Terror beneath Tendai Biti’s jumping figures on economy

The entire anti-Zimbabwe lobby at home and abroad has been singing like a chorus that Mugabe and Zanu-PF killed agriculture. But why is it that the only sector which was killed is the one driving the expected recovery and growth? One would have expected sectors not touched by reform to drive growth and recovery! Maybe Mugabe should have done to the entire economy what he did to land and agriculture!

The Sunday Mail

African Focus by Tafataona Mahoso

ON September 23 and 24 2010, journalists and their editors got all worked up on account of Finance Minister Tendai Biti's yo-yo forecasts on the Zimbabwe economy.

Like Biti's 2010 budget, the forecast for the growth of the Zimbabwe economy for 2010 had been projected as 5,4 percent, with the International Monetary Fund suggesting 6 percent which was revised down to 2,2 percent before being raised again to 7,7 percent and now 8,1 percent.

Journalists and their editors are missing the real story which is about the Third Chimurenga (land revolution), the indigenisation and empowerment laws, and illegal sanctions.

The real story which creates ideology problems for Minister Biti, his party and its sponsors arises from the fact that the supposed growth of 8,1 percent year is being driven by resettled indigenous farmers who increased their tobacco production from 70 million in 2009 to 120 million kilograms in 2010 without proper support and against debilitating, illegal and racist sanctions imposed on the entire economy and people by the Anglo-Saxon powers at the invitation of Minister Biti's party.

So, the minister, his party and the so-called economic experts who also supported the sanctions while condemning African land reclamation and redistribution are in a quandary.

They are itching to be associated with the emerging growth and recovery trend in order to earn credit through the sheer fact of announcing good news on results produced by the often condemned party; but they are also nervous about linkages. If they honestly link the tobacco story to the land revolution, to resettlement and to the so-called quasi-fiscal activities of the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe which gave those farmers a start — then too many questions will be asked of the minister and his party.

Which economy is the minister saying is going to grow 8,1 percent in 2010? Is it the one from which land reform and indigenisation were supposed to have chased away all meaningful investors?

Is it the one which President Robert Mugabe destroyed, the one which Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai pronounced “doomed as long as Mugabe is around” in Tsvangirai's Megabuck interview of November 2000?

The entire anti-Zimbabwe lobby at home and abroad has been singing like a chorus that Mugabe and Zanu-PF killed agriculture. But why is it that the only sector which was killed is the one driving the expected recovery and growth? One would have expected sectors not touched by reform to drive growth and recovery! Maybe Mugabe should have done to the entire economy what he did to land and agriculture!

So, a communication technique has been adopted to try to cope with the dilemma. The minister and his party will claim credit for the growth and recovery indicators, by association; that is, without mentioning past causes, past policies or agents responsible for the growth trends.

This is called “agent deletion”, which means producing indices, symptoms and trends without naming the real drivers.

Therefore “tobacco” becomes the driver, the cause, but not the newly resettled farmers or the policy which put them on the land or the RBZ which engaged in quasi-fiscal activities to get farmers started when sanctions had wiped out all other sources of support.

But the dilemma is not just for Minister Biti and his party. It affects the entire anti-Zimbabwe lobby and its media industry groomed over the last 15 years around the so-called Zimbabwe crisis.

The conflict and confusion to which Zimbabweans have been subjected for the last 12 years arose partly because too many who called themselves national leaders, business leaders and experts on the economy had no clue what the Zimbabwe economy is or where exactly it is located.

Many simply thought that since they knew how to make money in Zimbabwe, they were fit to lead or to direct economic policy. But they do not know what that economy is or where it is located. That is why we have five divergent growth forecasts for the very same year.

One demonstration of this continuing problem is that these opinion leaders tell us daily that any new laws on indigenisation, African empowerment and the restructuring of the mining industry should be abandoned or neutralised because “we do not want to chase away investors”.

When some of these people were conspiring and colluding with white racists to agitate for and to impose illegal economic sanctions on Zimbabwe, they and the media supporting them never stopped to think or say that even the mere mention of sanctions in association with Zimbabwe discouraged and chased away investors.

Indeed, what sort of economy would be destroyed by indigenisation and empowerment laws when it apparently was not destroyed by illegal economic sanctions?

Who are these “strategic investors” who did not mind illegal sanctions for 12 years but will suddenly be chased away as soon as there is a law requiring that Zimbabweans should own at least 51 percent of all national enterprises?

The question about which economy and whose economy is supposed to grow by 8,1 percent this year also leads to another question: Who has been in real crisis during the so-called Zimbabwe crisis?

Is it Crisis Coalition Zimbabwe and Sydney Chisi or the UDI economy of white Rhodesia, or the newly resettled farmers and the new indigenous companies in mining?

Given the meaning of crisis, one wonders why opposition groups in Zimbabwe would want to name themselves Crisis Coalition Zimbabwe.

Does this mean that they want the perceived turning point to last forever so that they will always have something to use to justify receiving donor funds, or does it mean that they will organise pseudo-events to prove that the crisis continues even long after it has gone?

These are not idle questions in our time and our situation. In “The Media and the Politics of Crisis,” Marc Raboy and Bernard Dagenais dealt with the role of mass media in publicising pseudo-events which may help to dramatise a non-existent crisis or to divert attention from a really critical turning point toward pseudo-events claiming to represent a crisis.

“The tendency (in mass media) is, therefore, for the media to seek out a crisis where it does not exist, and to obscure the actual forces of change that threaten (corporate) media privilege along with entrenched social privilege in general. Paradoxically, this means that the media will tend to pay more attention to a fabricated crisis than to one which can stake a material claim to reality."

How can the only sector which President Mugabe allegedly destroyed be also the only one to lead the current recovery?

In the context of Zimbabwe, the white minority media and the white minority economy occupied the “mainstream” position in 1980. Beginning in 1992 there were concerted efforts to change the economic status quo in the economy, starting with land redistribution.

By 2000, there were concerted efforts also to change the status quo in the mass media by making local, national and Pan-African content a policy priority. This was followed by the introduction of statutory media regulation beyond broadcasting, to cover print and advertising.

By the end of 2005 the legal side of the battle for African land reclamation had been sealed. The transformation of the African land reclamation movement into a national assets reclamation movement is still going on.

Given this scenario, it is obvious which mass media services would be most prone to this tendency to divert attention from the real crisis by fabricating pseudo-crises and pseudo-events inflated to look like crises.The heart of the turning point is the loss of white Rhodesian privilege or the threat of it, on the land, in politics and to some extent in the media.

In a situation like that, it means that when people in Zimbabwe speak of or write about the “crisis” they are not likely to mean the same thing.

The failure of local oppositional forces and the local corporate Press to name and locate the crisis is linked to a real global crisis as well.

The North Atlantic states, especially the United Kingdom and the United States of America, are also facing an unnameable crisis from which they are eager to divert attention. It is no coincidence that Britain and the United States have led the way in helping the local oppositional forces to fabricate an alternative crisis to the crisis of white Rhodesian agriculture and Rhodesian media.

At this point it might help the reader to understand what we mean if we list some examples of oppositional efforts to displace the crisis or to create pseudo-events to stand in for the real crisis.

In 1998, British media claimed that the Government of Zimbabwe would fall as a result of urban riots and industrial stayaways orchestrated by certain industries working with some trade unions.

Instead of falling, the Government of Zimbabwe participated in the Sadc war to save the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) from Rwanda and Uganda. And the Zimbabwe Defence Forces returned intact from that war.

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!”

This did not happen. So on February 21, 2001, The Daily News announced that President Mugabe would be out of office by the first day of July 2001.

Other media also chipped in, especially from South Africa. Norman Reynolds and others said that it was not only the President who would be out of office by July 2001. The whole country would have completely run out of food by that time as well. These doomsday predictions were being orchestrated as part of the campaign for the 2002 Presidential elections.

Still within 2001, The Financial Gazette came out on the side of the regime change forces and announced that 74 percent of the people of Zimbabwe would vote against President Mugabe and his ruling party in 2002.

This wrong prediction was based on a fraudulent opinion poll done by white South Africans with some assistance from activist academics in Zimbabwe. The fraudulent opinion polls were intended to create an alibi for the MDC which knew that it would not win the elections.

