogant Roy Bennett. This writer dwells in a history of unforgettable blood shedding that came through a protracted liberation struggle that was painfully punctuated by the tragedies of Nyadzonia and Chimoio at the struggle’s rear in Mozambique, and by the likes of the battles of Chinhoyi and Kamungoma (Gutu) on the war front. Kamungoma was a painful personal experience that remains a life scar.
Cesaire and Fanon dwelled in the history of the Middle Passage, of the slave plantations, of slavery and runaway slaves. This history is part of the entire African identity today and in the future. We share it painfully and in its tragedies our ideological being as a people dwells. We can neither forget nor wish these harsh historical brutalities away.
To us, decolonisation, post-colonisation and anti-imperialism are the horizon of thinking and being that shapes our future and destiny as a people. It is our response to the capitalist and communist imperial designs – our strategy against the prevalence of Western or Eastern domination.
This brings us to the Zanu PF landslide victory in election 2013. One Rodwell Makombe, who is a lecturer at a Durban University, has clearly been devastated by this landslide victory, and takes enormous offence at Paul Temba Nyathi for “publicly accepting defeat in Gwanda.” Nyathi’s crime is the risk of legitimising Zanu PF victory through his honesty, so the reasoning goes.
Makombe is also immensely infuriated by Lovemore Madhuku’s post-election behaviour, and he finds it notoriously unbelievable that Madhuku dared to “urge out-going Prime Minister and MDC-T leader Morgan Tsvangirai to accept defeat.” How does it make sense for Morgan Tsvangirai to be associated with defeat, Makombe openly wonders?
In his own words, the major worry is “we know that Lovemore Madhuku and Munyaradzi Gwisai are long time opponents of Mugabe’s rule,” and presumably they must by definition not see any logic or legitimacy in a Mugabe electoral victory, regardless of whatever obtaining realities. Mugabe is simply unelectable by definition and his electoral victory must constitute a democratic crisis.
For sure Gwisai and Madhuku have in the past notoriously opposed Robert Mugabe for the sake of it, or for material or relevance benefits that often came with such posturing, especially at the height of the land reform program when demonising Mugabe became a billion dollar industry involving generous Western donors.
But to argue that accepting the reality of a Mugabe electoral victory is synonymous with “turning their backs on Tsvangirai” is quite unscholarly logic. To infer that Madhuku and Gwisai are “lavishing praises on Mugabe” through accepting the result of a widely respected election is quite preposterous. Makombe thinks these people have no capacity to think independently without pinning their backs on Tsvangirai, and that they cannot be objective without sing-praising Robert Mugabe. He asserts they are driven purely by the stomachs, only he and his like-minded are driven by intellectual rationality.
Makombe heavily criminalises Raymond Majongwe for “going an extra mile to send congratulatory messages to Mugabe.” His argument is very simple. The only way for Madhuku, Gwisai and Majongwe to keep their credibility is to maintain their backing of Morgan Tsvangirai, regardless of whatever faults may be attributable to the man. Conversely congratulating Robert Mugabe is tainting and defamatory by definition. Not endorsing any of the two is apparent confusion.
The fundamental mistake Makombe makes is to limit political analyses to the persons of Morgan Tsvangirai and Robert Mugabe. The other mistake he makes is to assume that Madhuku, Majongwe and Gwisai are the custodians of the opinion of all law-makers, teachers and egalitarianists respectively – foolishly assuming that these groups have no capacity to think independent of their leadership.
Given the politics of borrowed reasoning practiced by Morgan Tsvangirai and his party in general, it is quite advisable to fully believe Makombe’s assertion that “unseating Mugabe is a dream that will never come true.” Probably Makombe should pass this on to the denial-smitten Tsvangirai.
The post mortem analysis of the demise of Morgan Tsvangirai has become a free for all pastime venture that has aroused long-sleeping intellectual demons even in the tiniest of political minds. As Makombe writes, even Morgan Tsvangirai allies have become too “eager to distance themselves from the crime scene and point fingers at Tsvangirai.” The man now stinks politically.
For some strange and unexplained reasons, Makombe is convinced that criticising Morgan Tsvangirai for his electoral failures and accepting the victory of President Mugabe and Zanu PF as legitimate is tantamount to “neglecting the fundamental question of the destiny of the country.”
Surely, it is plain myopic to imply that the demise of Tsvangirai’s opportunistic political career carries with it the destiny of Zimbabwe. It is equally inane to suggest that those that fault Tsvangirai for his political failures are necessarily practising “politics of the stomach” or that they are worried about “personal security,” presumably threatened by the CIO.
Were there no stomachs and the CIO when the likes of Madhuku and Gwisai wantonly demonised Zanu PF and President Robert Mugabe, much to the admiration of Rodwell Makombe? By suggesting that President Robert Mugabe is “deluded with praises of insincerity”, Makombe is insulting 61 percent of the electorate that voted for the veteran politician, and suggesting that they form the core of “national idiocy,” to borrow the lexicon from the excitable Mthulisi Mathuthu.
It is simply baseless to suggest that anyone who thinks Morgan Tsvangirai is making a fool of himself by childishly disputing the outcome of this election is “jumping ship” or “abdicating responsibility.” Makombe must be reminded that it is him who is abdicating intellectual responsibility by reducing himself to a public relations officer for a mega-blundering politician with a pathetically unhelpful sense of judgement.
It is asinine for Makombe to trivialise the disastrous complacency of the MDC-T in the run up to this election by suggesting “they also needed a rest and they did take a little nap.” The man even had the temerity to ask, “Who wouldn’t?”
Surely Robert Mugabe and Zanu PF neither rested nor take a little nap, and this is a party that has been in the trenches since 1963. To suggest that the MDC-T had justification for napping on the job because they “have been in the trenches from 1999” is plainly harebrained, and Makombe should know that.
We are told by writer Makombe that we “must leave the British and the Americans alone” so that we start asking ourselves some pertinent questions to do with the destiny of the country and our responsibilities towards it. That reads quite progressive, especially to the ordinary eye.
It is in fact the desire of every patriotic Zimbabwean to have nothing to do with the British and the Americans, and this position is well on record. However the right thing for Makombe to do is to write a precise piece telling these meddlesome imperialists to leave Zimbabweans alone, not this insanity of telling the victim to pretend the predator does not exist.
Britain's Deborah Bronnert and her Western diplomatic colleagues have been running restless manufacturing stinking falsehoods to discredit our election, and our very own Rodwell Makombe has the audacity to play umpire; ruling all of us offside for questioning this behaviour – chucking at us an anaesthetic that prescribes blissfulness to British and American imperial machinations.
Why would we listen to Makombe and leave the British and Americans alone? So that they can keep destabilising our country blatantly unabated? No Rodwell no. You are not going send us to sleep while we all get raped. We have a national duty to defend our democracy and this what we must be urging each other to do, not to leave those bent on destabilising us totally unmarked.
It is quite plausible that Makombe calls for “national conscience.” We have since 1999 been calling for national conscience on the part of those who chose to partner with the West in destabilising our country by mobilising illegal ruinous economic sanctions on whose evil strength Morgan Tsvangirai chose to make a political name for himself.
Must we not be celebrating that our nation has come back to its senses and the people have emphatically punished Morgan Tsvangirai for his treacherous behaviour? Must we not celebrate that they have used Tsvangirai’s hyped concept of electoral democracy to convey they painful message?
Tsvangirai has an option to accept the verdict of the people or he can wallow in postulations of a victory that never was. Zimbabweans are determined to champion a new era of independent nationalism in Africa, and we are not going to be taught decoloniality by our former colonial oppressors. We are the masters of decoloniality and post-coloniality and in our own hands we will place our resources and our economic, social and political future.
This election victory in Zimbabwe marks a new era for African politics and the domino-effect of independent nationalism will spread like veld fire. We just need to watch South Africa in the near future.
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: COLONIALISM, REASON WAFAWAROVA
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(HERALD ZW) The fall of the Main Actor
August 8, 2013
Reason Wafawarova
In early March this year Morgan Tsvangirai, in his typical insensitivities, drew the ire and wrath of many when he bragged that his escape from a fatal accident that killed his wife Susan was a predestined predicament designed to preserve “the main actor.” These were his words, “One of the fundamental things is that the main actor doesn’t die if the film is still on.”
The rapacious quest for political power that Morgan Tsvangirai has displayed over the years can only be best explained by this misguided delusion that makes the man believe that he is a predetermined leader whose destiny is immune to the misgivings of anyone, voters included — totally unhindered or unbridled by any possible acts of omission or commission.
His extortionate ramblings over the election result are part of the illusion that led to his massive electoral defeat — a predicament squarely traceable to the misguided notion that Zimbabweans inherently hate Robert Mugabe and Zanu-PF so much that victory for opposing him is guaranteed.
It is not surprising that Morgan Tsvangirai and Tendai Biti find it logical to postulate that the election result was fraudulent purely because they cannot believe they lost the vote.
They are quite oblivious to the detriment the crony- staffed kitchen cabinet has caused to their self-defeating political project. They have totally forgotten how the Makone-led kitchen cabinet disenfranchised many in the MDC-T when Ian Makone’s wife was imposed to take over the leadership of the Women’s Assembly — a move that was part of the beginning of this mighty fall that we have seen today.
