At last he had the chance to put his ideals into practice. The adoption of "Nkosi Sikelela Africa" as the national anthem for the newly independent state was a huge statement on Robert Mugabe's pan-Africanist ideals.
The song espoused an African and not merely a nationalistic vision.
Emerging from a nationalist war as we were, the temptation would have been to cap our victory with a fervent nationalistic anthem but I can picture Robert Mugabe raising his hand in objection.
To him, our independence was not merely a nationalistic achievement. It was an African achievement and we had to celebrate it through a song that captured that African dream.
The Herald
By Alexander Kanengoni
PRESIDENT Mugabe is 87 and many things have been said about him, some of them good, others bad - he is only human.
For instance, I won't forget the old woman who stood up at one of the recent Copac outreach meetings in the rural areas and made an emotional statement about Robert Mugabe.
She pointed towards Harare with her frail hand and said it would be difficult to find another leader like him; selfless, dedicated, committed and with really not much wealth to show for it.
She said there was a real danger that when the man eventually dies, his children might slide into poverty and survive on charity. We all saw there were tears in her eyes. The man sitting next to me sighed, looked down on the ground and began to draw indecipherable patterns with his finger.
The Copac co-ordinator, standing in front of the small gathering, absent-mindedly flipped through the papers in his hands and mumbled something inaudible to himself. There was silence.
I don't believe the woman knew that the President has a pig project at his rural home in Zvimba, if that can be called wealth.
I don't believe the woman knew the President has a farm near Darwendale. How many people have farms? I have one near Centenary and a struggling poultry project at my late father's small farm in Mt Darwin.
Many Zimbabweans have similar things running. President Mugabe is like any one of us. The most gratifying thing though is you get these positive sentiments about him openly, quite often these days.
These days, there is a growing consensus amongst all people, even across the political divide, about his unique and outstanding leadership qualities. And, you are left with no doubt they are all saying it from the bottom of their hearts.
The sincerity and honesty were there in the tears of the woman at the Copac meeting. I saw it in the unreadable patterns the man sitting next to me at that same meeting drew on the ground.
Africa saw it in Big Brother Africa when young Munyaradzi Chidzonga, the Zimbabwean participant, said his biggest wish was to meet President Mugabe and talk to him.
Although he didn't say it, it was clear the young man also wanted to become a hero like Robert Mugabe.
But what Munyaradzi didn't know was that he was already our hero.
Unfortunately, this is not what I want to talk about. I want to talk about something else. I want to talk about another side of President Mugabe's leadership attributes that has not been given sufficient accentuation - his Pan-Africanist ideals and how he tries to foster them.
His African journey began at the University of Fort Hare in South Africa in the early fifties. That was where his politics blossomed, outside his homeland.
Perhaps that explains why his politics and nationalism developed such a strong African accent. It was at Fort Hare where he met most of the people who would become future leaders of the ANC of South Africa.
They met and brainstormed politics through the nights. The seed of pan-Africanism that had been planted and germinated at Fort Hare kept growing inside him, so that when he returned home to teach, Ghana became independent in 1957 and he packed his bags and went there to experience how independence felt.
He also wanted lessons for his own country in their impending fight to free themselves. Kwame Nkrumah and his vision of a united Africa was his hero.
Well, he brought back home more than politics. He brought back Sally, a Ghanaian. It might seem insignificant that he married a woman from Ghana but in the bigger context of his pan-Africanist idealism, it is quite significant. He was living his dream.
But his pan-Africanist ideals would be tested when Zimbabwe became independent in 1980 and he became the Prime Minister.
At last he had the chance to put his ideals into practice. The adoption of "Nkosi Sikelela Africa" as the national anthem for the newly independent state was a huge statement on Robert Mugabe's pan-Africanist ideals.
The song espoused an African and not merely a nationalistic vision.
Emerging from a nationalist war as we were, the temptation would have been to cap our victory with a fervent nationalistic anthem but I can picture Robert Mugabe raising his hand in objection.