Sure enough, when the MDC lost the vote it rejected the results and urged its foreign sponsors to condemn and isolate the country. This then gave The Daily News the opportunity to publish a front page condemnation of the President as “Unelected Despot”.

The Zimbabwe Human Rights NGO Forum and Crisis Zimbabwe Coalition then contributed to a big document called “Is Genocide Imminent in Zimbabwe?” They then proceeded to answer their own question: that there would be genocide in the country by January 2003. The genocidal war would be far worse than what happened in Rwanda in 1994. This did not happen.

The reader may wonder what these recent events mean?

* First, we must remain sceptical of predictions claiming to come from economists or expert polls.

* Second, President Mugabe is in power but the same economy which was supposed to be doomed as long as he was around is forecast to grow by 8,1 per cent by the very same people who said it was doomed.

* Third, the growth of African-grown tobacco from 70 million kilogrammes in 2009 to 120 million kilogrammes in 2010 is not a forecast. It is real. The tobacco is coming from the one sector which Zimbabwe’s detractors said the President and the war veterans had killed. And we do not see much recovery from manufacturing, the one sector which was not touched by the reforms.

* Lastly, the same detractors are still cooking up more and more false predictions about elections which are repeats of the false predictions of 2001-2003.

Citizens beware!

Virgin in Zimbabwe: beware vultures disguised as angels

The country has been under illegal sanctions imposed by the United Kingdom, United States and their allies for the past ten years and Mr Branson has been investing next door in South Africa and elsewhere watching the country deteriorate. When he established a school of entrepreneurship for young people in Johannesburg did he think about the dying people next door? When we were mocked by the international community for having the highest inflation and our people died of curable diseases like cholera he was there; with all his capital investing in safari-related businesses and air transport just next door.

The Zimbabwe Guardian

By Tendai Midzi
A VERY very interesting article on the Reuters website in which Virgin boss and billionaire Richard Branson urged 'people' to invest in Zimbabwe, saying the world was wrong to wait instead of helping the country to develop.

This was a very interesting statement coming after The Economist's revelation that Zimbabwe could stage an economic recovery within two years and a best case scenario could see it "back as one of the most successful countries in Africa" within 10 years.

The statement also comes after Tendai Biti's very Right Wing and intellectually flawed argument about the national bourgeoisie in Zimbabwe.

A close look at this media hyping up of Zimbabwe, without a corresponding high level of engagement with the country, shows that Zimbabwe is under attack more than it was under the first wave of colonialism. It is the new battleground for a new "Cold War".

Branson's entry into the fray is predicated at having access to the huge Africa (Zimbabwean) resource. It is also about countering the power of China.

The new initiative was hatched by a Virgin 'philanthropic group', Virgin Unite, and the Nduna Foundation. Virgin Unite brought together a group of partners to create the Zimbabwe Trust "to facilitate investments in small and medium sized enterprises".

Who is Isabella Matambanadzo? She has worked for the Soros Foundation’s Open
Society Initiative for Southern Africa, and was Chairperson of the Board of
Trustees of Radio Voice of the People (RadioVOP Zimbabwe). One should read what
VOP broadcasts on Zimbabwe to have a clue of what exactly is going on here.

RadioVOP has been there for as long as the sanctions against Zimbabwe
have been there. They recently celebrated their ten year anniversary. Their
links with the BBC, Reuters in aiding the onslaught on Zimbabwe and Zanu-PF
leaves a lot to be desired.

The Nduna Foundation was founded by Amy Robbins – a corporate banker and founder and former Chief Operating Officer of the multi-strategy NY-based hedge fund, Glenview Capital.

The two, Mr Branson and Ms Robbins are financial backers of the so-called "The Elders who last year wanted to come into Zimbabwe and "assess the impact of the cholera crisis in Zimbabwe", but were denied visas.

The Elders include former Irish President Mary Robinson, Mr Richard Branson, former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, former US president Jimmy Carter, Cde Samora Machel's ex-wife Graca Machel, retired Archbishop Desmond Tutu, former South African president Nelson Mandela, etc and Mr Branson.

Bishop Tutu has advocated military action to topple President Mugabe and is connected with many other "charities" that purport to help Zimbabwe.

These people are relentless in their desire to "support" Zimbabwe; and one wonders why. They don't make as much noise about the illegal sanctions imposed on the country. Their desire to help from within the country is a cause of concern. They could do more from their own countries–firstly by urging their governments not to interfere in the internal affairs of Zimbabwe.

Mr Branson's philanthropy comes a little too late. It comes as Eastern countries have shown an unrelenting desire to work with Zimbabwe.

The country has been under illegal sanctions imposed by the United Kingdom, United States and their allies for the past ten years and Mr Branson has been investing next door in South Africa and elsewhere watching the country deteriorate. When he established a school of entrepreneurship for young people in Johannesburg did he think about the dying people next door?

When we were mocked by the international community for having the highest inflation and our people died of curable diseases like cholera he was there; with all his capital investing in safari-related businesses and air transport just next door.

Such statements should be taken with a pinch of salt. Zimbabwe does not need investments disguised as "philanthropic work" now. We reached rock bottom by ourselves and our people worked hard to lift themselves out of poverty; and are still doing so, despite the inhumane onslaught on the country.

The international community has now realised that this jewel we call Zimbabwe, having discovered the largest deposit of diamonds, in now able to lift itself out of the poverty that the West helped create in the first place.

No one would argue that had Mr Branson come to our rescue four five, ten years ago, he would have been more honourable and believable. Why now?

When Tony Blair and Gordon Brown went to the United Nations Security Council to convince them to impose sanctions on a tiny landlocked country Mr Branson and Ms Robbins and The Elders should have used their influence to bring them to the negotiating table. South Africa, China and Zimbabwe's other friends (countries and individuals) did.

Zimbabwe is inevitably on the recovery path and international capital is now coming disguised as philanthropy. South Africa today has useless mobile phone projects and leadership academies when its people are living in poverty.

They can bring as many textbooks as they want to hoodwink the people of Zimbabwe. Zimbabwe needs the lifting of sanctions. It will create or buy its own textbooks. Zimbabweans are educated and are conscious of they own struggle. The leadership in the country will never allow this backdoor entry by international hedge funds, international capital and Western foreign policy agents into Zimbabwe.

Reuters reports that: "The founding of Virgin Unite, the philanthropic arm of Branson's Virgin Group, has helped create Enterprise Zimbabwe, a nonprofit group connecting philanthropists and commercial investors with business and social development opportunities."

This is interesting because it comes at a time when Zimbabwe least needs philanthropy; and the leadership of the country is not involved; at least the Zanu-PF side of the leadership.

The renewed interest in Zimbabwe, just prior to the elections next year should be read in its right historical context. This happened again in 2007. Many governments, media and companies voiced their opinions about Zimbabwe, how it could recover only if the Zanu-PF government was to relinquish power.

Desmond Tutu (an 'Elder') and Archbishop of York John Sentamu voiced their opinions on behalf of the West Archbishop Sentamu even went on to cut his dog collar in protest against the leadership of President Mugabe.

Mr Branson in June last year met with Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai and details of their meeting were never made public. If he got some business concessions from that meeting we hope that they are in the best interests of the people of Zimbabwe; not in the form of the Rudd Concession.

The New York Times was right in its editorial when it said: "Zimbabwe is considered to be one of the most difficult nations in Africa to help." that is true. Zimbabwe does not need help. It has resources. It needs to be engaged in the international community like any other country. This should be done by the lifting of illegal sanctions.

It doesn't need the Clinton Global Initiative, without the lifting of sanctions.

Zimbabweans that remained in the country and busted sanctions from within will not tolerate this backdoor entry by "vultures" disguised as angels. What has changed? Is it Chiadzwa diamonds, or a realisation that there could be huge profits to be made from the vast mineral deposits in the country?

Is it lack of comparable viable investments elsewhere with a return like that of Zimbabwe?

Is Mr Banson sincere in saying: "Zimbabwe is a magnificent country that has had a really rough few years and either the world can continue to wait and see and not invest."