Morgan Tsvangirai still deluded himself as Zimbabwe’s political main actor when elections leading to the 2011 MDC-T congress were marred by vote rigging irregularities and violence — counting those sins holy because they were being committed by his friends and relatives from the kitchen cabinet. Morgan Tsvangirai wangled Theresa Makone and many others into political positions they did not deserve and he dismissed every criticism as meaningless because he told himself the fate of his party was all installed in his person.
So overrated was Tsvangirai that after the telling split of the party in 2005 his colleagues found it warranted to totemise the name of the party by affixing Morgan’s second initial to it.
Why is Tendai Biti behaving like he is not aware that his name topped the list of people to be demoted or removed from cabinet when Morgan Tsvangirai axed the likes of Fidelis Mhashu and Elias Mudzuri through his 2011 cabinet reshuffle?
Does Tendai Biti seriously think that no one cares about the infighting in the MDC-T? He must ask the people of Chikanga who voted Arnold Tsunga.
The MDC-T leadership decided to go to sleep in the course of the maiden appearance in Government, and most of them foolishly mistook government perks for an expression of political power — even counting such for ultimate achievement.
Is it an exaggeration to assert that the MDC-T leadership totally lost any fighting spirit that saw them mount meaningful challenges to Zanu-PF the moment they tasted the sweetness of privileges enshrined in occupying ministerial positions?
And what did the MDC-T leadership think they were doing falling over each other to sing correctional praises for the otherwise deserved exceptional qualities of President Mugabe? Did they expect people to keep hating the man purely based on the yesteryear slander that had once spread from their lying mouths?
Morgan Tsvangirai, Samuel Sipepa Nkomo, Tendai Biti and Nelson Chamisa all made glowing public comments correcting their opposition-era defamatory lies about the person of Robert Mugabe. If they thought the people were not listening then they are stupider than we all now know they are.
So unstrategic was the MDC-T leadership in the run-up to the 2013 election that the top three officials found it harmless to publicly pose for a photo reading a Zanu-PF manifesto right at the high table of an MDC-T rally. Undoubtedly they thought everyone was writhing with fury at the sight of the document — getting ready to unleash a thunderous protest vote against the “sunset party,” as Chamisa would put it.
Unconfirmed reports say Chamisa even went prophetic predicting a mighty demise of Zanu-PF, proclaiming supernatural communication with the Most High as the source of his foretells.
The biggest distraction for the MDC-T was the sensational internet clown by the name Baba Jukwa. The perfect fool did a feat by converting his Face Book page to an MDC-T polling station, getting an impressive 400 000 likes — clearly mistaken by many for votes. To think that senior MDC-T leaders actually thought the wanton ignoramus was doing a propaganda coup on Zanu-PF boggles the mind.
And Morgan Tsvangirai must have learnt that his sexometer should have been cut off in order to make him enter the kingdom of ruling Zimbabwe. In politics you do not scandalise and popularise at the same time.
An MDC-T activist by the name Simbarashe Dziruni had this to say about Tsvangirai’s disastrous sex scandals: “Finally people realised that serial bed-hopper is not their saviour. In fact they were wasting a lot of resources trying to protect their wives and daughters from open-zip policy.”
Blogger Denford Magora says the MDC leadership “are living in La-la land, delusional and completely off the mark with accusations of vote rigging.”
The only evidence Tsvangirai gave to a South African television journalist about vote rigging was that his party “used to control Manicaland,” and he could “not believe” they had lost the province to Zanu-PF. Staring at the journalist Tsvangirai genuinely wondered, “Could people have lost faith in us to that extent?”
Magora thinks it is simply illogical to treat Morgan Tsvangirai’s lack of belief as some kind of evidence to prove vote rigging.
Dismissing as baseless Tsvangirai’s sensationalised allegations of vote rigging Professor Lovemore Madhuku of the NCA had this to say:
“It is the NCA’s firm view that the complaints raised against the 31 July 2013 poll by the losers do not raise anything new and cannot be used as a basis for rejecting the results of an election in which they participated voluntarily.”
Clearly Morgan Tsvangirai and his inexperienced colleagues took support for granted, foolishly counting on the 2008 protest vote as a political plan to form the next government. Tsvangirai was possessed by this grand illusion that Zimbabweans would never desert him regardless of whatever he did or did not do, no matter how many sins he committed or how badly he behaved. In his world Mugabe was simply too evil and too old to be liked by anyone, and that alone sufficed to grant the MDC-T electoral victory anywhere anytime.
There was no point doing any outreach programmes to the people during the lifespan of the inclusive Government because the people of Zimbabwe now permanently belonged to the MDC-T and its leader Tsvangirai — so the thinking went.
Tsvangirai has no idea how the MMD lost the election in Zambia. Protest votes are seasonal by their very nature and this is no protest season for Zimbabweans. For most Zimbabweans this is indigenisation season, and whoever advises Tsvangirai must have told him so.
Instead of focusing on winning the election after the tenure of the inclusive Government Tsvangirai obsessed himself with this meaningless war for what he broadly called “reforms.”
He forgot too quickly that he led the first round vote in the March 2008 presidential race without any such reforms, just like Zanu-PF won elections at independence without crying for any reforms.
As soon as Tsvangirai got in the inclusive Government he engaged in committed personal fights for power and privileges — winning a mansion for himself in the process. When he was not doing that he was sparring with little Gideon Gono at the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe — dismally failing to dislodge him from his job. He tried a similar fight against Johannes Tomana, the Attorney-General.
Again he lost the junior war and people were watching. The nasty little losses were a far cry from what main actors are made of, and the people soon realised who the actual bulls of Zimbabwean politics were. Someone must tell Theresa Makone the difference between a bull and a philanderer.
If Tsvangirai thought he was waging some kind of a political fight against the military leaders of Zimbabwe through his rhetoric about security sector reforms then he is in the wrong life career.
Military leaders the world over do not conform to the political voice of anyone who is not their commander-in-chief. Hearing Tsvangirai singing President Mugabe’s praises and deriding his military leaders as rogue at the same time; and also demanding reforms from them must have been an amusing experience for the generals.
They must have wondered what kind of a clown this prime minister was. Zanu-PF must have enjoyed it thoroughly as Tsvangirai called for Council of Ministers meetings that the party’s Cabinet ministers enjoyed boycotting — more to keep Tsvangirai distracted and frustrated and less for the merit of whatever excuses given by those who bothered to explain their absence.
In short Morgan Tsvangirai was thoroughly distracted for four and a half years while Zanu-PF was not only mobilising support on the ground but also getting its supporters registered for the vote.
Zanu-PF was in an election mode from day one of the inclusive Government. The jingles that the MDC-T ignored and derided, Jabulani Sibanda’s extensive outreach programmes, the draft constitution outreach programme, Kasukuwere’s indigenisation drive and the constant calls for an election were all part of the Zanu-PF strategy to keep its support base in election mode.
Meanwhile, Tsvangirai was womanising big time, taking his sexual adventures to the high seas of the Indian Ocean.
We were told Zanu-PF officials were pleading for favours in Tsvangirai’s government that would come after the inclusive Government. Tendai Biti said the tens of thousands that participated in Zanu-PF elections were all MDC-T supporters sent by himself to enjoy the fun of fooling Zanu-PF. He even suggested that the star rallies addressed by President Mugabe were made up of MDC-T supporters “fooling the old man’’.
The tragic mistake made by the MDC-T was that the leadership did not panic when red lights flashed in their faces, dismissing otherwise very informative surveys as fluke predictions, and even daring the surveys were part of a grand plan to fool Mugabe into complacency.
The United States, the United Kingdom and Australia must stand advised that their opinion over Zimbabwean polls this year neither matters nor counts, and precisely this is why they were told to stay away.
Bob Carr may want to pursue constitutional reforms leading to the recognition of indigenous Australians in line with the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples before he calls for a re-run of an election whose context he knows next to nothing about.
Surely the rights of indigenous Australians to their own land cannot be less important than those of a few Zimbabweans who for one reason or the other failed to meet the criteria required for one to cast a vote.
Would it not be historical for Australia to carry out the historic reform of constitutionally recognising its indigenous people before the Australian Foreign Minister wails about reforms in faraway Zimbabwe?
Perhaps these reforms can be done before Australia goes for the 7 September election.
Meanwhile, the world is advised to listen more to those who were invited and accredited to observe the election in Zimbabwe instead of paying attention to the postulations emanating from Western capitals.
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, MORGAN TSVANGIRAI, REASON WAFAWAROVA
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(HERALD ZW) Quest for local political legitimacy
July 25, 2013
Reason Wafawarova
contesting parties. When such violence occurs it is the side unfavoured by Western support that is often tainted with guiltiness, especially when this side happens to win the election.
It is not exactly accurate to make the commonly accepted assumption that electoral assistance from the so-called mature democracies lead to the ultimate expression of popular participation and democratisation. Often it is far from it, if not the exact opposite.
It is quite evident that the international community’s focus is often limited to the event of elections, and rarely is any attention given to long-term solutions for nation building, or even to the actual needs of local populations.
Democracy does not come or even begin by merely carrying out a violence-free election described as free and fair by whoever cares to say so.