To him, our independence was not merely a nationalistic achievement. It was an African achievement and we had to celebrate it through a song that captured that African dream.
The anthem "Nkosi Sikelela Africa" was composed by a black South African around 1880 in a compound at the gold mines in Johannesburg. What brilliance! More than one hundred years old and it's still Africa's guiding light.
It was an innocent prayer to God for Africa to be free. It was composed during the times when we did not yet know we had to fight to be free.
Robert Mugabe made the remaining vestiges of colonialism in Africa his top target. The independence of Zimbabwe was meaningless unless South Africa and Namibia were free, he would declare.
that required a colossal effort and monumental human sacrifice. Zimbabwean lives were lost in pursuit of that African dream. But the biggest test would come at the expiry of the entrenched ten year clause regarding the land issue in the Lancaster House Agreement.
The willing-buyer-willing-seller clause fell away and was duly replaced by the compulsory Acquisition Act, but Robert Mugabe would delay the compulsory acquisitions of former white commercial farms because he feared that might complicate the South African independence struggle.
Imagine the land reform programme in 2000 happening in 1991. The South African whites, with the absolute support of the West, would never have let South Africa go for fear that the country would experience a similar land reform programme.
I wonder whether South Africans are aware of that fact. But even if they know, what difference would it make anyway? It's only now they seem to appreciate the role Africa played in their freedom.
The whites had misled them to believe they were not part of Africa and they believed it.
It's the Namibians who openly appreciate the role that Africa, particularly Zimbabwe, played in their freedom.
But it would be naive to blame the South African people for such lack of appreciation. Such appreciation doesn't happen on its own. It requires political leadership to foster it. It requires a political leader to sow it in the hearts of the people.
Robert Mugabe is one such leader. For some strange reason, Nelson Mandela did not plant it in his people thus setting a disastrous precedent that Thabo Mbeki grappled with and Jacob Zuma is still grappling with.
He is finding it difficult to convince his people they are Africans. The xenophobic attacks that occasionally occur in South Africa are largely a result of people who view themselves apart from the other Africans. Robert Mugabe's pan-Africanist ideals extend to his love to see peace and stability on the continent.
When he went into the inclusive government with the MDC, there were muted voices within his own party, Zanu-PF that he had sold out, that he should not have gone into a partnership with counter-revolutionaries and agents of the West.
But that was a mere reflection of his personality. If he could assist Frelimo forge a working relationship with Renamo, who began as bandits created by Rhodesians to frustrate Mozambique's effort to support the Zimbabwean liberation struggle, how could he deny that for himself and his country?
If he could assist Frelimo to work with Renamo, a grouping that had no political agenda, how could he deny the same for his country in the face of a similar grouping called MDC, created by the West to safeguard their interests?
Zimbabwe's foray into the DRC together with Namibia and Angola was a pan-Africanist mission to stop the country from descending into mayhem and President Mugabe was instrumental in that decision.
In the end, the whole DRC campaign was painted to appear as if it was Zimbabwe alone that was there. After everything else has been written and said, Robert Mugabe is a true pan-Africanist.
But then, one cannot help thinking about the tears in the old woman's eyes as she bemoaned that he might be the President of Zimbabwe but besides the love for the well-being of his people, he has nothing much to show for it. And that his children might live on hand-outs when he eventually dies.
SEE ALSO: Robert Mugabe @ 87: the myth and legend
Wednesday, February 23, 2011
Tuesday, February 22, 2011
Sanctions: time to give West taste of own medicine
This brings to the fore the forthright issue that the European and American companies who wantonly and freely eat the fat of a Zimbabwe that is under their mother countries’ sanctions should get the taste of their medicine.The Herald
By Tichaona Zindoga
One can be forgiven for dismissing as damp squib the European Union’s renewal of sanctions against Zimbabwe on February 15.
