In 2003 Zimbabweans were told they could not survive as a country outside the Commonwealth. But today the British are using the Commonwealth to entice us back, so that they can also get our diamonds. But the people have forgotten the Commonwealth precisely because it has no wealth to give them. The wealth is here.
The Sunday Mail
AFRICAN FOCUS By Tafataona P. Mahoso
There is a global frenzy over the addition of Zimbabwe’s Chiadzwa diamonds to Murowa and River Ranch diamonds. One of the reasons for this frenzy is that a country and a people which have been pictured for the last 15 years as cursed and doomed now appear to be clearly blessed.
Likewise, the leadership of Zimbabwe, which has been demonised as a curse upon their country and their people, have been granted long life so that the God of Chaminuka and Nehanda can bless the nation under that very same leadership.
Indeed, the story of the revelation of a new diamond-endowed Zimbabwe and the extent of its mineral wealth is the story of the fulfilment of one prophecy and the shaming of so many false prophecies.
At the turn of this century there were two types of false prophecy. One was the vindictive prophecy of the descendants of Cecil John Rhodes, which told us that the African liberation movement in Government was a curse and the country was therefore doomed as long as that movement and its leader remained.
In 2000 the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) predicted a critical turning point by December, saying that President Robert Mugabe and the Government would be out of power by Christmas. This prediction was amplified in the November issue of Megabuck magazine in a feature interview entitled “Zimbabwe doomed as long as Mugabe remains in power — Tsvangirai”. The MDC leader was asked: “Do you still stand by your prediction that Mugabe will be out of office by end of year?” Tsvangirai answered: “Yes!”
The other prophecy was a bit more sophisticated. It came in the name of “globalisation” and the need for countries of the South, including Zimbabwe, to embrace neo-liberalism and economic structural adjustment which was to be dictated by the Anglo-Saxon powers. Africa was portrayed as stagnant and paralysed, unless it agreed to be adjusted. Anglo-American Corporation led the way very early on, in the late 1980s, and commissioned experts to look at South Africa and the region beyond the 1990s. Part of that research appeared as a book, The World and South Africa in the 1990s, by Clem Sunter.
Chapter 1 was entitled Rules of the Game and it included a chart called Future “Rules of the Game” in which the world was put into three categories.
The first category was called the dominant Triad nations, who were mostly rich and old, and numbering “millions” in terms of population. The three main actors in the Triad were North America, Japan and Western Europe.
The second group was called the Non-Triad nations who constituted the Poor Young Billions. It was made up of the rest of the world without Africa. Africa was put in its own category as The Swamp or The Pit.
Based on these scenarios, De Beers moved its headquarters from South Africa to Switzerland. Anglo-American Corporation, the creators and owners of De Beers, moved their headquarters from South Africa to London. So did Old Mutual.
Now, by 2000, Zimbabwe, as part of the African “swamp” and “pit”, was being portrayed as clearly doomed, destined for a fate far worse than Somalia.
The reasons for such a fate were given by the very same organisations who now seek to bar Zimbabwe from certifying and selling its Chiadzwa diamonds. Zimbabwe was doomed because it embarked on a land revolution in fulfilment of the goals of the liberation struggle. Zimbabwe was doomed because it dared to lead Sadc into the DRC to stop genocide and looting sponsored by the Anglo-Saxon powers. Zimbabwe was doomed because it dared to leave the British Commonwealth. Zimbabwe was doomed because it abandoned structural adjustment.
In a letter entitled “Enjoy it while it lasts, comrades”, one Alistair Hull told the editor of the Zimbabwe Independent:
“The New World Order advocates (seen here as Anglo-Saxons) will ultimately implement a one-world political system which will operate from a major city somewhere in Europe where there will be a global economy and a one-world religious system, that is, the much-talked-about ecumenical church . . . Elements of our paranoid (Zimbabwean) leadership keep babbling on about sovereignty and the fact that we will never be a colony again. They keep on accusing the World Bank and the IMF of having ulterior motives for Zimbabwe.
“The IMF and the World Bank are just one of the ‘1 000 points of light’ President (George) Bush (Senior) spoke about at the same time he announced the coming new world order.
“The ‘1 000 points of light’ he mentioned are the various organisations and institutions that are slowly and insidiously doing the groundwork for a new world order.
“Any country whose government does not conform to this will ultimately be brought down by whatever means the new world order (Anglo-Saxons) sees fit.
“President Mugabe and Zanu-PF are bucking the new world order and will ultimately be brought down by these people whether they like it or not as was Ian Smith and Rhodesia. We are all pawns in a game — they had better believe it.”