There must be full attention to paradigmatic differences between liberal-style democracy and local concepts. Zimbabweans are faced with a situation where voters are supposed to elect between the high-sounding glories of liberal-style democracy and the popular concept of indigenising and thus democratising the country’s economy.
Zanu-PF is pushing the popular economic empowerment policy on the one end, and Morgan Tsvangirai’s MDC is importing liberalisation rhetoric through its JUICE policy — solely focused on creating employees out of the Zimbabwean population — the very way colonisation externalised the continent’s wealth through our own employment.
The telling question is whether Zimbabweans have the stomach to endure the challenges involved with going against the liberal forces of global politics, or are instead prepared to continue playing pliant victims of imperial hegemony where at the very best success can only be measured by employment rates. Tsvangirai believes African success is by definition limited to impressive employment rates and he makes his point very clear at his campaign rallies.
Since the Cold War liberal-style democracy has become the basic model of international interventions, many times with disastrous consequences as seen in Iraq’s 2003 invasion, the aggression against Afghanistan in 2001, the 2011 Nato massacres in Libya, and of course the ruinous economic strangulation of Zimbabwe after the popular 2000 land redistribution programme.
The murderous illegal Western-imposed sanctions left the country so devastated that a violent clash between local sympathisers of liberal-style democracy and proponents of local concepts became inevitable — leading to very high levels of polarisation, itself manifesting through political violence, and even degenerating to attacks on minor members of families of political opponents.
Some people had their children killed for the political beliefs of their parents, while some children studying in Western countries were barbarically persecuted and expelled in a blatantly arbitrary way — all because they happened to be born to parents whose political beliefs did not coincide with the beliefs of politicians in their host countries.
With a legacy of the stolen generation, it appears Australia still has no problems meting ruthless measures on minors, as was seen in 2007 with the expulsion of children born to Zanu-PF members.
In the eighties the disasters of liberal-style democracy interventions were quite devastating on Latin American states, and of note was the Allende violent ousting of 1974 in Chile, the ruining of millions of lives in Nicaragua, the deadly US invasion of tiny Grenada, the Haiti blood-shedding, and many such examples as Cambodia.
Not only have liberal-style democracy interventions been used as regime change tools by Western powers; they have also been used to provide post-conflict solutions, and many times such solutions are hijacked to coincide with the imperial interests of those offering post-conflict electoral assistance.
We saw this with our own independence vote in 1980 where liberal-style democracy glaringly backed Abel Muzorewa’s UANC and was in subtle opposition to the liberation parties Zanu and Zapu.
This was the same scenario with the Namibia independence vote in November 1989, followed by the February 1990 UN supervision of the post-conflict Nicaragua election, and the ill-fated referendum on the independence of Western Sahara in 1991, as well as the 1992 Cambodia intervention.
The problems associated with these interventions could not be ignored by President Mugabe’s Government and this is precisely why UN electoral assistance was turned down for the July 31 election.
No sane revolutionary would want to facilitate the manipulation of his people by forces serving the interests of foreigners over the country’s economic resources.
Increasingly elections have become a tool of international intervention and also an exit strategy in conflict situations. The 2001 East Timor elections were an exit strategy for the Indonesian occupying forces, and even our own independence elections were largely seen as a face-saving exit strategy for the defeated Ian Smith and his Rhodesian forces.
The model of liberal-style democracy elections is quite simple. It includes registration of voters, codes of conduct, information campaigns, voter education and a subsequent secret ballot. The model is more procedural than it serves the pragmatic interests of locals.
The model does not always work out well and it is not in itself an assurance that power will be transferred from losers to winners. In Egypt the winners have been forced to surrender power back to the losers through the barrel of the gun, and there is tacit American support to that travesty.
Freeness and fairness of elections is measured by simple criteria such as the amount of violence, and we are supposed to abide by such limitations. Rarely is electoral assistance for democratic elections evaluated as a tool for influencing the opinion of voters, or as unfair to the unfavoured contestants sidelined by the providers of such assistance.
When one is looking at the evenness of the political playing field, such factors as the illegal sanctions imposed on some Zimbabwean politicians cannot be overlooked. It is not sensible for the EU to apply for accreditation to observe elections involving contestants the organisation has excluded from the list of credible human beings. You cannot make a fair judgment of an election which in your eyes pits human beings and a set of beasts.
This is precisely why only those who believe that the Zimbabwean election is between equal contesting human beings have been allowed to observe the election.
The labelling of Western enemies as tyrants or murderous monsters is largely a disenfranchising tactic to sway opinion against people seen as a threat to imperial expansionism, and Zanu-PF is undoubtedly the targeted Western enemy in Zimbabwe — purely because the party is nationalist and so hard focused on empowering its people through independent nationalism.
A revisit of most of the countries where electoral assistance has been deemed to have produced “free and fair” elections will show that these countries have not necessarily turned into well-functioning democracies, even by the controversial standards of proclaimed success stories like the United States — a country that publicly seeks to kill its own citizens for daring to inform the world that the US government spies on almost every individual in the world.
The short-term focus on the conduct of elections does not in itself present a reliable tool for genuine democratisation — especially the long-term democratisation of the economy.
It is simply myopic to assume that by merely securing a label of credibility for this year’s election Zimbabwe will suddenly become a democratised society. A democratised society is not merely a country carrying out free and fair elections to the satisfaction of all others.
Rather it is a country whose political, economic and social settings are all democratised and in the hands of the local people.
There is no such thing as democratisation without the indigenisation of all political, social and economic processes.
There is simply no way a short-term international involvement can ever create a permanent system of political legitimacy, and this is precisely why non-Western societies cannot be democratised by liberal-style Western standards.
Non-Western societies are often based on a strong independent political culture that is incompatible with Western values and interests and, as such, will have to be tamed for imperial interests to prevail.
In Zimbabwe we have local interests currently focused on the economic empowerment of locals, and people are greatly inspired by the significant success of the 2000 land reform programme, especially through the immense success of tobacco farmers.
The only political legitimacy that can be described as democratic and acceptable is that which falls within the confines of land ownership and economic empowerment by the indigenous people.
There is diminished interest in the belief that only foreigners can create employment for locals, and this is precisely why President Robert Mugabe is having a far easier task campaigning than the IMF-obsessed Morgan Tsvangirai.
Fundamentally the difference between indigenous political legitimacy and the international democratic concept raises more questions than answers. Is Jacob Zuma’s South Africa democratic simply on the basis of his ANC persistently winning elections that are deemed free and fair by those enjoying the benefits of the natural resources of the country?
Or is it truer democracy for Julius Malema to seek equality for South Africa by advocating for the nationalisation of land and mineral resources?
It is rather presumptuous to assume that people have a free choice by simply participating in an election rated as free and fair by foreign observers. The underlying paradigmatic constraints cannot be ignored or wished away.
Our democratic choice as Zimbabweans was limited to the political sphere since independence in 1980, and the 2000 shift towards economic choice has enhanced the path to the fullness of democracy in the country.
In Zimbabwe there is this sharp contrast between the application of internationally accepted paradigms and the local population’s idea of political legitimacy.
We are in a country where political legitimacy is derived from a number of superseding factors, chiefly identification with the liberation legacy, indisputable belief in nationalist sovereignty, patriotic support for the land reform legacy, and unwavering support for the indigenisation of the economy.
Not even Tsvangirai himself believes that there is political legitimacy in preaching the virtues of the IMF or that of Western influences.
At his best all Tsvangirai can say about the West and his adored IMF is “our rich friends” from the international community. He cannot name these entities by name in public. That would be political suicide, and he knows it.
All he can say to convey the message that his backers want the land reform reversed is “we will have to revisit the land redistribution programme.”
These veiled and vague utterances clearly show where political legitimacy lies in Zimbabwe, and there is no doubt that Morgan Tsvangirai himself is aware that his political agenda fails to coincide with the diktats of political legitimacy in the country.
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: REASON WAFAWAROVA
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Aid fuelling inept governance, corruption
Wednesday, 06 March 2013 20:26
Reason Wafawarova
For long Africa has been looked at as the world’s arbiter of poverty, and the plight of Africa’s poverty is the basis of the billion dollar charity industry, that despite the glaring fact that Africa’s poverty is nowhere near alleviation.
Kenya’s Kibera is probably the most densely populated slum on this planet, if not the biggest. It is home to more than a million people and the slum is only 2,6 square kilometres.
Life within Kibera is the ultimate definition of poverty, with children playing right inside garbage — most of them with faces littered with mucous and mud.
Kibera’s pathways that serve the purpose of streets are trademarked by a rife stench of sewage, and there is virtually no running water in place.
Just adjacent to Kibera one finds the headquarters for the UN Agency for Human Settlement, and the organisation runs it’s affairs on a multi-million dollar budget.
The UNHCS in its motto boasts about its resolve to “promote socially and environmentally sustainable towns and cities with the goal of providing adequate shelter for all.”
The stark irony of it all raises serious concerns about the seriousness of the UN system in general. If there is a country that must benefit most from developmental aid it must be Kenya, having Africa’s highest ratio of development workers per capita, as outlined by author Dambisa Moyo in the book “Dead Aid.”
In Zimbabwe there are over 2 500 civic organisations all purporting to be devotionally committed to the transforming of the lives of Zimbabweans through the power of aid.