Mr Branson goes on: "The idea of Enterprise Zimbabwe is to have a sort of safe haven for people to invest through." He should know that there are mechanisms in Zimbabwe for investment already. Why does his group not use those mechanisms? We have government departments in the country that he can utilise for that purpose. Why another charity?

The NY Times reports: "Enterprise Zimbabwe has attracted the money that has helped those things happen and now wants to attract more. Established quietly a year ago, it will have its official debut on Tuesday before one of the biggest gatherings of billionaires and other wealthy people dedicated to making social change, the Clinton Global Initiative."

Why are they launching this organisation elsewhere and not in Zimbabwe and not engaging authorities in the country?

Why do 'donors' think Zimbabwe needs urgent help when their countries do not think so? Are these real donors or simply investors? Who is Isabella Matambanadzo?

Mr Branson says "the world can help Morgan Tsvangirai and the coalition government get Zimbabwe back on its feet". Why Tsvangirai when he is not Head of State and Government? Why not President Mugabe? This is the contempt with which they treat oiur leadership and that contempt will be reciprocated.

Mr Branson wants to create a "safe investment haven". Yes, safe for himself and his backdoor Zimbabweans. Where were they all this time? Zimbabweans are building diamond centres and creating institutions that will threaten global businesses like Virgin.

Our friends in China, India, China, Venezuela, etc – all weather friends – did not wait. Who is Mr Branson referring to as "the world community" or is it a sudden realisation that the West has been left behind in the rush for Zimbabwe?

These people should read President Mugabe's words loud and clear: "Zimbabwe will never be a colony again".

Thanks Mr Branson, Mr Soros, but no thanks. Our Chiyangwas and other vibrant businesspeople in Zimbabwe and our friends elsewhere will do it for us.

Sanctions negate achievement of MDGs

Even as our economy suffered from illegal sanctions imposed on the country by our detractors, we continued to deploy and direct much of our own resources towards the achievement of the targets we set for ourselves.

Indeed, we find it very disturbing and regrettable that after we all agreed to work towards the improvement of the lives of our citizens, some countries should deliberately work to negate our efforts in that direction.

(This is a speech delivered by President Mugabe at a UN high-level plenary meeting on Millennium Development Goals in New York on September 21, 2010.)

By President Robert Mugabe
Your Excellencies, the President of the 65th Session of the General Assembly, Mr Joseph Deiss, and the President of the 64th Session of the General Assembly, Dr Ali Treki, Your Majesties, Your Excellencies, Heads of State and Government, Your Excellency, the Secretary-General of the United Nations, Mr Ban Ki-moon, Distinguished Delegates, Ladies and Gentlemen, Comrades and Friends.

I wish to thank you, Mr President and the Secretary-General of the United Nations, Mr Ban Ki-moon, for convening this very important meeting.

Co-Chairs, You will recall that we gathered in this august Assembly in the year 2000 and agreed on a set of social and humanitarian deliverables which we appropriately called the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).

We then set out separately and collectively as member-states to achieve our targets.

We now meet, five years before the target year 2015, to review the state of implementation of those goals, to share experiences, identify obstacles and, possibly, chart a course of accelerated action to achieve the Millennium Development Goals.

Co-Chairs, while there is reason to celebrate the progress attained in some areas, the challenges that remain are serious and many.

The recent economic and financial crises wreaked havoc on our previously confident march towards 2015. Resources dwindled, priorities had to be re-arranged, and for many of us in the developing world, sources of support were reduced, or even lost completely.

Yet, we remain determined, even in these circumstances, to achieve the MDGs in particular, and other internationally agreed commitments in general.

Co-Chairs, from the onset, Zimbabwe has demonstrated unwavering commitment towards the implementation of the MDGs.

We set up an MDGs steering committee in 2000 to track and report progress on implementation.

We initially prioritised Goals 1 - Eradicate extreme poverty and hunger, 3 - Promote gender equality and empower women, and 6 - Combat HIV/Aids, malaria and other diseases, which we viewed as critical to the achievement of all the other goals.

Even as our economy suffered from illegal sanctions imposed on the country by our detractors, we continued to deploy and direct much of our own resources towards the achievement of the targets we set for ourselves.

Indeed, we find it very disturbing and regrettable that after we all agreed to work towards the improvement of the lives of our citizens, some countries should deliberately work to negate our efforts in that direction.

I believe that as we sit here today and re-dedicate ourselves to the achievement of the MDGs in the time frame we set ourselves, this noble effort on our part will only reach fruition if all of us walk our talk.

Our MDGs steering committee has produced three reports since its formation. The reports show that we have registered mixed results.

Despite our best efforts, we fell short of our targets because of the illegal and debilitating sanctions imposed on the country, and, consequently, the incidence of poverty in Zimbabwe remains high.

As a result of these punitive measures and despite our turnaround economic plan, the Government of Zimbabwe has been prevented from making a positive difference in the lives of the poor, the hungry, the sick and the destitute among its citizens.

This, Co-Chairs, is regrettable because Zimbabwe has a stable economic and political environment.

We have the resources, and with the right kind of support from the international community, we have the potential to improve the lives of our people.

Co-Chairs, Zimbabwe's commitment to the education of its people is well-known. Since independence in 1980 there has been a massive expansion in primary, secondary and tertiary education. A lot of investment has gone into human capital development.

Relevant policies, including the Early Childhood Development Policy, have ensured that net enrolments in schools remain high. As you may be aware, Mr President, according to recent Unicef reports, Zimbabwe has the highest literacy rate in Africa.

Co-Chairs, I am also pleased to inform you that Zimbabwe is set to reach the gender parity target in both primary and secondary school enrolment.

The country has also made strides in attaining gender parity in enrolment and completion rates at tertiary education.

We have signed and ratified a number of international and regional gender instruments and promulgated national policies and laws on gender.

Nevertheless, we are lagging behind in regard to gender equal participation in decision-making in all sectors by 2015.

Women still lag behind.

While there has been a slight increase in the number of women Parliamentarians from 14 percent in 1990-95 to the current target of 30 percent, we are concerned that this is still below the 2005 target of 30 percent.

Co-Chairs, regarding Goal 6, my country has registered significant progress in lowering the HIV and Aids prevalence rate.

The estimated prevalence rate in adults aged 15-49 years was 23,7 percent in 2001.

This dropped to 18,1 percent in 2005 and declined further to 14,3 percent in 2009.

This decline was achieved despite lack of support from the international community, and at a time when even issues such as HIV and Aids were politicised and mixed with agendas of regime change.

My Government greatly appreciates the assistance it is now receiving from the Global Fund and other agencies.

We remain concerned about the incidence of HIV and Aids in our country and hope that it will continue to decline significantly as Government strengthens prevention efforts.

Co-Chairs, we are worried about the limited progress we have made in the area of environmental sustainability.

The impact of climate change, as evidenced by recurrent droughts, flooding, unreliable and unpredictable rainfall seasons, has wreaked havoc on the lives of our people, most of whom depend on agriculture for a living.

In addition, efforts by Government to provide clean water, decent sanitation and shelter for both urban and rural dwellers, have suffered as a result of the illegal sanctions imposed by some Western countries.

We applaud those in the international community who have responded to our appeal for assistance to address these urgent challenges.

Co-Chairs, my country remains convinced that the MDG targets are achievable. What is needed is political commitment, particularly, on the part of developed count- ries. There is need to ensure that commitments already made are not reduced even in the light of new demands.

Aid delivery and co-ordination mechanisms must not be hampered by political biases and preferences. Let us keep the promise we made 10 years ago.

Let us all strive to make 2015 a watershed year, a year when poverty, hunger, disease and other ailments which are impediments in life can be completely prevented.

Let us henceforth forge a wide-ranging global partnership to make the world a better place for all its peoples, now and in the future.

I thank you.

Zimbabwe journos: neocolonial-addled agents

Remnants of colonial broadcasters lead these media houses in the host countries and function mainly to perpetuate what residual "white interests" masked as "minority rights".

Maravi/Newzimbabwe.com

By Basil Mutoti
THE Government and leadership of Zimbabwe has been under vicious, slanderous and libelous attack by so-called independent media to a point where claims by journalists and the international community that there ought to be a "free and independent" media space in Zimbabwe are meaningless and absurd.