The 27 member bloc instituted the measures in 2002, violating its own processes and the Cotonou Agreement governing relations between Europe and Africa Asia and Pacific countries, in an effort to effect regime change in Zimbabwe.
The EU sanctions followed a similar move by the United States of America which imposed similar coercive and punitive measures on Zimbabwe under a law called the Zimbabwe Democracy and Economic Recovery Act which was signed into law on December 21 2001.
The EU cites issues of alleged human and property rights violations as reasons for the embargo, although from what German Chancellor Angela Merkel told Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai during his visit to Europe and America in 2009 it is all about "expropriated land" being returned to the former white commercial farmers.
In 2000, the Government of Zimbabwe embarked on the successful land reform programme that benefitted about 300 000 families which were previously marginalised under the British colonial land tenure in which only 4 000 whites held over 70 percent of all arable land in the country.
The majority indigenous people were condemned to arid, semi-arid, unproductive and inhospitable areas.
The EU sanctions then were a way of economically strangling Zimbabwe by imposing sanctions on the country’s productive sectors to first of all to bring down the agrarian revolution and the agro-based economy as well as its leaders in politics and business.
Hence, the EU imposed sanctions on close to 200 individuals and 31 companies in Zimbabwe.
The sanctions, which are outside the ambit of the United Nations, have drawn worldwide condemnation from the regional grouping Sadc, the African Union, the Non-Aligned Movement and powerhouses such as China and Russia.
Even other countries within the bloc are said to oppose the sanctions.
On February 15 the EU said that the sanctions it has imposed on the country and the economy would remain in force save for 35 individuals.
One can be forgiven for dismissing as damp squib the European Union’s renewal of sanctions against Zimbabwe on February 15.
The 27 member bloc instituted the measures in 2002, violating its own processes and the Cotonou Agreement governing relations between Europe and Africa Asia and Pacific countries, in an effort to effect regime change in Zimbabwe.
The EU sanctions followed a similar move by the United States of America which imposed similar coercive and punitive measures on Zimbabwe under a law called the Zimbabwe Democracy and Economic Recovery Act which was signed into law on December 21 2001.
The EU cites issues of alleged human and property rights violations as reasons for the embargo, although from what German Chancellor Angela Merkel told Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai during his visit to Europe and America in 2009 it is all about "expropriated land" being returned to the former white commercial farmers.
In 2000, the Government of Zimbabwe embarked on the successful land reform programme that benefitted about 300 000 families which were previously marginalised under the British colonial land tenure in which only 4 000 whites held over 70 percent of all arable land in the country.
The majority indigenous people were condemned to arid, semi-arid, unproductive and inhospitable areas.
The EU sanctions then were a way of economically strangling Zimbabwe by imposing sanctions on the country’s productive sectors to first of all to bring down the agrarian revolution and the agro-based economy as well as its leaders in politics and business.
Hence, the EU imposed sanctions on close to 200 individuals and 31 companies in Zimbabwe.
The sanctions, which are outside the ambit of the United Nations, have drawn worldwide condemnation from the regional grouping Sadc, the African Union, the Non-Aligned Movement and powerhouses such as China and Russia.
Even other countries within the bloc are said to oppose the sanctions.
On February 15 the EU said that the sanctions it has imposed on the country and the economy would remain in force save for 35 individuals.
These people happen, to use a common phrase associated with the sanctions, be not "close to President Robert Mugabe", (meaning not influential enough on matters of State) being mainly wives of Government officials and dead persons.
But sanctions remain effective on the key institutions of the economy in areas of agriculture, mining, energy, banking, defence and security, among others.
Announcing the latest development EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton is quoted as having said that the EU review team noted "significant progress" in addressing Zimbabwe's economic crisis and delivering basic services to citizens.
"However," the BBC quoted her as saying, "economic and social developments have not been matched by equivalent progress on the political front."
Adding: "In this context, I have to express my deep concerns at the upsurge in political violence seen in recent weeks."
This confirms the damp squib that was the reviewing of the sanctions by the EU, much as has been the case with the US.