Most of these organisations have been politically vocal in the last decade and the civic hoopla in the political arena is expected to be on the increase once again as the country heads for the March 16 constitutional referendum and the July general election this year.
Aid organisations like Oxfam, Amnesty International, Red Cross and Medicines Sans Frontiers each works in more than 50 countries across the world, and each in its own way has attractive goals about ending the suffering of poor people. The nobilities of such goals are hard to dispute.
There is no doubt that giving alms to Africa ranks as one of the greatest ideas of our time, and wealthy philanthropists are portrayed as anti-poverty messiahs worth our praises and honour.
We are told Bill Gates is glorious in mercifulness, and that he does wonders among Africa’s poor starving children. Again this is some nobility for all sane people to highly cherish, and so we comply.
[Except that you can never trust Bill Gates and his population control agenda. - MrK
Hundreds of thousands of people across the world are directly employed to facilitate the giving of alms to the poor in Africa.
Many popular anti-poverty marches are often successfully staged in Western capitals, and the success is based on the pure logic that says such marches are indisputably meritorious in their call for ending poverty in Africa, of course through the giving of aid. Western political parties compete for votes on the merit of the policy of giving aid to Africa — a policy always packaged as a morally intended rescue operation meant to redeem a desperate and perishing people. Incumbent governments in the West are judged by their people on the basis of how much they are reaching out to help Africans.
African governments of today are judged by their people on the basis of how much aid they solicit from Western donors.
As Zimbabwe heads for elections in 2013, Morgan Tsvangirai’s MDC-T openly campaigns on their strategic alliance with the Western donor community — bragging openly that if voted into power Zimbabwe will be Africa’s most aid-inundated country in Africa.
From its formation in 1999, the only way known to run political affairs for the MDC has been the way of donor funding — and to the party’s leadership money by definition comes from donors. To the MDC money is never made but given, and the despicable culture is sickening.
We have on the other hand Zanu-PF which was weaned from the aid culture by isolation from enraged Western countries that could not stand Zimbabwe’s compulsory land reclamation programme of 2000 — a justice driven initiative that saw about 3000 white commercial farmers being forcefully pushed out of vast tracts of land they had colonially occupied — paving way for over 300 000 families of indigenous people that were settled on this acquired land.
The popular land reclamation programme was behind Zanu-PF’s 2000 and 2002 electoral victories — all dismissed as fraudulent by the Western sponsored MDC, of course fully supported in this view by their backers in Western capitals.
Now Zanu-PF is tipped to win the 2013 general election on the backdrop of the highly popular indigenisation policy — a Western criticised empowerment policy that decrees local ownership of the means of production to be at least 51 percent, with foreign ownership limited to 49 percent.
Essentially we have an election that presents the people of Zimbabwe the opportunity to vote between economic freedom and international aid (in reality dependency).
So important is the culture of aid that Western celebrities find it highly meritorious to boost their profiles by publicly reaching out to Africa’s poor.
The moral imperative to share one’s wealth with the poor cannot be disputed of course. This explains the connection between African orphans and Hollywood characters.
It is estimated that over US$50 billion aid money finds its way into Africa each year, despite the undeniable reality that with increasing aid Africa’s poor have become poorer, especially in the last 50 years.
From 2000 there are many African countries whose economies have been shrinking despite a continued increase in the number of donor agencies setting bases in these countries.
We have a crippling aid culture that has left African governments more corrupt, and has resulted in African countries being more debt-laden, more inflation prone and highly unattractive to investment targeted at value addition.
The continent remains the world’s attraction number one for raw material extraction investment.
We are a resourced continent that is contented to see shiploads of raw materials leaving Africa for foreign destinations like China and Europe.
We are more than happy to receive some of the end products from our own raw materials as humanitarian aid from foreign donors.
It is so enraging to see a Westerner showing a cell phone to DRC children — and all of them so mesmerised to see for the first time this coltan product — coltan being a mineral literally stolen from their country. Our governments in Sub-Saharan Africa prefer to impress aid givers in the West than to undertake the tedious challenge of growing economies.
This is the disaster that has befallen Africa.
Aid does not create meaningful employment, and with the continent’s under 25 making up over 60 percent of the continent’s population, the economic prospects for these youths remain a major worry.
As author Dambisa Moyo writes, “Aid is an unmitigated political, economic and humanitarian disaster.” It is not a brilliant political idea to take unemployed youths for granted.
As stated earlier on, it is next to impossible to dispute the moral imperative for humanitarian aid, especially in emergency situations like natural disasters and wars, and far be it from this writer to demean the good intentions of those who genuinely extend the humanitarian hand to the vulnerable.
While humanitarian aid is always morally plausible, it must be noted that it is no panacea to ending the suffering of poor people. Alleviation of immediate suffering is not in itself a way to end poverty, and the nature of aid as received by Africans is not to end Africa’s poverty. Instead it is aid designed to perpetuate poverty as driven by dependency in Africa.
Aid to the African continent today is like an anaesthetic meant to silence the screams of a continent being raped.
We are pacified by aid as foreign corporations literally feast on our natural resources.
The lines of credit and grants that African political leaders die to access from the IMF and the Word Bank are today the greatest undoing to Africa’s economic growth. Indeed billions of dollars flow into the coffers of African governments each year, and yet it remains an indisputable statistic that 400 million Africans live on less than a dollar a day — a figure way bigger than Europe’s entire population.
The much-applauded debt-relief campaigns, or Tendai Biti’s favourite Bretton Woods programme, the Highly Indebted Poor Countries scheme have not helped the African cause.
Every debt relief so far granted has been swiftly followed by a fresh infusion of fresh debt and more crippling aid. This is exactly what Finance Minister Biti was clamouring for when he embarked on his disgraceful campaign to have Zimbabwe apply for HIPC status in 2009. Today Africa collectively pays more than US$25 billion a year in debt repayments — largely to service only the interests of loans accrued over the years.
The figure is far higher than what the continent spends on education and healthcare each year. We service better our debts to Western institutions than we do the education and healthcare of our people. It is sad that Africa’s current leadership is so hopelessly addicted to this deadly drug of aid that there is virtually no hope that Africa will soon depart from the insidious aid culture to genuine economic growth. Aid promotes inept governments, laziness, corruption and a sorry sense of dependency. The bloated bureaucracies of Africa feed off the stream of aid. The countless people working in the obscenely rewarding non-governmental sector are a direct product of the aid culture, and they are of no use to anybody regarded as a victim of poverty.
It is the aspiration of every African university graduate to land a job with the most rewarding donor-funded non-governmental organisations, and it is almost indisputable to rank the charity industry as the most financially rewarding career in Africa today. Even the UN agencies are regarded as a highway to unmitigated wealth. Western agencies, the IMF and the World Bank have all been complicit in Africa’s corrupt culture that has been openly fuelled by aid. In 2002 the African Union estimated that corruption was costing the continent US$150 billion per year.
Cases of aid-related corruption include Mobutu’s Zaire, Chiluba’s Zambia and Muluzi’s Malawi, Equatorial Guinea, South Africa, and Kenya, among other African countries. Inadvertently or intentionally, one can always take their pick, but what cannot be disputed is that aid fuels corruption in Africa.
The governments that rely on aid evidently lack policy initiative, are largely unaccountable and they only seek to please their donors — often forsaking their own people and leaving them to languish in misery.
In Africa our governments shamelessly gather to announce national annual budgets made up of an average 40 percent foreign aid, with many countries ranging well over 75 percent aid money in their annual budgets. At one time Ethiopia had 90 percent of its annual budget coming from foreign aid, and in 2008 Ghana’s budget was 70 percent foreign aid.
It is high time Africa gets serious with initiatives to come up with meaningful investment policies that lead to the continent benefiting to the maximum possible from its own resources.
Africa we are one and together we will overcome. It is homeland or death!!
Reason Wafawarova is a political writer based in SYDNEY, Australia. Feedback: reason@yahoo.co.uk or visit wafawarovawrites.com
Labels: CORRUPTION, NGOs, REASON WAFAWAROVA
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The ‘We are so good’ rhetoric
Wednesday, 28 November 2012 21:34
Reason Wafawarova
Zimbabweans are heading for elections in March 2013 and this is the time when politicians cry out the “we are so good” message with so much conviction that makes it fashionable for all others to believe the rhetorical utterances from the self-anointed custodians of our opinions — the loud mouths that hail from the powerful political community.
The fundamental principle that runs political parties is “we are so good,” — “we” being the political elites that occupy leadership positions in the political arena. This of course is based on the totalitarian principle that conveniently asserts that political parties and the people are one — more for the need to lure votes from the public and less for the need to pursue the real needs and wants of the people. No known state on this planet has been spared this deception.
Ordinarily it must be apparent that matters have reached a pretty bad patch when informed commentators are compelled to conclude that democracy in Zimbabwe must rely on a person like Morgan Tsvangirai and his MDC-T party.
Democracy within the MDC was tragically and single-handedly failed by Morgan Tsvangirai in October 2005 when the man unilaterally overturned a popular vote in favour of contesting pending senatorial elections — of course leading to the splitting of the party into two factions initially, and to at least four such factions as things stand right now.