Media should investigate and report correctly; not engage in political activism, if it is to be distinguished from political parties and political pressure groups. Likewise journalists, if they are to be respectable members of society, have to be professional in approach and investigate and find evidence in their reports to back them up.

The sheer ignorance and blatant disregard for facts oftentimes displayed in "independent" Zimbabwean media; makes a mockery of an education system that is said to be one of the best on the African continent.

The onslaught on Zimbabwe has been mainly carried out in the media; with the likes of charlatan and quacky broadcasters like SW Radio literally getting away "with murder"; slandering and engaging in libellous broadcasts that would never see the light of day even in Western newspapers.

Some reporters who could have carved serious careers in broadcasting and journalism, have become part of these "personal" projects and their integrity often compromised to a point of no return.

Zimbabwean "independent media" often gets away with calling people murderers, killers and thieves without backing it up with court decisions.

The journalists in these media houses have sled into the habit of dehumanizing and inferiorizing African leadership at any given opportunity with the hope of getting some award, recognition or some token from Western organisations.

Africa's past was shaped by depredations many of which were caused by the West. Today, that pillaging, plunder and robbery continues unabated; and is encouraged by African journalists. A neocolonized media, often ruled by the power of the dollar (or pound) exacerbates that situation.

African journalists, mainly employed in Western media houses, are the worst kind; they denigrate their own people, do not investigate stories fully and often have preconceived ideas about the nature of political social and economic processes in Africa.

They also have a twisted mindset, and twisted sense of self-worth, which makes them the best agents for the cloying banality of our African culture, ideals and aspirations.

The likes of SW Radio rely on charlatan political commentators like "Dr" John Makumbe and various other ignorant commentators whose motives are incongruent with the processes in the host countries.

Remnants of colonial broadcasters lead these media houses in the host countries and function mainly to perpetuate what residual "white interests" masked as "minority rights".

Take one journalist, Angus Shaw, who reporting on the increase in alcohol consumption in Zimbabwe, writes: "Health authorities (in Zimbabwe|) also are reporting increases in illnesses linked to the consumption of illegal, homemade drinks with a high alcohol content made from potatoes, rags, chemicals, rotting vegetables and sugar."

Such sweeping statements, not backed up by facts, are repeated worldwide by international media houses like The Canadian Press for which Shaw was writing.

Recently, on SW Radio Africa, anti-Zanu PF Zimbabwean political activist who wishes people to think that he is a journalist, Lance Guma, was corrected by Deputy Minister for Women's Affairs, Gender & Community, Jessie Majome, when he tried to present the work of COPAC in some condescending and poisonous way.

Guma had suggested that COPAC was marred by violence to a point of making it an irrelevant institution.

This is only one of the endless number of grossly biased and inaccurate reports on what is really going on in Zimbabwe.

Interestingly, SW Radio's highly biased reports, are repeated elsewhere including by the BBC, who are licensed to report from within Zimbabwe.

The number of BBC reports, interestingly, have been reduced since they were relicensed to broadcast from the country. The lies they peddled for a long time can no longer be sustained now that they have the opportunity to report from within Zimbabwe.

The same goes for the likes of Al Jazeera's Haru Mutasa, who had for some time, exclusive access to reporting from within Zimbabwe.

These people cannot tell lies for long as Zimbabwean people wise up to this kind of poisonous reportage; which completely ignores, but exacerbates the effects of the illegal sanctions on Zimbabwe.

This way of reporting is characteristic of many so-called journalists who have left the country; and the so-called "political commentators" who have no idea of the subject matter they comment on. They are highly partisan and lost in gutters of neocolonialism.

As long as Zimbabwe is under Western attack, the state media in the country has to adopt a vanguard approach. The "soft touch" approach is not proportional to the myriad of vicious, ignorant and slanderous reports we read about daily.

If Cuba did not have a vigilant state media; like Juventud Rebelde, the effects of the century long embargo on that country would have been more disastrous.

This self-inferiorisation by African journalists has to be met by a proportional response from state media; and their eagerness to publicise Westernism has to be attacked back; if Africa is to self-determine.

Reports from the West about the West are in direct contrast to this gutter journalism by African journalists. CNN, BBC, SkyNews, etc glorify the West and undermine Africa. They are an extension of the policies of Governments of their respective countries, in as far as international branding of their countries is concerned.

These "journalists" who accept crumbs, scrambling for crumby awards and recognition, should be exposed. Where they slander, they should be brought before the courts.

This is not, in any way, an attempt to restrict press freedom.

Press freedom should not be tantamount to slander and it is not synonymous with illegal activity.

So-called independent press should abide by journalistic principles and its reporting should be above board and exemplary.

Independence is not a ticket to say anything. It should be accompanied by responsibility; not by charlatanism

The unsustainable myth of Nelson Mandela

The former MK colleague then made a cynical remark: that the Freedom Park mirrored the confusion surrounding the vision of Nelson Mandela’s legacy. If Oliver Tambo were around to witness this, he continued, the man would cry.

The Herald

By Alexander Kanengoni
I AM tempted to contribute towards the huge debate about Ndebele ethnicity that Nathaniel Manheru ignited a week ago, but something else equally compelling has held my attention; the unfolding South African political drama.

I can’t stop wondering how much longer Nelson Mandela’s legacy will survive because it is clear it is not sustainable.

The firebrand ANC Youth League leader, Julius Malema, is making the headlines again.

This time, it’s not about liberation war songs that the South African judiciary, in its "wisdom", banned. It’s his wrath targeted at the ANC leadership, his bosses.

The young man made disparaging remarks about those leaders with multiple wives and warned them they would not be venerated above the party. It’s not difficult to guess who he means.

The young man fires unguided missiles, doesn’t he?

ANC chairperson, Madame Baleka Mbete, tried to douse the flames. She explained that the country’s real problem was not the transgressions of the party leadership, but the continued economic marginalisation of the black people.

Tough words indeed from the ANC leadership that whites would be apprehensive to hear.

Words that one would have expected to come from Malema himself! Isn’t that what we have always been saying? Nelson Mandela’s myth and legacy were created to forestall tackling the issue of black economic empowerment. Is the ANC ready at last to take the issue head-on?

Then there was Cosatu secretary general, Zwelinzima Vavi, a key ally of the ANC in government, threatening the government during the recent nationwide strike to remember that power was in Cosatu’s hands and not the ANC’s.

The ANC secretary general, Gwede Mantashe retorted quickly that if Cosatu ever dreamt that was the case, then they were mistaken. The ANC is under siege. It might be forced to take unprecedented political decisions it never thought it would take to save itself.

There is no disagreement in the sub-region, in fact in the world at large, that Zimbabwe has almost resolved its fundamental issues regardless of the enormous cost. Unfortunately, South Africa has not even started yet and there is no way it is going to escape it.

But then, much like our own Rhodesians, the whites down there will never learn. Nelson Mandela’s legacy, the myth they are desperately propping in order to hide behind, is not sustainable.

South Africa’s farmer organisation held its annual meeting sometime last week; it was there in the news. The conference hall was jam-packed but there wasn’t a single black face among the hundreds, if not thousands, attending the meeting.

Even if there were separate organisations for black farmers, why were they not invited? The leader of our own increasingly peripheral white commercial farmers union, Dion Theron, was there, presumably by invitation. If that was the case, why then were our black farmers organisations like the ZFU and ZICFU not invited?

How many members does Theron’s organisation have, anyway? In Centenary where I farm, I can count the number of remaining white farmers on the fingers of one hand! I suppose he is representing farmers that have relocated to the UK, South Africa and Australia.

They still dream they will come back one day. Unfortunately, this is the dilemma of the white man in post-colonial Africa. He cannot regard himself as an equal to the black man.

In other parts of independent Africa, they avoided that "humiliation" by emigrating. In South Africa, as it was in Rhodesia, their interests are so entrenched they are prepared to fight to death.

In Rhodesia, they believe they were sold by the British, Ian Smith said so in his book, The Great Betrayal. It’s difficult to see how Mandela’s legacy can survive for much longer. The ANC has started talking about the economic marginalisation of the blacks as the root cause of the country’s instability and it is under siege.