First of all is the Anglo-Saxon world’s determination to bring down the economy of Zimbabwe, which was traditionally linked to Europe and America as a colonial legacy, by refusing to trade and deal with the Government of Zimbabwe.
This explains why all key economic sectors and players have been targeted for death and dearth.
And it does not matter how the West tries to pretend easing anti-Zimbabwe sanctions because all key institutions and individuals remain under sanctions hit lists.
The latest EU move is similar to that of America which last year eased sanctions on some six companies, and removed dead people and those who were no longer part of President Mugabe’s "inner circle".
The EU cites "deep concerns at the upsurge in political violence seen in recent weeks" as one of the causes for the retention of the widely descredited sanctions.
This is despite the fact that it is known that the same violence was being orchestrated by the MDC-T for the obvious reason of grandstanding.
As such the EU exposes itself as both dishonest and devilish.
For, a whole bloc cannot be as daft as not to notice the typical grandstanding that the MDC-T puts up whenever European heads meet.
The trend of the so-called upsurge of violence always coinciding with EU meetings is just too good - or bad as it were - to be true.
As the EU cites these acts it exposes itself for a very dishonest group of individuals.
But it is also a very evil institution.
Forget about the destructive nature of sanctions.
The very act of feeding on the blood of African people butchering one another for the audience of Europeans only to punish them collectively makes the EU a sadistic body.
When one considers the statement by Emilio Rossetti, the chief EU representative in Zimbabwe the hypocrisy of the bloc is further exposed.
International media on February 15 quoted him as saying that EU sanctions "are not affecting the people of Zimbabwe at large and the economic impact of the sanctions is negligible."
He reasoned: "They are just preventing certain people from travelling and having their assets frozen."
Any sane person may question just how a useless regime should be, and is, reviewed every year for close to a decade and how shunning trade with key economic players of a country does constitute "negligible" impact.
For all the vicarious act, in European view, of preventing looters from enjoying in Europe money stolen from the European-loved people of Zimbabwe one wonders what happens if captains of industry are barred from attending world meetings at which they have to cut deals for the benefit of the country that they serve.
The fact of the matter is that there is simply an ashy taste in the pseudo-magnanimity of Ashton and the horrors of economic sanctions - as they are intended - make it hard to see Zimbabwe’s treatment at the hands of EU with the rose glasses of Rosetti.
This brings to the fore the forthright issue that the European and American companies who wantonly and freely eat the fat of a Zimbabwe that is under their mother countries’ sanctions should get the taste of their medicine.
But sanctions remain effective on the key institutions of the economy in areas of agriculture, mining, energy, banking, defence and security, among others.
Announcing the latest development EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton is quoted as having said that the EU review team noted "significant progress" in addressing Zimbabwe's economic crisis and delivering basic services to citizens.
"However," the BBC quoted her as saying, "economic and social developments have not been matched by equivalent progress on the political front."
Adding: "In this context, I have to express my deep concerns at the upsurge in political violence seen in recent weeks."
This confirms the damp squib that was the reviewing of the sanctions by the EU, much as has been the case with the US.
First of all is the Anglo-Saxon world’s determination to bring down the economy of Zimbabwe, which was traditionally linked to Europe and America as a colonial legacy, by refusing to trade and deal with the Government of Zimbabwe.
This explains why all key economic sectors and players have been targeted for death and dearth.
And it does not matter how the West tries to pretend easing anti-Zimbabwe sanctions because all key institutions and individuals remain under sanctions hit lists.
The latest EU move is similar to that of America which last year eased sanctions on some six companies, and removed dead people and those who were no longer part of President Mugabe’s "inner circle".
The EU cites "deep concerns at the upsurge in political violence seen in recent weeks" as one of the causes for the retention of the widely descredited sanctions.
This is despite the fact that it is known that the same violence was being orchestrated by the MDC-T for the obvious reason of grandstanding.
As such the EU exposes itself as both dishonest and devilish.