In September 2009, Morgan Tsvangirai simply overruled his party’s constitution and decided to stay beyond the 10-year limit as the party’s leader. Nelson Chamisa was instructed to tell all those who dared to question that the counting of Tsvangirai’s term limits was to begin in 2006, since the first five years had been “nullified” by the 2005 split. The supposedly perfect logic in Chamisa’s announcement was that Tsvangirai was now leading a new political party.
Those in the MDC-T who questioned the sense behind this explanation were roundly dismissed as Zanu-PF implants or infiltrators from the dreaded Central Intelligence Organisation. These two labels are extensively used to control dissent within the MDC-T, as they are also used to explain away scandals and blunders, including the perpetual sex scandals.
In 2007 Morgan Tsvangirai used Thokozani Khupe to usurp the people’s will as she unilaterally imposed Theresa Makone as the chairperson of the MDC-T’s Women’s Assembly ahead of the people’s choice Lucia Matibenga. Violence and intimidation was extensively used to buttress the unpopular decree.
In 2008 Morgan Tsvangirai imposed at least 10 parliamentary and senatorial candidates for the pending election and the Midlands province was worst affected — leading to the late Patrick Kombayi leading a group of disgruntled renegades who proceeded to contest as independents. Resultantly the vote was split in favour of bitter rivals Zanu-PF, who were no less guilty themselves.
Of course Zanu-PF suffered the same fate in Manicaland and other areas where the party resolutely stuck to its notorious tradition of imposing candidates on the electorate — giving away close to a dozen seats to the MDC-T in the process and taking absolutely no blame for it. It was all blamed on the independents whom we were told had failed to put the interests of the party ahead of their own.
Now the MDC-T has crafted a way of retaining seating MPs as candidates for the March 2013 elections, and the party leader has so far predictably shown endorsing reticence.
Douglas Mwonzora explains that the seating MDC-T MPs will all participate in a one candidate contest each against him or herself — with a handful of colleagues in the party’s leadership structures having to confirm their political worthiness; literally against no one in contest. Once confirmed this way the seating MP will have the green light to represent the party in the 2013 elections. Cool bananas for everyone!
Only those stupid enough to fail to win against themselves will be send to meet the wrath of the grass root masses — who of course are waiting behind their popular new candidates, ready to punish the lazy and thieving lot that sordidly betrayed their trust in the last five years.
The Mwonzora-Chamisa confirmation venture is an exercise in gruesome mischief — only designed to sideline the masses and their popular candidates, and of course to protect the seating MPs against the wrath of the voters. There is simply no other plausible cause why the primary vote should be evaded or avoided.
Zanu-PF has simply labelled those who pose a political threat to its incumbent cadres “infiltrators” and the party has indicated that only those defined as cadres by the party leadership will be allowed to be popular with Zanu-PF supporters at grass roots levels. Going ahead to be popular with the constituencies without the nod of sitting leaders is an unacceptable mischief and such mischief will not be tolerated.
In other words one has to be popular first with those they seek to displace in the political structures of Zanu-PF before being popular with the masses themselves — and of course this is supposed to make perfect logic — unless someone has no idea on how gwara remusangano works.
The rhetoric leading to elections always dramatises the operative principle that says “we are so good,” and on an immediate practical level it ratchets up the peril of lies and deception in politics — the torturous trait of propaganda.
The manifesto of the MDC-T in particular carries an appreciable risk of ultimate doom. In Senator Obert Gutu’s words the party’s MPs and councillors are “a bunch of clowns,” and author Miles Tendi asserts the party “has a culture of mediocrity.” The party leader himself is technically so crippled that he needs “massive handholding,” according to American diplomat Christopher Dell.
Morgan Tsvangirai makes more news with his zipper and women than he does with policy matters and he has the temerity to brag about it all — of course on the basis that he only equals some of his political rivals in Zanu-PF when it comes to immorality. Regardless of whatever moral shortcomings Tsvangirai clearly commands, his party arrogantly prides in the indecency that allows its spokespersons to continually brand their corrupt entity the “party of excellency.”
Critics of the MDC-T have aptly labelled the outfit a “party of sexcellency,” and that is probably quite apt — given the graphic detail in the public domain over the sexual shenanigans of the party’s leader, described by Zanu-PF’s Jonathan Moyo as “a man with an open zip and shut mind” character.
The MDC-T run councils have in a short three years elevated public office-pilfering to levels of culture. These are the kind of people who sit and vote in favour of the idea that the need for luxury cars is more life threatening than flowing sewage in the streets of Harare and Bulawayo.
We are so good they tell us, so good that people must appreciate the need for all of us to lead by the excellent example of driving around in the most expensive of cars. That seems to be the logic in Zimbabwe’s political arena across the divide, and there is no trace of remorse whatsoever.
Didn’t our parliamentarians recently make decent claims for golden exit packages “in case this is our last time in Parliament,” and was that not meant to make perfect sense to our generality? Politics has become a vehicle of enrichment and our own politicians have popularised and normalised this tragedy.
Is it a wonder that the African political community makes up the biggest market for Mercedes Benz? We have a political tradition that says we are so good that we deserve the best and our people must adjust to the aspirations of their political leadership — including their insatiable appetite for wealth. After all luxury is not the opposite of poverty, only of vulgarity. So we are told. Even our own church pastors have religiously and zealously embraced this gluttonous trait.
The people of Zimbabwe must by definition appreciate that those among us who fought to bring us freedom and independence are so good that pointing out their shortcomings can only be tantamount to egregious sinning. This is precisely why some of our political leaders find it highly effective to wield before our sorry eyes war credentials each time they feel they are running out of sound political ideas, or they have been caught out doing unacceptable things.
Matters cannot be allowed to come to such a dire situation that we have to solely rely on the glory of our past to make a political impact in domestic politics. That we make quisling parties like the MDC-T appear noble intended.
This is why Zanu-PF has to expand its scope and strength on the basis of empowering beneficiaries of the land reform program and also empowering indigenous entrepreneurs through the policy of majority shareholding for locals in all major business enterprises, locals being a reference here to our grassroot people, not to some political elites enjoying the wealth of our country on our collective behalf.
Our liberation history must be the inspiration behind our resolve to defeat unsparingly the wreck of imperialism. It must not be a source of elitism on the part of those who sacrificed their lives for our collective emancipation and freedom.
That only defeats the heroism behind the liberation legacy and those who seek elitist recognition on the basis of having fought for national independence are worse traitors than the puppet politicians that receive instructions from Western capitals. A people’s solidarity cannot be blackmailed.
While the explicit critique of the state of the MDC-T in relation to the threat to the survival of democracy within the party is very harsh and bitter, it must be noted that the implicit critique of the Zanu-PF leadership in regards to the legacy of the country’s revolution is equally harsh and bitter, if not a lot more dire.
When disregard for moral values becomes a point of pride for those in support of our Prime Minister’s shortcomings we must be reminded that the species we call integrity is now threatened with extinction.
When our political leadership openly regards political office as a means to gather illicit wealth we must stand reminded that the species we call democracy has been decimated — never mind how many international observers declare our elections free and fair — something the MDC formations notoriously believe defines democracy.
We cannot allow our politicians the luxury of fooling our populace with this good for nothing “we are so good” rhetoric; whose only justification is the badness of political opponents from the other side of the divide, as if that in itself creates goodness on the other side.
There is no such thing as a lesser evil in politics or in the generality of life. Evil is evil, nothing more, and nothing less — and so is good; it is just that, good.
We Zimbabweans must vote wisely in 2013 and as it stands the only wise thing worthy voting for is the democracy that will allow us to fully control our wealth and our natural resources — in reality the only true meaning of democracy; not this vacuous numerical democracy measured by measly elections structured to ratify the wishes of political elites or those of their wealthy foreign backers.
Elections whether free and fair or not, in a country whose people have no control of their own means of production are a mere ratification of egregious exploitation. As such elections of this nature must be discredited and abandoned.
The two most outstanding democratic achievements ever achieved in Zimbabwe’s 32-year history are the land reclamation exercise and the economic empowerment policy.
On these two we can build a truly democratic society in full control of its destiny and posterity will forever cherish the legacy of those that have spearheaded these policies — particularly President Mugabe, a man also renowned for his early ’80s highly successful mass education policy.
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: 2013 ELECTIONS (ZW), REASON WAFAWAROVA
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The sorrow of a manipulated people
Wednesday, 10 October 2012 22:23
by Reason Wafawarova
Posting her thoughts on an Internet social network, writer Petina Gappah had this to say: “My friend Nick Twinamatsiko has pointed out that no African has ever been in contention for any of the Nobel Prizes in science. I am not surprised.”
It takes men of exceptional brilliance to make it into coaching the biggest soccer clubs in the world, much as a soccer coach has to be stupid enough to believe that what they do is such an important thing in real life.
It is like believing that the Nobel Peace Prize is an important arbiter for the success of Africans.
You have to command an outrageous sense of gullibility to believe that kind of egregious nonsense.
A people shorn of the past, blind to the direction towards the future and uncertain of the present cannot tell from where they are coming and to where they are going.
European hegemony has for a long time hypnotised our people in Africa, and we have even reached a catastrophic stage where some of us are convinced that our past is gone and forgotten — that way making many of our people lead a life of meaninglessness.