The images on television of the white farmers at their conference reminded me of the chilling feeling I had at the Voortrekker Monument in Pretoria during a visit to South Africa recently. Built on top of a hill directly facing Union Buildings, South Africa’s parliament, the colossal stone structure, to commemorate the history of the Afrikaners, took a decade to construct. We were told it was built from 1937 to 1947.

And engraved on granite right round the walls of the gigantic stone structure are images that tell the story of the Afrikaners during the Great Trek during their journey north from the Cape, away from British domination. Unlike the English who were predominantly entrepreneurs and miners, the Afrikaners were farmers.

They fled from British persecution and domination from the Cape to Natal, then Orange Free State and finally Transvaal where they could not take it any longer and war broke out, the Anglo-Boer War. And throughout this long journey, any mention of the black man is when they were engaged in a military confrontation as they took away his land.

For instance in Natal, there was a war with the Zulus as they did to the Zulus what they did not want the British to do to them; subjugate and rule them. To show how despicable they regarded the Zulus, they engraved on the walls an image of Zulu warriors killing Afrikaner babies and another where the warriors were being trampled by horses ridden by their gallant soldiers.

Those two graphic images, among others in the colonial spiral, summarise the painful story of how the Africans lost their land. There were other groups like the Ndebele under Mzilikazi that the Afrikaners crushed.

Mzilikazi fled across the Limpopo and established his capital at Bulawayo.

And between the hill with the Vootrekker Monument and Union Building is another smaller hill where the ANC have built their own Freedom Memorial Park after the demise of apartheid in 1994, a version of our own Heroes Acre.

For me, it is here that you come face to face with South Africa’s irreconcilable contradictions. Everyone that you care to think about have got their small space here. Even the generals who fought to crush the black resistance are mentioned and the citation for one is: "he showed compassion for the injured victims."

How such a general can find space alongside Che Guevara and Steve Biko, as is the case here, is beyond comprehension. All the names of soldiers who perished during the First and Second World Wars, black, white, Indian and coloured, are also listed at the Freedom Memorial Park.

Whereas the Voortrekker Monument is easy to define, it is difficult to do the same with the Freedom Memorial Park. South Africa is honouring at its national shrine soldiers who perished during wars between imperial powers to control the world.

The question then becomes: Who is telling the story here? It certainly cannot be the ordinary South African telling such an unclear and confused story. The Afrikaner from the other hill could well be telling the story here!

We have our divergent opinions here but the definition of our Heroes Acre is indisputable.

The criterion of who should and should not go there is clear. There is very little dispute over that. Ndabaningi Sithole and Gibson Sibanda were classic examples of individuals who, by definition, failed to make it there.

It is an indication of the clarity of our vision.

A South African colleague and also a former member of Umkonto weSizwe, who was with us during the tour, whispered in my ear that a sub-committee of The Truth and Reconciliation Commission determined the criterion of who should and should not be mentioned here.

The TRC is selecting South Africa’s heroes? No wonder.

The former MK colleague then made a cynical remark: that the Freedom Park mirrored the confusion surrounding the vision of Nelson Mandela’s legacy. If Oliver Tambo were around to witness this, he continued, the man would cry.

In fact, there was a young AZAPO activist who had earlier on declared that if Biko was still around, he would not bother to vote.

The Freedom Memorial Park is the black man with his head bowed down, clasping his hat in his hands, apologising to the West for trying to fight the white man.

But if there is confusion in the definition of South Africa’s Freedom Memorial Park, there is absolute clarity in the Hector Peterson Memorial Square in Soweto. We also went there.

The whole world remembers that famous picture from the June 16, 1976 Soweto students uprisings because it captured the horrors of apartheid.

The picture of a young man carrying a dying little boy in his arms and a crying girl on the side?

Yes, that picture. There is a square in Soweto to the little boy’s memory.

His name was Hector Peterson and he was 10.

The little boy was the first victim of the June 16 Soweto massacre. The little girl crying on the side was his sister and her name was Antoinette.

The young man carrying him was Mbuyiselo Makhubu. The three young people encapsulated the face of South African internal resistance against apartheid: the pain (the dying little boy), the helplessness (his crying sister) and the determination (the young man’s anguish as he tried to carry the dying little boy to safety).

They say Mbuyiselo eventually died during the struggle outside the country.

The primary school nearby where the three were pupils is named after him, Mbuyiselo Makhubu Primary School. Antoinette is a librarian at the Memorial Square’s library.

It is difficult to imagine that the road from the place where the little boy called Hector Peterson was shot dead on June 16, 1976 would one day lead to the Freedom Memorial Park.

What happened? Perhaps it is a case of a struggle that lost its way or a struggle that was hijacked along the way.

Madame Mbete is right. Julius Malema’s anger with the top ANC leadership is misdirected. The same applies to South Africans’ anger against fellow Africans from neighbouring countries that is commonly known as xenophobia.

The real problem is the continued economic marginalisation of the blacks and that is Nelson Mandela’s legacy.

I don’t see this legacy surviving much longer.

No matter how much money is used to prop it, it is bound to crumble. The ANC is under siege.

Let’s be wary of West’s agendas

The issue of human rights has been gravely abused by the western powers to punish those leaders who do not pander to their whims.

Almost every leader who does not dance to the tune of the West has been labelled a human rights violator.

Yet the whole world has seen the United States and its allies wantonly violating the rights of other countries and their citizens.

The Herald
(EDITORIAL)
ZIMBABWE appears determined to forge ahead with reforms of its political and governance systems in keeping with the Global Political Agree-ment.

It has partially dealt with the media environment, putting in place the Zimbabwe Media Commission and issuing out licences to newspaper publishers.

What remains is the broadcasting sector.

Similar progress has been made in reforming the electoral system.

The Zimbabwe Electoral Commission is in place and the necessary changes are being made to our electoral laws.

And on Monday, Justice and Legal Affairs Mini-ster Patrick Chinamasa spoke about the forthcoming Bill to operationalise the Zimbabwe Human Rights Commission.

This is confirmation that Zimbabwe has an open society with nothing to hide. Zimbabweans fought a bitter liberation struggle so that they can be free and enjoy the rights and privileges that come with being an independent and sovereign nation.

Yet out there the picture being painted is that of a country that has no respect for human rights.

Of course, these falsehoods are peddled to achieve political ends by our erstwhile oppressors who now masquerade as champions of democracy and human rights.

Human rights are not a Western concept.

The West has only been at the forefront of championing them in recent years in order to serve its economic interests.

As Africans, we have always included human rights in our social, economic and political systems and there is no reason now for anyone to be opposed to the setting up of a human rights commission.

Already, Zimbabwe is party to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the International Convention on Civil and Political Rights and the International Convention on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights.

At the regional level, Zimbabwe has assented to the African Charter on Human and People’s Rights.

It is only proper that Zimbabwe’s human rights programme be run by a properly constituted commission instead of a coterie of non-governmental organisations that have found our human rights story to be big business for them.

The Bill that Minister Chinamasa is proposing shows that the Zimbabwe Human Rights Commi-ssion is not going to be a toothless bulldog.

It will be empowered to investigate any cases of alleged human rights violations committed after the enactment of Constitutional Amendment Number 19.

Minister Chinamasa said "no one is going to escape scrutiny of the commission".

This is all part of efforts to get Zimbabweans to continue to uphold law and order at all times and respect the rights of fellow citizens.

As the Bill is put before Parliament, we hope legislators will critically analyse every point and remove those aspects which may not be in the interest of the people of Zimbabwe.

The issue of human rights has been gravely abused by the western powers to punish those leaders who do not pander to their whims.

Almost every leader who does not dance to the tune of the West has been labelled a human rights violator.

Yet the whole world has seen the United States and its allies wantonly violating the rights of other countries and their citizens.

The story of Guantanamo Bay and the torture that took place there is well documented.

In fact, the US only respects the rights of its citizens but is ever ready to violate the rights of those that don’t subscribe to their way of doing things, especially those that want to protect their natural resources from forceful exploitation.

It is critical that the funding of the Zimbabwe Human Rights Commission be from internal resour-ces so that there is no room for foreign agendas to be smuggled in.