For, a whole bloc cannot be as daft as not to notice the typical grandstanding that the MDC-T puts up whenever European heads meet.
The trend of the so-called upsurge of violence always coinciding with EU meetings is just too good - or bad as it were - to be true.
As the EU cites these acts it exposes itself for a very dishonest group of individuals.
But it is also a very evil institution.
Forget about the destructive nature of sanctions.
The very act of feeding on the blood of African people butchering one another for the audience of Europeans only to punish them collectively makes the EU a sadistic body.
When one considers the statement by Emilio Rossetti, the chief EU representative in Zimbabwe the hypocrisy of the bloc is further exposed.
International media on February 15 quoted him as saying that EU sanctions "are not affecting the people of Zimbabwe at large and the economic impact of the sanctions is negligible."
He reasoned: "They are just preventing certain people from travelling and having their assets frozen."
Any sane person may question just how a useless regime should be, and is, reviewed every year for close to a decade and how shunning trade with key economic players of a country does constitute "negligible" impact.
For all the vicarious act, in European view, of preventing looters from enjoying in Europe money stolen from the European-loved people of Zimbabwe one wonders what happens if captains of industry are barred from attending world meetings at which they have to cut deals for the benefit of the country that they serve.
The fact of the matter is that there is simply an ashy taste in the pseudo-magnanimity of Ashton and the horrors of economic sanctions - as they are intended - make it hard to see Zimbabwe’s treatment at the hands of EU with the rose glasses of Rosetti.
This brings to the fore the forthright issue that the European and American companies who wantonly and freely eat the fat of a Zimbabwe that is under their mother countries’ sanctions should get the taste of their medicine.
President Mugabe said this at his party Zanu-PF’s annual conference in Mutare last December.
“We are not fools” to let the devil run with the gospel, he declared.
He demanded that British and American companies publicly denounce economic sanctions or face the boot.
He said in part: “We will only align with those that want to give us their hand.
“Those who give us their backs and bring sanctions we will kick out.”
He warned: “Countries without co-operation with us and which have not recognised the hospitality we have extended to them must not sit on their laurels thinking that yesterday will be tomorrow.
“Think again whether it is going to be sanctions or no sanctions. If the countries have organisations here; we will be very strict. In fact, we will refuse investment from those countries.”
President Mugabe said the same principle would also apply to financial institutions closely linked to hostile countries.
“We are not fools. If you thought we were fools you are fooling yourselves. Sanctions will never kill us if you thought we were going to die,” he told the West.
Thus the anti-sanctions campaign, which will see the collection of two signatures of Zimbabweans, does signal not only a tumultuous voice defiance of the death wish of sanctions.
It also should signal a people ready to take care of themselves and their destiny through the ownership of their indigenous resources.
“We are not fools” to let the devil run with the gospel, he declared.
He demanded that British and American companies publicly denounce economic sanctions or face the boot.
He said in part: “We will only align with those that want to give us their hand.
“Those who give us their backs and bring sanctions we will kick out.”
He warned: “Countries without co-operation with us and which have not recognised the hospitality we have extended to them must not sit on their laurels thinking that yesterday will be tomorrow.
“Think again whether it is going to be sanctions or no sanctions. If the countries have organisations here; we will be very strict. In fact, we will refuse investment from those countries.”
President Mugabe said the same principle would also apply to financial institutions closely linked to hostile countries.
“We are not fools. If you thought we were fools you are fooling yourselves. Sanctions will never kill us if you thought we were going to die,” he told the West.
Thus the anti-sanctions campaign, which will see the collection of two signatures of Zimbabweans, does signal not only a tumultuous voice defiance of the death wish of sanctions.
It also should signal a people ready to take care of themselves and their destiny through the ownership of their indigenous resources.
Robert Mugabe @ 87: the myth and legend
"Dr Jokonya, my name is Robert Mugabe; not Robot Mugabe! Do you hear? I swear by my mother Bona. She never meant my name to be spelt out in any other way, let alone that my behaviour took after a robot. Do you understand!"