We have a people so hypnotised by today’s world order that they have no idea why they are on earth, no sense of purpose whatsoever, and are totally unaware of the meaning of life.
This is the legacy of colonialism in Africa, and the legacy of neo-colonial Western hegemony in our post-colonial era.
A loss of one’s history is a loss of one’s past and essentially a very dangerous manipulation of one’s time dimension.
It is a sordid warping of one’s time, resulting in the warping of his perception, leading to a distortion of one’s experiences and his sense of choice.
Those who colonised us deliberately and strategically played with our history and our sense of time.
They intentionally displaced us so as to manipulate our sense of place, so they could distort our identity and what we are about as a people.
They made us trivialise our history while they elevated their own history to be an essential part of a body of knowledge they coercively installed in our minds, naming our countries and cities after their own dead ancestors, and telling us our own dead ancestors were demon-possessed pagans.
We were made to believe that there was only one way to India and that the way was discovered by Vasco da Gama, and as young school pupils we were made to sing this vacuous myth until it was embedded in us as the truth.
Only the white colonisers had the power to discover things and that is why David Livingstone discovered the Mosia Tunya Falls before he “appropriately” named them Victoria Falls, and the people around the falls could not have discovered the natural wonder since they themselves were also discovered by Dr David Livingstone.
Our lack of ambition and innovation is not a genetic phenomenon.
Rather, it is a result of an annihilated past, a battered present, and a misdirected future. With no future in sight, our people will inevitably lose identity, and will euphorically feel no need for motivation or anxiety — being content to depend on the benevolence of those who exercise hegemony over the continent’s resources.
The mentality of the European after the Medieval Ages has been that of expanding the future, spreading white hegemony pursued on the backdrop of cancelled fears and a sense of self-fulfilment, all at the expense of the lesser peoples of this world.
Colonialism might be counted long forgotten by those of us obsessed with the rhetoric of moving with the times, but it almost indelibly robbed us of our past, bringing us into a semi-infantile state — and in our dilated past we have become an inhibited people.
We have a political leadership in Africa that is legendarily catatonic when it comes to development policy.
Asked by the BBC’s Brian Hungwe on what his idea of empowerment of people is, Zimbabwe’s Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai said: “You empower people through education, jobs, and through gender support . . .”
[How about ownership of the economy? - MrK]
Surely the education and jobs created by colonisation did not, from any angle of imagination, empower any of our people in Africa.
Rather the education helped annihilate our past, destroy our culture, and moulded out of us very loyal labour tools for profiteering capitalists, and whatever jobs we got empowered only those who employed us, providing to us slave wages.
Dr Bernard Aaronson of the New Jersey Neuro-Psychiatric Institute made the following conclusion about the past, present and the future for any people: “Life must carry some sense of direction, from past to present or present to future, to seem worth living. People given a present shorn of a past and future become preoccupied with death and behave like schizophrenics.”
Is it a coincidence that our poverty-stricken people’s major fear in life is death, and that unscrupulous traditionalists and religious prophets manipulate so much this fear of death to control and exploit these vulnerable people?
Even Western hegemonic powers manipulate us so immorally on the basis of the poverty that wreaks havoc in our communities.
The colonial legacy is used by the West today to hypnotise Africans by manipulating our attitude towards our past, that way manipulating our consciousness, our capacities, and our collective abilities. We are not only bound in a state of illusion of who we are and who we must be, we are also victims of memory problems.
Our lives have become somewhat meaningless because the only institutional memory we command is that of experiences given to us by a colonial legacy we purport to have conquered, and many times we have serious problems getting the real meaning of life.
Western hegemonic powers are aware that by manipulating our past and present, they can easily manipulate our collective mentality, our sanity, and our contact with reality.
We sadly underestimate the power of history in the shaping of societies. The colonisers made sure they prevented the teaching of our history in a correct manner, that way ensuring that our collective potential will perpetually be undeveloped, and that we will forever depend on those who exercise economic hegemony over us, with some among us calling themselves revolutionaries for fighting to preserve white hegemony over Africa’s economy.
The logic of employment today is elevated as a higher priority to the idea of establishing an economy, and in the name of employment all radicalism to shift African economies away from the control of Western capitalists has largely been derided as ill-thought policy, and sadly we have Africans who support this cowardly rhetoric.
For us to use the intellectual knowledge base in Africa for the development of the continent, we will need a major paradigm shift.
As Amos Wilson asserts: “Alienated knowledge can only be used in the interest of aliens,” and that is why we aspire to work for those whose history has been sold to us as the definition of success. We have countless higher degrees in business administration across Africa, and yet we have no idea whatsoever what it means to build a business, unless we are building it on behalf of a Western investor.
Our resources in Africa are pillaged every single day because we have allowed other people to stall our creativity. We basically lack in coping skills and that is why we believe so much in interventionism and we compete to have Westerners lead the way of our economies in Africa. We feel better when we call it globalisation.
Africa is the richest continent on this planet when it comes to natural resources. Yet we enrich Western investors, the Chinese, the Indians and other people from outside the continent, and we pride ourselves as champions of promoting Foreign Direct Investment.
Our continent supports other racial groups, feeds their children while our own children starve and die at a rate of about 2 000 a day, and those who survive are destined to dire poverty, drug and alcohol addiction, or become robbers and petty thieves, and do all sorts of things we do not approve of.
The usual cry of the African political leadership is “We need money!” It is as stupid as that. Africa is not suffering from lack of money. That is the most stupid thing one can ever say. Trillions of dollars are realised from Africa’s natural resources every year, and yet we have African economists foolishly telling us that the continent is suffering from money problems.
Africa today is suffering from the absence of an economic system, and money is not a system. The continent lacks the pattern, the system, and the organisation that is needed in the building of an economy.
An economy exists prior to money, and this is why it is important to fully understand the policy of indigenising the economy of Africa.
This is why it is important for every Zimbabwean to see clearly the vision behind the economic empowerment policy as pursued by Zanu-PF.
Morgan Tsvangirai does not agree and his reasoning is very simple.
“Why must I agree with the policy of another party?”
This is what he asked the BBC’s Brian Hungwe in response to a question during an interview he gave recently.
Morgan Tsvangirai needs to be reminded that there were economies in the world well before money was invented, and that, in fact, we do not necessarily need to have money in order to establish an economic system.
We need to establish an economic system that will create money for Zimbabwe, not necessarily to have money that will create an economy for the country.
Foreign direct investment creates an economy in the interest of aliens, and such an economy may create tax revenue and wages for locals, but it can never make meaningful money for the country.
When we create an economic system owned by local people, we begin to make money for the country; and this money is only a fruit or a consequence of what is really needed — an established locally controlled and run economy.
The only reason Africa has so many resources and yet remains direly so poor is that the continent has no economy of its own.
The economy of South Africa is foreign owned, and that is why there is both a supposedly huge economy and money in South Africa, and yet the indigenous South Africans are languishing in extreme poverty.
South Africa will need to establish an economy for its people and that way money will come the way of black South Africans. Malema has it accurate when he advocates the takeover of mines and farm lands by indigenous South Africans.
Africa we are one and together we will overcome. It is homeland or death!
* Reason Wafawarova is a political writer based in Sydney, Australia.
Labels: NEOCOLONIALISM, REASON WAFAWAROVA
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MDC-T’s last mile to demise
Wednesday, 12 September 2012 00:00
Reason Wafawarowa
In Nelson Chamisa’s world Zimbabwe “saunters towards the demise of the ultimate phase of a hard transition,” and he believes the people of this country have “subliminally” long stored decisions about an ideal future. But have they?
It is just as good that the MDC-T organising secretary realises the pending MDC-T demise coming with the last phase of the misnamed Global Political Agreement, and the confession that the MDC-T has been in Government for three years doing nothing but “subliminally” stalling decisions about an ideal future for the country is quite telling.
Dear reader, something subliminal is something inadequate to produce conscious awareness. So in reality the MDC-T is hardly conscious of its presence in Government, and that explains a lot of the behaviour portrayed by the leadership of the party.
Nelson Chamisa, Morgan Tsvangirai and one Abednico Bhebhe have all said something to the effect that the MDC-T is in the constitution-making business only for
political expediency but are totally uncommitted to the process since the party envisages a day in the future when it will be in power and able to write for
Zimbabweans a Constitution democratic enough to meet the standards of MDC-T sponsors, whose code name is always “the international community.”
Chamisa’s October 21 2010 contribution to this unpalatable rhetoric reads like this:
“Zimbabweans will be given another chance to write a Constitution in a free environment after elections. “That’s why we want a transitional constitution now to create a conducive climate for elections, after which a new charter will be written.”
His boss Morgan Tsvangirai was more brazen about it. He said on December 20 2011: “a new Constitution for Zimbabwe, which is now with Government drafters (meaning Copac), with a referendum to follow, will be abandoned as soon as the MDC party wins power”.
The political climate created by the presence of the MDC-T in Government guarantees that no patriotic Zimbabwean will vote for the reckless indiscipline and corruption now synonymous with the MDC-T leadership, with Tsvangirai’s character now written hopelessness all over it, not least because of his scandalous sexual lifestyle. The man is probably the fastest zipper of our times, albeit done with a completely shut mind.