What the False Prophecy Could Not Prophesy
Both types of prophecy missed the following developments and factors:
l The African land reclamation and revolution, even under illegal sanctions, succeeded enough to convince even the opposition to accept that it should not and it cannot be reversed.
l The African majority soon realised that hondo yeminda was the wrong name for the revolutionary land reclamation, since it was not limited to taking farms. The dream of Cecil John Rhodes’s British South Africa Company to get rich on minerals was not realised in Rhodesia; but it can be realised in Zimbabwe under the leadership of Robert Gabriel Mugabe because the God of Chaminuka and Nehanda chose to reveal Zimbabwe’s heart of minerals fully at the very time the world was being told that the country was doomed as long as Mugabe and his liberation movement were still around. The revelations began with new platinum discoveries along the Great Dyke and spread to new coal deposits in Hwange, Gokwe and Chiredzi, as well as methane gas in Lupane.
Diamonds have come as the crowning discovery which has shaken Anglo-American and its diamond subsidiaries in Dee Beers and Consolidated Diamond Mines.
l Clem Sunter’s “poor billions” of China and India emerged as economic giants of the near future, accompanied by Russia, Brazil, Indonesia, Iran and Venezuela. And it is no coincidence that the support for Zimbabwe to certify and sell its diamonds is coming from the very same group, against the so-called Triad.
Above all, the false prophets did not know that neo- liberalism and structural adjustment were the real curses which would be condemned even by those who pushed them on the South. The chaos unleashed by the so-called global financial tsunami or toxic debt can be matched only by the disaster unleashed by the same Triad when it illegally invaded and occupied Iraq on top of Afghanistan.
The result is that the people of Zimbabwe have now forgotten about their departure from the British Commonwealth in 2003. They no longer worry about restoring the white settler farmers. They are, instead, preoccupied with extending African ownership from farms to mines and trade. Diamonds occupy the centre of these concerns because the earnings from their cutting and marketing can finance the farming industry and the infrastructure which has been decimated by illegal sanctions.
Zimbabwe’s diamonds have become an international issue because they have the potential to produce fundamental changes. Before the emergence of Zimbabwe’s Chiadzwa diamonds, Anglo-American Corporation, through De Beers, controlled about 70 percent of the international diamond market. The mechanism for control is De Beers’s Central Selling Organisation (CSO) whose strategies are daily run by a small unit called Diamond Services.
Diamond Services monitors the daily relationship between the global supply of diamonds and the global demand. Diamond Services intervenes in the market, by finding ways of keeping new players and new mines out, by delaying production by competitors or offering to buy them out. It is widely believed that the US companies who were offering very high prices for Chiadzwa diamonds, despite the demonisation, may have been trying to trap Zimbabwe. The diamonds would be shipped to the US and the importing companies would plead that they cannot transfer the funds to Zimbabwe because of illegal sanctions against the country.
At any rate, Zimbabwe’s new diamonds have the potential to cause the following important changes:
l Provide a way out of the financial blockade and sanctions by the Anglo-Saxon powers;
l Reduce the dominance of De Beers in the diamond market;
l Split the 75-member club called Kimberley Process Certification Scheme (KPCS) between cutters and retailers on one hand and producers who may also acquire the capacity to cut and market their own diamonds;
l Rescue the land revolution from the grip of illegal sanctions by providing the much-needed financing for farm inputs and infrastructure; and
l Secure Zimbabwe’s independence and sovereignty by making it possible to avoid debt traps set by the IMF, the World Bank and other Western-dominated financial institutions.
But for these things to happen, the people of Zimbabwe need also to adjust their thinking.
As a result of Anglo-Saxon interference in the politics of Zimbabwe in pursuit of illegal regime change, a tension which has existed between two strands of Zimbabwe’s nationalist politics has grown into a full-blown crisis. One of the two strands can be defined as the home-coming politics which has produced the First Chimurenga, the Second Chimurenga and the Third Chimurenga; this is the strand which is represented by the song:
Mauya, mauya, Comrade
Zvamauya, Hamuchadzoki
Mauya, mauya, Comrade
Zvamauya, Tongai Zimbabwe.
This home-coming is not about a geographical return home alone. It is about our awakening and coming to ourselves, to our God-given wealth, to our history, our memory, our unhu — after slavery, after apartheid, after colonialism and after UDI.
The second tendency in African nationalist politics is the escapist and potentially narcissistic politics which has always been based on the contradictory notion of freedom through Western guidance or imperialist intervention in response to good begging or lobbying by a select, white-groomed, African elite.
The conflict between the two tendencies or strands has been worsened by the globalisation of Western media and their continuing dominance in Africa. This conflict means that we are caught between two types of African leadership. The white-groomed, white-worshipping and potentially narcissistic African leader is the one who sought liberation through lobbying the Queen of England, the British House of Commons, the British House of Lords, the Commonwealth and, occasionally, the UN General Assembly, while minimising or ignoring the role of the povo. In 2003 Zimbabweans were told they could not survive as a country outside the Commonwealth. But today the British are using the Commonwealth to entice us back, so that they can also get our diamonds. But the people have forgotten the Commonwealth precisely because it has no wealth to give them. The wealth is here.
No comments:
Post a Comment