The Herald
By George Charamba
THE one question I am always pelted with from people who get to know that I work with President Mugabe, nay, articulate his views, is just how it feels, more accurately how it works out.
"Uri romo-romo remukuru wenyika kaiwe, unombozviita sei? You mean unenge wakagara apa, ivo apa, muchitotaura?" (You are the mouth of the President of the country; just how does it work out? You mean you sit here and he sits there - sit with him - and you actually talk?)
You see genuine disbelief, deep bemusement, mingling with swelling eagerness to find out just how a man who has become a legend or myth for many, a monster and gorgon for those whose world he has toppled - how this larger-than-life man comes down to interact with mortals in the work-a-day world, in order to discharge duties of the State.
The clear implication is that he cannot be of this world, an interlocutor to mere mortals.
I enjoy the question. Who wouldn't?
It is a much-needed raisin to my ever wilting, dwindling ego.
Since birth, I have been a creature of small, mundane or pedestrian deeds and misdeeds.
Nothing outstanding, nothing spectacular to my name, or to that of my clan.
I suppose the closest I got to the hemp of fame was when America put me on the fourth place in its first ever list of persons guilty of "posing a continuing, extraordinary threats to American interests".
Before my name was that of Robert Gabriel Mugabe, followed by that of his wife, Grace Mugabe.
After the First Couple came that of Stanslaus Mudenge, then Foreign Minister.
There may have been one or two more, I can't quite recall. But I was well within the zone of the top three, four, at most five, most notorious men and women Zimbabwe had spawned, of course in the jaundiced eyes of America.
Then, America was too angry to be alphabetic, and gradation was by degree of "culpability". The alphabet came much later in the sanctions saga, to push me a good many positions down the list. Who now remembers I was among the first to be charged by America?
This little fame I had stumbled upon, in my arduous search for glory, turned out to be short-lived, remarkably ephemeral. I largely remain a man of little acts, all with little staying power.
Once, I even beat the President in being "more guilty", this time in the eyes of the French.
The President was scheduled to attend the second or so-called France-Africa Summit in Paris.
As likely, the issue of sanctions and travel bans cropped up, whipped to shrillness by the British media, as always.
The French leadership did not want their Summit to flop, all against the potentially damning backdrop of a successful Commonwealth Summit still too fresh in the world's memory.
France's tiff with Rwanda was a freshly opened wound, set to fester as President Kagame kept poking France's already angry eyes.
Already, he had turned Rwanda English speaking, away from the traditional French. No, France could not afford any sanctions-related controversy, sure to alienate most of Africa.
South Africa had already indicated it would not come if Zimbabwe was excluded.
That was bad enough and France buckled.
After all the whole sanctions argument was perfidious Albion's, the same country pecking at her severely diminished colonial backyard.
The President got his visa, finally. So did everyone else set to accompany him. Except I, George Charamba. Quite amused at the turn of events, I walked up to the President with a clear heart to confront him: "Cde President, I haven't got my visa to France. The French Embassy will not oblige," hardly able to hold back laughter.
The Chief of Protocol, Cde Munyaradzi Kajese was on hand to underline the severity of the matter.
He told the President everyone else's visas were out, except raComrade Charamba.
At which point laughter just got the better of me, volubly shooting past my clenched teeth and lips, for a direct hit somewhere behind the Presidential desk.
"Comrade Charamba, you look amused?" "No sir, I mean to sound great, greater than the President of Zimbabwe.
"The French think I am guiltier than you are, you my boss and President! I thought all I do is to speak your mind, implement your policies? Sir, with due respect, you have enough reason to feel junior in my presence!"
It was only after a while of unrestrained laughter - President, Chief (of Protocol), Charamba alike - that we gathered ourselves once, composed enough to transact.
Since the President was to proceed to Malaysia from France, to attend the Langkawi International Dialogue, a decision was taken that I fly straight to Malaysia, well away from France.