Nelson Chamisa recently wrote in an article titled “MDC-T: Last mile towards real change,” that the MDC-T is “a force for real change and a locomotive for real transformation.”
The only explanation given to what this change and transformation is all about is the vacuous statement that it will be about “a decisive response to hopelessness, disempowerment and break down of the rule of law through state-sponsored violence.”
The economic crisis of Zimbabwe between 2000 and 2009 was a direct result of the isolation of the country by the major Western economies through illegal sanctions imposed on the country at the instigation of Nelson Chamisa’s party, and this is the hopelessness that Chamisa says his party is worried about.
The only decisive response to this hopelessness is for the MDC-T to start joining every other sane and patriotic Zimbabwean in defending the motherland by calling for the unconditional lifting of these illegal and irrational sanctions. The fight against Western sanctions is a national cause, which the MDC-T leadership needs to embrace with all others.
It is ironic to read Nelson Chamisa saying the MDC-T has a plan to change and transform the state of disempowerment for Zimbabweans, especially when one takes into consideration the position of the MDC-T regarding economic empowerment as implemented by Minister Saviour Kasukuwere.
Morgan Tsvangirai was quite explicit about his party’s position on the indigenisation policy when he addressed a rally in Marondera in March this year.
He said: “We are totally opposed to this programme being undertaken by (Minister of Youth Development, Indigenisation and Economic Empowerment Saviour) Kasukuwere and Zanu-PF. There are some people who are moving around saying: ‘indigenisation, indigenisation’. How can you implement a party programme hiding behind the Government? Ours is a job plan. Our plan is of jobs and starts by encouraging investment.”
A job plan based on encouraging Western investors is the MDC-T idea of responding to disempowerment, and Chamisa calls this culture of capitalist dependency an approach of excellence.
The MDC-T was never formed because its founders had an idea what to do in terms of policy formulation or solutions to the challenges facing Zimbabwe.
The party was formed as a reactionary movement whose sole occupation was protesting the rulership of Zanu-PF. Chamisa explained it all in his little and exciting essay. He wrote: “The absence of a people-framed Constitution, weak growth by industries, poor economic policies by Government gave birth to the MDC.”
Chamisa believes his party “stands for the supremacy of the nation and its people over partisan and individual interests,” and he writes this at a time his MDC-T adamantly prides itself in having disregarded the national report on the views of the people about what should constitute the Zimbabwean Constitution — an abrogation inspired not only by selfish partisan interests, but also by the influence from Western imperialist interests.
Indeed the MDC-T stands for the supremacy of the nation and its people over individual interests, and this is precisely why the MDC-T leader sees no contradiction in moving into a multi-million dollar mansion barely ten kilometres from a national university failing to operate because of critical water shortages that could easily be eradicated by a fraction of the dollar value of his mansion.
Nelson Chamisa rhapsodises that his party is “pro-poor, labour-centric, social democratic and human-centred development party.”
This is a pro-poor people party that finds it logical to align itself with disparaged whites bidding to reverse the pro-poor land redistribution program, when it is not vehemently opposing the indigenisation policy designed to transfer majority ownership of business into the hands of indigenous Zimbabweans.
The MDC-T is indeed a labour-founded party, but white interests sadly hijacked the party when Morgan Tsvangirai was openly bought out by white capital from ex-white commercial farmers and Western moneybags way back in 2000.
A social democratic and human-centred party that openly calls for the sanctioning of its own country in order to strangulate the populace to a point of rebellion against the incumbent government is an insult to the philosophy of social democracy, and it is a mockery to humanity.
Chamisa candidly wrote that his party had a real prospect of attaining “political power” by “walking on dead bodies (of starving Zimbabweans) to State House.” He aptly describes in his essay what the Western sanctions imposed at the instigation of his MDC-T had done to the people of Zimbabwe.
Nelson Chamisa wrote, almost braggingly: “People were dying of cholera, bread was being bought from South Africa, prices were changing every second and we had no food in shops.” That is the ungovernable state of affairs his party has always advocated for.
The young politician was quite audacious in crediting his party for every little success associated with the lifespan of the inclusive Government, even boasting that tobacco farmers are now in good business because of the MDC-T presence in Government, and not because of the land reform program that gave them the land on which they are doing tobacco farming, of course at the expense of the white commercial farmers.
The daring contriving of glory in the restoration of the welfare fund for war veterans stands in sharp contrast to Minister Biti’s efforts to frustrate the disbursement
of the same fund, and is a stark contradiction to the vilification of war veterans by the MDC-T, as evidenced by Chamisa’s own utterances in 2000, when he told a gathering in Harare CBD that “Chinotimba, Hunzvi and the so-called war veterans are thugs. They are the ex-combatants, and we are the current combatants. They can take Zimbabwe back to colonialism and we will fight and free it better than they ever did.”
The admission by Nelson Chamisa that “the ‘party of excellence’ is not full of angels” is the summary of the MDC-T to most Zimbabweans today. Nelson Chamisa’s explanations and excuses will never make up for the missing angels.
Morgan Tsvangirai is not angelic from any angle of imagination, and moralists would dare say the man is in fact diabolic. Emmanuel Chiroto, the Harare deputy mayor who built himself a 24-bedroom house as soon as he made it into the local council, stands out as a prototype example of MDC-T councillors across the country — a corrupt lot that loots with reckless abandon.
Here is a party whose winning candidates brazenly compete in the game of self-aggrandisement, corruptly parcelling pieces of land to each other to the point of not sparing even football fields and public parks.
Chamisa writes about something called the “New Zimbabwe blue print Vision 2030 JUICE Plan,” and one is tempted to think that this is a plan to juice up the lifestyles of MDC-T politicians.
Apart from coming up with fancy names for its policy documents, the MDC-T has never really impressed in articulating what it stands for, much as the party postures very impressively on what it stands against.
The mediocrity in MDC-T leadership is encyclopaedic; to borrow Nelson Chamisa’s complex vocabulary. The party leadership stands tainted as keener on corruption than its rivals in Zanu-PF.
Morgan Tsvangirai has transformed himself from a fiery opposition leader to a sexual weakling throwing himself wantonly on all manner of women, when he is not displaying his shortcomings on political etiquette like he did in Germany where he made a perfect fool of himself; saluting a guard of honour meant to salute him, and speeding away from his host in a walk to the podium, only to end up standing bouncingly under the wrong flag before a packed auditorium.
If there is one thing the GPA has done, it is exposing the MDC-T as a party of hopelessness, even in the context of a habitually blundering Zanu-PF. We have at the very most about nine months before the country goes for elections, and the MDC-T is indeed sauntering towards a well-earned demise.
Zanu-PF, in all its numerous shortcomings, is capable of defining what it stands for, and its policies often attract international attention, controversially or otherwise. The MDC-T has, on the other hand, publicly stated what it stands against, only to fail to practice the gospel the party so much preaches about.
Unholy people never really make good listening when they preach against sin, and the MDC-T stands naked whenever they chant this rhetoric on change and good governance.
The only change that has happened since the MDC-T came into office is the increasing fatness of its leaders and, of course, their mobility up the social ladder, drifting away from the voting masses. The credibility of the MDC-T in matters of transparency is currently no more than that of a pastor preaching holiness in front of a congregation that includes his mistresses.
The MDC-T has become a party too used to people following its pursuits, not because the pursuits are noble but because people are hunting for an alternative.
Now the time has come for the MDC-T to start following the pursuits of the people and the party simply has no idea how to do it.
Barring a radical miracle, the MDC-T may in fact be walking its last mile towards real demise, and no amount of blame apportioning will be good enough to revive the lost myth of glory that the MDC-T used to enjoy as an opposition political party. The aura of invincibility that was part of the myth around the name Tsvangirai has been replaced by the raucous laughter of citizens watching the unmasking of a fake hero.
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, NELSON CHAMISA, REASON WAFAWAROVA
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Elevating procedural over substantial liberties
Wednesday, 29 August 2012 22:25
“Only a handful of the reasons for party choice in Zimbabwe show up clear differences between the two main parties’ supporters. Land, indigenisation, foreign interference in Zimbabwe, liberation from colonialism (all linked to Zanu-PF), and the need for change (associated with the MDC-T) do differentiate.”
The above is a quote taken from the Freedom House’s profiling of supporters for MDC-T and Zanu-PF, as reported in the 2012 Survey of Public Opinion in Zimbabwe. The report has gained prominence more for its unexpected predictions and less for the credibility of Freedom House itself — an organisation notoriously so openly instrumental to the implementation of the US’s sabre-rattling foreign policy. It may be necessary to reproduce the main points highlighting the shocking predictions as recently published by the Freedom House. Here are the bullet points.
* In terms of the declared survey-based support, it appears the MDC-T has been suffering a decline in support, falling from 38 percent to 20 percent in the parliamentary vote from 2010 to 2012, in a period of approximately 18 months between the 2010 and 2012 FH surveys.
* In contrast, the survey data point to Zanu-PF having experienced a growth in popular support, moving from 17 percent to 31 percent in the same period.
* It is essential to bear in mind that a total of 47 percent of the respondents did not declare their voting intention in this 2012 survey. The percentage includes those who declared their vote to be their secret. Analyses in the rest of the report show that this undeclared category does not veil a systematic party orientation. Rather, should these persons vote in a next election, their support is likely to be diffused across party categories.