UNITED STATES: THE LEADING OUTLAW STATE

Obama says he is heartbroken over alleged human rights abuses in Zimbabwe, and he carries such a broken heart while boasting of the US’s resolve to keep occupying both Iraq and Afghanistan – molesting and murdering millions of innocent civilians in the process. This Emperor Alexander of our day speaks proudly of slamming Zimbabwe with illegal economic sanctions from one corner of his mouth, and tells the world that he is heartbroken over the same Zimbabwe from the other corner.

Wafawarova Writes

By Reason Wafawarova
On the 14th of August Nathaniel Manheru did an incisive analysis of an essay by US ambassador to Zimbabwe, Charles Ray, through a weekly newspaper column curiously allocated to this Obama envoy by one of Trevor Ncube’s newspapers.

Ray tried to through his piece to sanitise US aggression and military acts of brutality by placing the blame for unjust wars on politicians “who rarely have to face the consequences of battle up close”, and he endeavoured to mobilise sympathy and mercy for the innocent and troubled soldiers sent to execute the evil plans of politicians.

Manheru rightly noted that what Ray wrote about is ground that has been extensively covered by numerous other writers before, and in this regard no readers should be misled into believing that the US envoy has something to do with discovering new things. The only fascinating part of Ray’s piece is its amoral effort to sanitise unjust and evil wars that are a large part of the history of the United States of America, his country by ancestral slavery.

In 2006, James Traub wrote in the New York Times Magazine: “Of course, treaties and norms don’t restrain the outlaws. The prohibition on the territorial aggression enshrined in the UN Charter didn’t faze Saddam Hussein when he decided to forcibly annex Kuwait.” He added, “When it comes to military force, the United States can, and will, act alone. But diplomacy depends on a united front.”

In reality what Traub was saying is that the US does not need any laws or restraining opinion when it comes to military action. The superpower acts alone and only respects international law on matters of diplomacy.

Traub knows very well that the United States is a leading outlaw state, a leading terrorist state, and that the Pentagon is the biggest terrorist organisation on this planet, totally unconstrained by international law, and proudly and openly so. He did not say that in his essay because if he did that, he would not be writing for the New York Times. One cannot trespass from the dictates of a certain level of discipline to be met in being part of that establishment.

Noam Chomsky wrote in the book “What We Say Goes” and he said, “In a well-run society, you don’t say things you know. You say things that are required for service to power”. Clearly Charles Ray, just like James Traub, is quite educated on what to say about US brutality and aggression. You criticise the execution and planning of a war if you must; but you cannot criticise the war itself.

It is public knowledge that the United States invaded Iraq, even though that was a radical violation of the United Nations Charter. It is the duty of writers like Charles Ray and James Traub to glamorise and sanitise such violations, and changing the context of events is one common way of doing so. This is why Charles Ray wrote about an innocent and troubled soldier fighting in an unjust war the same time Zimbabwe was celebrating the heroes of its liberation struggle. Such glory as attributed to liberation fighters must be juxtaposed against the exploits of troubled soldiers at the service of the empire.

The United States is absolutely notorious for covering its evil by loudly pointing at lesser evils from others and even advocating for justice to victims of tyranny and dictatorships – zealously doing it ahead of all others.

It is like the often told story of Emperor Alexander and the pirate. The account from Saint Augustine has it that a pirate was brought to Alexander, who then asked him; “How dare you molest the seas with your piracy?”

The pirate answered: “How dare you molest the whole world? I have a small ship, so they call me a pirate. You have a great navy, so they call you an emperor. But you are molesting the world. I am doing almost nothing by comparison”. (Quotes are the writer’s emphasis).

This is the way it works in Western political lexicon. The emperor is allowed to molest the world, but the pirate is considered a major criminal. It is always the typical case of a pea standing next to the mountain.

Wouldn’t Osama bin Laden say the same things said by the pirate if he were brought before Barrack Obama today? Is that not the feeling of every member of the listed terror groups that the US wants the world to fear so much, Hamas included?

Obama says he is heartbroken over alleged human rights abuses in Zimbabwe, and he carries such a broken heart while boasting of the US’s resolve to keep occupying both Iraq and Afghanistan – molesting and murdering millions of innocent civilians in the process. This Emperor Alexander of our day speaks proudly of slamming Zimbabwe with illegal economic sanctions from one corner of his mouth, and tells the world that he is heartbroken over the same Zimbabwe from the other corner.

Indeed the world is supposed to applaud. Having heartbreaks over one’s own destructive works must be plausible.

In January 2006, 18 Pakistani civilians were killed in a US missile attack on Pakistan. The New York Times commented in an editorial that “Those strikes were legitimately aimed at top fugitive leaders of Al Qaeda”.

The message here is very clear. The New York Times is in agreement with the military actions of the United States, however egregious. To them the United States is a legitimate outlaw state that should be readily accepted by all others.

On May 7 2009, Hillary Clinton was reported by the BBC as having apologised for the death of hundreds of innocent Afghan civilians who were brutally murdered by US indiscriminate air strikes on villages suspected of harbouring the Taliban.

The apology came after the Red Cross confirmed the deaths of hundreds of civilians covered in shallow mass graves in the province of Farah and all Clinton said was that Washington “deeply regrets” the loss of innocent lives.

According to a survivor of the brutal attack, Sayed Azam; fifty members of his extended family died to the bombings that evening, Reuters reported.

The regret from Clinton should suffice to atone for the death of these lesser peoples. That is not surprising. The United States has the right to use violence where it chooses, no matter what happens. If the wrong people are killed in the process, it is enough for the US to simply say “Sorry, we hit the wrong people”.

There should never be limits on the right of the United States to use force. On that the US acts alone and all others must follow or risk being “irrelevant”.

Western liberal media like The Times and the Rupert Murdoch owned media are sometimes vocal about domestic law in their own backyards and they have sometimes voiced a lot of concern about surveillance and the invasion of privacy resulting from anti-terror laws.

However this concern does not really extend much to the international arena, and this is not without cause.

The only time Western liberal media show their unrivalled dedication to international law is when that law is broken by non-Western countries and perceived enemies. Some have called this a double standard but in reality it is not.

It is a single standard and the policy is strictly consistent. It is an unquestionable loyalty and subordination to power. The standard says there is an issue when Big Brother is eavesdropping or reading emails of all others, and that is quite annoying on the domestic front. But when there is this gross violation of international law; what the Nuremburg Tribunal called “the supreme international crime ----that contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole” – such violation as was the invasion of Iraq, then that is just fine. It is unacceptably barbaric when the violation is by Saddam Hussein invading Kuwait, but acceptably understandable when the violation is by George W. Bush invading Iraq.

In such scenarios you sympathise more with the troubled soldier executing the evil plans of the politicians, and Charles Ray did not only write about this in a Zimbabwean newspaper, but indeed personally executed one such evil plan when he participated in the US aggression on Vietnam between 1968 and 1973. For the trouble he went through, he whole heartedly expects a lot of sympathy from the whole world, that with no sense of irony.

Howard Friel and Richard Falk looked at the attitude of the New York Times towards international law in their book “Record of the Paper”, and what they found pretty much applies to most of the Western Press.

They found out that if an enemy can be accused of violating international law, it is always a huge outrage. But when the US does any similar or worse violation, it is as if it did not happen.

Friel and Falk pointed out that in the seventy editorials on the invasion of Iraq from September 11, 2011, to March 21, 2003, the words “UN Charter” and “international law” never appeared even once.

That is understandably typical of a newspaper that believes the United States should be an outlaw state.

Members of the peace movement, Martin Luther King Jr included, talked a lot about stopping the US from engaging in unjust wars and sometimes they described plain aggression as “war”.

Was the US really at war when they invaded Grenada in 1982, or in 1967 when they were killing Vietnamese people? It is an odd sense of being at war. The United States was just attacking other countries, and it had not been attacked by anybody. Iraq was the same, Afghanistan was the same, Laos in 1957, and many other places far too many to mention.

What part of a plain act of aggression constitutes a war? What the United States does is brazen violation of international law in aggressively invading smaller states in the name of war.

The biggest problem in combating US aggression is the civil obedience of US citizens. These people are made to take orders without questioning, and to accept unjust wars as unavoidable. US state power is the most egregious in the world, and sometimes it just appears like it is futile to stand in its way.