The immediate surface effect of this survey has been the exciting of thrills from a Zanu-PF lately better known for its troubled internal politics than its traditional revolutionary trademark. Zanu-PF has decided to embrace the good message from the bad messenger while the MDC-T has been absolutely infuriated by the report, choosing to slander and vilify the message and just falling short of condemning the messenger.
Ordinarily Zanu-PF should not even be reading a report from Freedom House and the MDC-T should be singing praises of the report without even reading it. But Zimbabwe seems to be moving from the ordinary to the peculiar these days.
In the report it is telling that Freedom House’s profiling of supporters of the two main parties shows five main reasons for party choice in Zimbabwe, and only one of those choices (which happens to be the vaguest), is attributed to MDC-T. The four main reasons for party choice are Land, Indigenisation, Foreign Interference in Zimbabwe and Liberation from Colonialism; all centre pillars of Zanu-PF’s political doctrine and policy framework. The fifth reason is the obscure and vague rhetoric on the call for “change,” hardly ever qualified or explained by an MDC-T leadership that seems more committed to political activism than strategic politics.
Land reclamation has not only trademarked Zanu-PF as a pro-people party within Zimbabwe, but has also created an international name for the revolutionary party, with many outsiders expressing adoration and admiration for the party’s resolute stance in reclaiming colonially stolen farmlands and giving that land back to its rightful owners. No doubt the party’s victories in this regard will be replicated in South Africa, and this is only a matter of time. Though somewhat pursued from a liberal approach, Zanu-PF’s indigenisation policy of pushing for 51 percent local control of all major investment in the country seems to be gaining enormous support among the people. Just like the land reclamation policy, the indigenisation drive is internationally supported in principle, much as its planning and implementation strategies have been openly derided and interrogated by opponents from the West.
While Saviour Kasukuwere does not really sound like South Africa’s Julius Malema insofar as explicitness for nationalisation is concerned, his capitalist approach to Zimbabwe’s indigenisation drive seems to be quite popular with young aspiring business-minded people and an informal sector that has been the mainstay of an economy in decline for the past decade.
The illegally imposed EU-US sanctions have been roundly condemned by Sadc, the AU, the NAM, and even by the United Nations — strengthening Zanu-PF’s assertion that the sanctions are the main cause of the suffering of Zimbabweans from 2000 to date. Those who believe in the declared intentions behind the sanctions complain that the sanctions have unintentionally harmed ordinary Zimbabweans, and those who believe in the undeclared intentions maintain that in fact the sanctions have hit the intended target, just failing to incite the public into raucous rebellion. France recently awarded Morgan Tsvangirai for leading the failed “mass stayaways” of 2002 and 2003. Equally strengthened are Zanu-PF’s charges that its political opponents in the MDC-T are trojan horses of Western interests, charges that have been endorsed not only by many of Zimbabwe’s political analysts from across the political divide but also by many other political commentators from across the world, with political leaders like Zambia’s Michael Sata and South Africa’s Thabo Mbeki openly condemning the quisling tendencies in the politics of the MDC-T in general, and in Tsvangirai in particular.
That the MDC-T fronts Western interests in Zimbabwe has become a matter of common knowledge, and those that hold this view do so purely on the basis of common sense and logic. The only rebuttal and defence given by the MDC-T leadership has been a reminder of Zanu-PF’s former pliant politics to Western interests, as well as the assertion that receiving military support from Russia and China during the liberation struggle was tantamount to puppet politics on the part of Zanu and Zapu.
It even gets to a point where ludicrous comparisons have been made between the war for national independence and what the MDC-T calls its “struggle for democracy,” with the millions of dollars received by the MDC-T leadership from the West treated with equal weight to arms of war received by Zanla and Zipra forces to liberate Zimbabwe from colonial slavery.
There is no doubt that Morgan Tsvangirai has stood out as a renowned fighter for democracy, and just about all Zimbabweans know without any shred of doubt that the democracy that Tsvangirai has fought for and continues to fight for is on behalf of the West, for the interest of the West, and imported from the West. The fourth reason given by Freedom House in the profiling of Zimbabwean voters is the liberation legacy, otherwise stated in the report as “liberation from colonialism.”
The MDC-T has underestimated the role of the liberation struggle in the political affairs of Zimbabwe, and the attempt to trivialise and exclude from the draft constitution the recognition of the liberation struggle as the founding pillar of our nationhood is just one example of this ill-informed trend.
From its inception, the MDC-T has megaphoned Western feelings and resentment towards war veterans of Zimbabwe’s liberation struggle, glorifying dissident veterans like Wilfred Mhanda, embracing veterans of the Rhodesia Front like Roy Bennett and Giles Mutsekwa, and even vaingloriously trying to invent heroes out of them. This attempt to separate Zimbabweans from their own history in order to make them lose their identity has failed to resonate with common public opinion, and the Freedom House report only confirms this obvious point. There is something so indelible about a people’s pride.
[Over and over again, the attack by neoliberals is on the nation state, and national identity is a big part of that. They are doing the same in Swaziland, where they gutted government revenues by eliminating the Southern African Customs Union (SACU) which existed since 1904 and provided 60% of state revenues. They are now blaming the lack of government resources on the supposed opulence of the Swazi king. Destroy the sovereignty of the state with one hand, attack national symbols with the other. It's a pattern. You can see the same happening in Europe itself, in Greece for instance. The common denominator is the IMF/World Bank policies, and behind them the trillionair banking dynasties. - MrK]
What the MDC-T has offered to the people of Zimbabwe is the vicious call for change, sloganised so powerfully that the party leadership inadvertently elevated this vacuous call to policy level. Clearly one cannot sustain the delusions of sloganeering for over a decade, and the MDC-T must have known that there is no such policy as “change” on this planet. Whatever MDC-T pretences at formulating policies appear in that long-forgotten thing called “The Blue Print,” or in Tendai Biti’s dusting STERP, these were not captured among the reasons established by Freedom House as the core opinion shapers among Zimbabwe’s voters, and Douglas Mwonzora’s vertigo over the matter is only a matter of badly thought out political reaction. Douglas Mwonzora must learn fast that bread and butter issues appeal more to voters than reactionary politics. Right now he is putting up a very impressive fight to secure for us all an ultimately elitist document him and his lawyer friends like Eric Matinenga and Paul Mangwana fondly call a draft constitution for the people of Zimbabwe.
The draft that Mwonzora defends with the aplomb of a pretentious political warlord is nothing more than a mere guarantee of procedural liberties — guaranteeing that certain procedures will be followed, that we will vote in a certain way, that we can go to court over all sorts of matters of concern, that we will be heard before a jury, that we will have access to different media units and so on and so forth.
Does the draft constitution guarantee freedom from hunger? Does it guarantee housing, health care and education? Does it guarantee economic empowerment of Zimbabweans and employment? Does it guarantee safe working conditions? Does it guarantee true equality and equal distribution of the nation’s resources?
While the commitment of Zanu-PF in implementing its own policies is abundantly questionable, it must be noted that the party’s policies do in principle address the issue of substantial liberties, or what we may call the primary rights of citizens. A guarantee of fundamental procedural rights does not give people access to primary rights, and this is why freedom of the Press does not belong to the listeners and readers but to the owners of the Press. It can be argued that constitutions and the legal systems in societies are not neutral instruments, and that the law itself belongs to those who write it, and to those who use it to control other people, and also to control the resources of a society.
Mwonzora and his lawyer friends are reported to have failed to publish the national report capturing the people’s views on key constitutional matters, after which they are accused of deliberately departing from the contents of this report, drafting for the people what essentially belongs to a constituency best known to the drafters themselves. Chris Mutsvangwa of Zanu-PF believes the draft constitution defended by Mwonzora is a product from the heads of Rhodesian-trained black lawyers, among them his Zanu-PF colleagues Munyaradzi Paul Mangwana and Patrick Chinamasa.
Zanu-PF has made a raft of amendments to the Copac draft, and the party could have done itself a huge favour by simultaneously publishing the national report that Copac made sure would never be public knowledge. But the Politburo has of late become like God reminding us mortals that “my ways are not your ways, and my thoughts are not your thoughts.” The DCC saga speaks that to high heavens. While the motives of Zanu-PF’s Politburo cannot be trusted without question, it is apparent that amendments on clauses covering land, indigenisation, the liberation legacy, foreign policy and moral issues like homosexuality resonate so well with public feeling, and hopefully this is not as far as it goes. It appears that to Douglas Mwonzora and his constituency the draft constitution is nothing more than another tool for “achieving change.” This is precisely why Nelson Chamisa once intimated that if the MDC-T came to power, another “real constitution” would be drafted. One can understand why the push for a new constitution has become the West’s burden.
Zimbabwe is stuck between a party that is using a national agenda as a tool for its narrow objective of effecting change and another party determined to protect through the constitution the broader goal of self-determination, as pursued by the land and indigenisation policies. Infuriated as the MDC-T may be, and excited as Zanu-PF have been, what the Freedom House report shows us is that the people of Zimbabwe are not naïve and that they place at the centre of their political choices matters to do with sovereignty and self-dependence.
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: DOUGLAS MWONZORA, FREEDOM HOUSE, REASON WAFAWAROVA
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