There have been successful models in confronting US power in the past, from the civil rights movement in the sixties to the peace movement in the seventies. These are occasions when state power fails to manufacture consent among the people.

The United States does not only seek to create civil obedience among its own citizens. It seeks to do so in its client states, and in fact they want more civil obedience in other countries than they do in their own back yard.

This is why they want all Zimbabweans to loath President Robert Mugabe on their behalf, and that is why it is now considered a crime of sorts in the West to be a member of ZANU PF.

One is sanctioned and barred from travelling to Western countries for being legitimately elected to a leadership position through a ZANU PF ticket – for being elected by Zimbabweans as a Zimbabwean leader. The US and its Western allies will say no to that; insisting that “progressive” Zimbabweans will only elect leaders from the highly treacherous, insidious and puppet MDC-T party.

The British Sports Minister believes his country has every right to tell Zimbabweans who should lead their cricket, and he openly says his country views the Zimbabwe Cricket Chairman Peter Chingoka as a criminal.

We have seen this kind of political aggression elsewhere in recent times. Bolivia and Haiti have recently had democratic elections of a kind no Western country can even conceive.

In December 2005, the people of Bolivia elected Evo Morales ahead of two rich and powerful Western-backed candidates trained in the United States. The people of Bolivia just ignored Western rhetoric about the democratic credentials of the two puppets and instead chose someone from their own ranks. That is real democracy, and we saw that happening in Palestine when Hamas was elected in 2006.

In Haiti, if Jean-Bertrand Aristide had not been forcibly expelled from the Caribbean by the United States in early 2004, it is very likely he would have won re-election.

In the West, there is not much of meaningful participation by the people in the democratic process. There is real obedience to corporate power. You do not get this Bolivian kind of disobedience that is needed to create a truly functioning democracy.

The resolve by the US to manufacture consent at home and abroad is what is driving US foreign policy today. It is the underlying factor behind the now traditional gross violations of international law by US elites and their allies from other Western countries.

So the US, Canada and Australia have the temerity to use international law in justifying their minority racially composed opposition to Zimbabwe’s right to sell its diamonds through the Kimberly Process. Canada even unashamedly tried to redefine the law just to contrive a crime against Zimbabwe.

When an outlaw state like the US preaches human rights it is like the Devil preaching righteousness. It is simply appalling.

When progressive countries overwhelmingly stand against US excesses as happened with Zimbabwe’s Diamond case at Kimberly, we begin to believe that US aggression is after all not insurmountable.

Zimbabwe we are one and together we will overcome. It is homeland or death!!


Reason Wafawarova is a political writer and can be contacted on wafawarova@yahoo.co.uk or reason@rwafawarova.com or visit www.rwafawarova.com

Tony Blair: the dead that won't lie dead

Those who fed into Blair’s Zimbabwe misadventure, like him, do not seem to comprehend why Zimbabwe and President Mugabe in particular continue to enjoy support not only from Africans but also other progressive forces across the globe which has made UK-US intervention in whatever guise unacceptable.

The Herald

By Tichaona Zindoga
THE memoirs of former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, in a book titled "A Journey" have received wide reviews, which predominantly hammered home the one truth that Blair is an archetypal bigot.

This ranges from his narcissistic view that he "was a big player, was a world and not just a national leader".

He as strongly as ever supports fellow warmonger and liar, former US leader George W Bush whom he declares "cleverer" than his critics imagine.

He goes right down a 1994 night when he made love to his wife and supposedly got support for his political ambitions.

Amidst the interest that has been generated by the pen of this man who left the scene in June 2007, waking a murderous legacy of neoliberal interventionism and the so-called global war on terror, one reader noted a particularly disturbing attribute of Blair.

In Tony Blair, the world has seen the emergence of a "Zombliarism" (or such term), the dead that won’t lie down.

If that ironic role as a Middle East "peace envoy" plus a couple of other moral grandstanding activities do not suffice, Blair’s continued obsession with Zimbabwe makes this apparently immortal (im)moral and political ghost quite alive.

In his autobiography, Blair says globalisation has made military intervention in "rogue regimes" overseas more necessary than ever, without sensing the irony of his own exported rogue-ness.

The man, who relishes the prospect of attacking Iran one day, chiefly regrets not having been able to topple President Robert Mugabe during his tenure at Number 10 Downing Street.

He would have "loved" to topple the veteran leader who decided to empower hundreds of thousands of families previously condemned to arid areas by British colonial systems.

He wrote: "People often used to say to me: If you got rid of the gangsters in Sierra Leone, [Slobodan] Miloševic, the Taliban and Saddam, why can’t you get rid of Mugabe?

"The answer is I would have loved to, but it wasn’t practical (since, in his case, and for reasons I never quite understood, the surrounding African nations maintained a lingering support for him and would have opposed any action strenuously)."

Looking back just a year ago, in July, Blair called for that which he had failed to do in his 10 years at Number 10 Downing Street.

"I think whoever has the possibility should topple Mugabe," he said.

Without, even at this time as well, sensing the strong irony he added of President Mugabe, whom he accused of destroying the country, that "many people have died unnecessarily because of him".

In all this one finds basically two levels of the Blair ghost.

On the one hand is the troubled, wandering and inconsequent spirit that could not effect regime change in a small country called Zimbabwe during a whole 10 years and ended up groveling for just anybody’s help through a German newspaper last year.

This led one analyst to slam back not only his ineffectiveness (the analyst is on the regime change side, apparently) but also the very folly of not having opened talks with Zimbabwe, which might have benefited both parties.

Said the analyst: "When the ordinary Zimbabwean hears that Tony Blair is now leaving office without ever setting foot in the country that he talked about so much at international gatherings, they will wonder what he hoped to achieve by shouting from afar."

Yet on the other hand of this nuisance is a symbolic dimension of this evil spirit that is represented in a political philosophy that he started.

It will be noted that since Blair started his anti-Zimbabwe war, beginning by reneging on his government’s commitment to fund land reform in the country when his New Labour won power in 1997, a stand-off between the two countries has gone on.

His successors, Gordon Brown and the current coalition involving Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron and Liberal Democrat Nick Clegg, have maintained cool relations with Zimbabwe.

This British-exported standoff has also applied to the US and the EU among other Anglo-Saxon powers.

Those who fed into Blair’s Zimbabwe misadventure, like him, do not seem to comprehend why Zimbabwe and President Mugabe in particular continue to enjoy support not only from Africans but also other progressive forces across the globe which has made UK-US intervention in whatever guise unacceptable.

To them that see things in black and white — absolute contradictions — the inherent justness of Zimbabwe’s cause especially where resources are concerned, as opposed to their historical injustice, just does not matter.

Unfortunately, the evil in the Machiavellian Blair and his philosophy is very much alive.

His appetite for international affairs, we are told, has been sharpened by his role as a mediator in the Middle East!

He says that he feels "indeed a greater urge to leadership".

Thus he tries, as arrogant as ever, to systematise interventionism, saying: "If change will not come by evolution, should it be done by revolution?

"Should those who have the military power contemplate doing so?

"The leader has to decide whether the objective is worth the cost. What’s more, he or she must do so unsure of what the exact cost might be or the exact price of failing to meet the objective . . . In this context, by the way, indecision is also decision . . . Omission and commission both have consequences."

This adventurism not only seems to project his warmongering demon but also rings of war projected as a business, and business executed without feeling.

This makes his vaunted reawakening in the Middle East as unfortunate as it is omi-nous.

It has been observed that Blair has reaped millions of dollars for his involvement in the Mideast, not as a bona fide statesman, but as a supporter of Israeli apartheid against its occupied Palestinian counterpart.

A million-dollar "peace-broker" award that he was proffered by Israel seemed to confirm this depravity, which also was a slap in the face of his Iraqi war founded on lies.

A critic was quoted as saying of the accolade: "This prize looks like a payment for services rendered.

"It will make people feel that he’s not really a peace envoy, he’s an envoy operating in the interests of the Israeli state in the Middle East."

This subplot makes Blair, even supposedly contained within the pages of a book, a sick and morbid character both in deed as in spirit and philosophy.

The Robert Mugabe African reality vs the Nelson Mandela myth

The now white-imprisoned myth of Nelson Mandela functions as a lethal weapon against the African National Congress and against all African liberation movements in government in Southern Africa.

The Sunday Mail

By Tafataona Mahoso
The regime-change strategy which toppled former Zambian president Kenneth Kaunda’s United National Independence Party (Unip) from power in 1991 has now shifted to South Africa, having been applied in Zimbabwe (since 1997) and failed.

But in South Africa it has an added viciousness because of the concentration of Anglo-Rhodesian forces relishing a chance to punish the African National Congress of South Africa for failure of the illegal regime change campaign against Zimbabwe.
Unfortunately for the ANC, the difference between SA and Zimbabwe is that in SA too many Africans, including those in the ANC and in the Congress of the People (Cope), have willingly accepted and installed the white neoliberal definition of Nelson Mandela and his legacy; whereas in Zimbabwe the African majority condemn in the strongest terms all the neoliberal and Anglo-Saxon attempts to redefine Mugabe for the African.
The standing ovation given to President Mugabe at the last Sadc Summit in Windhoek and that summit's willingness to suspend the white neoliberal project misnamed as the “Sadc Tribunal” constitute the final signal that the overwhelming majority of Sadc Heads of State and Government have also rejected the neoliberal Anglo-Saxon efforts to define Mugabe and Zimbabwe for Africans.
Zimbabwe as a state is feared and revered in Anglo-Rhodesian and neoliberal circles because it has overcome five challenges which have proven to be fatal elsewhere:
IMF-World Bank-imposed structural adjustment; urban destabilisation through riots and strikes sponsored by white industry; illegal sanctions; direct financial warfare; and an unwieldy and cumbersome coalition government made up of ideologically incompatible forces.

It is this appreciation of the Zimbabwe reality which has made it possible for the majority of the people here to despise the white racists' efforts to redefine Mugabe and Mugabeism for the African.
Now, before I explain how the white creation of a Mandela myth and how it relates to the struggle for tangible resources and for real power, let me first explain what those behind the current destabilisation of SA aim to achieve.

Three years ago, through his book called “Race and the Construction of the Dispensable Other”, Professor Bernard M. Magubane warned Africans about the strategy of the counter-revolutionary forces in South Africa. He used the example of the Democratic Alliance, which at that time was led by Tony Leon and is now led by Hellen Zille.
“Tony Leon (now Helen Zille), the Machiavellian leader of the Democratic Alliance . . . claims that his (white-led) party stands for (a suddenly) ‘colour blind’ society in which ‘merit’ alone should be the criterion for advancement, rather than race-based affirmative action. Colour blindness is most improbable in a society divided by class and by gender and spatial (material) disparities, born of the structural injustices of (apartheid) capitalism, themselves entrenched by a long period of white minority domination guaranteed by white privilege.”
Any perceptive reader will notice that the white image of Nelson Mandela as the saint of the neoliberal human rights crusade is based on this myth of miraculous colour blindness. Mandela went to Robben Island Prison as a radical pan-African revolutionary fighting white supremacy, only to emerge “colour blind” 27 years later!
In other words, the neoliberal and imperialist strategy was to make Mandela champion the values of the white minority, such as those in the DA, from inside the African liberation movement in the ANC.
But what is the strategic programme these values are meant to advance? It includes the following:
l Rapid, wholesale privatisation of the public sector intended to deny the incoming African government the resource base required to meet the expectations of its constituency, the African majority, who were dispossessed and excluded from the centre of the economy for 300 years;
l Downsizing the state to a bare-minimum needed to facilitate the corporate needs of white capital while minimising the social needs of the masses. This means using the ideology of balanced budgets and cash-budgeting in order to enforce massive budget cuts at the very time that the deprived African masses expect expanding education and social services;
l Intense demands for law and order, to be defined narrowly as intended for the protection of private property, property rights, exclusive middle-class suburbs and foreign tourists at the expense of the povo who are always suspected of crime until proven innocent;
l Massive restructuring of the working class by encouraging mass retrenchments, reliance on part-time and casual jobs, expanding the informal sector and re-creating the segmented apartheid labour force on the basis of class;
l Re-integrating South Africa into the Western capitalist system against Africanist and South-to-South tendencies;
l Co-opting the new derivative African elites into white consumer culture and encouraging them to celebrate conspicuous consumption as a substitute for real power and real production;
l Condemning as “reverse racism” the popular demands for African land reclamation and demands for indigenous ownership of the economy; and
l Using the former apartheid media, still dominated by whites, to equate African leadership with corruption while cleansing all the white beneficiaries of apartheid and UDI and re-presenting them as the champions of social mobility based on merit, efficiency, good governance, democracy, human rights and transparency.
The white demand for strict law and order in protection of white property and white privilege is most tragic for the African government because it serves as a double sword for white racist interests and against the liberation movement in government.
On one hand, whites accuse the government of not being tough enough, being ineffective in clamping down on criminals and subversives, when that interpretation suits the racists. These racists go as far as claiming that at least the apartheid regime maintained perfect law and order. They may even instigate their Anglo-Saxon cousins in Europe and North America to issue bogus “advisory” warnings to their citizens against travelling to SA.
On the other hand, if the government gets though on suspected criminals and subversives in order to maintain peace and the rule of law, the very same forces turn around and accuse it of all sorts of brutality and violations of human rights.
The experience of Zimbabwe and the speech given by President Mugabe at the Sadc Summit in Windhoek in August 2010 become important in relation to the South African struggle: if you do not own the structure you cannot own the superstructure. The African Commission on Human and People's Rights and the Sadc Tribunal cannot defend Africans using donor funds. In the same way, the people of South Africa have never been able to own Nelson Mandela. At Robben Island he was apartheid’s prisoner. As president of the new South Africa the Nelson Mandela he projected on TV and through other media was defined and driven by those who own the economy and the media. When the Africans begin to own the real economy in South Africa they will also determine how the media frame their country and its first president.
In the case of Zimbabwe, the Sadc Tribunal was suspended for its outrageous judgments precisely because the people who gave it donations no longer control the land, the subject of the Tribunal’s outrageous judgments against Zimbabwe. So the outrage provoked by the neoliberal judgments became so unbearable because they were also unrealistic in relation to the real (though still emergent) structure of society in Zimbabwe.
Let me state the ideological problem facing South Africa: While apartheid controlled the person of Mandela at Robben Island for 27 years, the Africans at home and abroad owned the myth of Mandela as a weapon against apartheid.
In 1991, the whites staged a prisoner swap: They gave the African liberation movement the exhausted physical, mortal, Mandela in exchange for the myth of Mandela which they have since emasculated and controlled. The white neoliberal establishment now control Mandela the media icon as if it is their intellectual property.
A look at just the Mail and Guardian for April 17 and April 24 2009 respectively helps to demonstrate the problem. In the April 17 issue the current ANC president was presented as a threat to “freedom” and a threat to the constitution of South Africa. The Zapiro cartoons of recent South African history, from Nelson Mandela in 1994 to Jacob Zuma in 2009, in the same issue of April 17, helped to sum up the white racist media’s caricature of South Africa.
The first panel shows former South African president Nelson Mandela as a towering, inimitable political and moral giant. The second panel shows former South African president Thabo Mbeki as a political and moral midget who could hardly walk in Mandela’s big shoes.
The third panel shows Mbeki in his second term in 2004. Here according to the cartoonist, Mbeki has so deteriorated morally and politically that he now almost sinks completely into just one of Mandela’s big shoes.
In the final panel Jacob Zuma comes in, in 2009, as a thug who grabs one of Mandela’s big shoes and pounds a fallen Thabo Mbeki with it.
The message is as blunt as it is presumptuous: Jacob Zuma is not only the worst candidate for president of the ANC and of South Africa; he is not even ANC. He has taken over the ANC presidency but he is alien to the ANC, as far as Zapiro, the Mail and Guardian and the rest of the white- dominated media are concerned.
The problem which became visible at the abrupt removal of former president Thabo Mbeki from power while he was still in the middle of executing one of Africa’s most important diplomatic achievements has now become clear:
The now white-imprisoned myth of Nelson Mandela functions as a lethal weapon against the African National Congress and against all African liberation movements in government in Southern Africa.