I tore off from the rest of the delegation, fame whirling in my tall head, ego puffed by brimming pride and triumph, partly against my President.
I had succeeded in upsetting mighty America, true together with the President.
But in upsetting France I was alone, done it singlehandedly.
Let my scion and history take good note, I kept whispering to myself, all in gratuitous self-ravishment.
For months that followed, I regaled myself with this sparse, inchoate glory!
As such incidental, frankly fortuitous greatness whirled and swelled my head, then comes this question of how I, George Charamba, manages to work with President Mugabe!
I have committed this question to my mind as a pet-question, one that loyally serves me when I am in self-doubt.
Each time my ego is mauled or bruised, often by a reckless world which does not seem to know who I am, more accurately who I speak for, I trawl in the deep blue of my subconscious to fish out this delightful question.
Who else can they ask such a question? Does the question itself not confirm a portion of my own greatness?
I delight myself that way, erecting mighty castles in thin dry air. Of course these curious Zimbabweans will not be marvelling at me.
Rather, they are curious to know how a legend relates to mere mortals like me. Far from being a tribute to me, it is an oblique rebuke.
My minister and I have a duty to present the President to the public. Such a question means we have not done a good job, especially me!
But that is an offence for another day, for another court. For now I must enjoy the flimsy glory I cull from the enquiry.
It is a very difficult question, to tell you the truth. The question has come repeatedly. I am still not able to answer it.
Yet I have had the privilege of working with President Mugabe since 1988, more intensively since 1990 as Head of his small Press Unit, then Deputy Principal Private Secretary before going back to the Press Department, this time as its Director.
I grew in that seat until I doubled up as a Permanent Secretary and his spokesman, a duality that has since discomfited the Prime Minister and his party.
All this means I have worked with the President for slightly over two decades, clearly his longest serving Press Secretary to date, possibly ever.
Still I find this simple question quite difficult, yet so important to address it.
An honest and comprehensive answer to that question goes some significant way in constructing some small face to this multifaceted, most round, very rich character who been at the helm of our country since 1980, at the helm of Zimbabwean politics since 1960.
But also a figure commanding intense curiosity, a figure whose real pith remains elusive to many writers of whatever motive.
Mugabe gazing has become the single largest preoccupation in opposition politics and diplomacy.
So too is Mugabe-bashing, all of it founded on ill-clad malice so brazen so obvious to pass for bona fide mischaracterization by those searching for a difficult truth. One classical case of such malice is Heidi Holland's "Dinner with Mugabe, a book which has turned out to be such an a propaganda runaway, yet such an atrociously lie, so well written by some old, bitter white Rhodesian girl whose deeply ingrained racist contempt for Africans, clawed to a plinth of respectability once Robert Mugabe did a few good things for his long-denied people, thereby making the white man weep.
People get surprised when I tell them the President was interviewed well after the book had been written; that he was a postscript to his portrait by a woman already working the embittered the British, with the angry Rhodesians, with the eager MDC-T, all to lay propaganda material just ahead of the March 2008 harmonised polls.
Which is why his not-so-long interview with the girl, one granted after so much reluctance, was taken not to the printers, but to people in London who claimed to be experts in psychoanalysis, all to validate a mythic monster with which they want history to replace the flesh-and-blood Robert Mugabe.
Thankfully, that interview is available, and shall one day play, clearly showing the man he could never be.
While some Mugabe watchers turn him into a monster, others graft onto him acute vulnerability. He is depicted as a hapless "kid" who is so vulnerable as to require collective gentle cradling. Or worse, a leader who does not know, who is misled and smothered by a parapet of official duplicity. That, too, is another variant to the same myth of vulnerability. I have always thought the President often brings that upon himself. To see his small frame curled in one corner of a remarkably standard chair - his small, well sculpted head slightly fallen back - is to get a picture of a "small" hurdled in an ever diminishing corner, unsure and all alone, against an engulfing danger. That impression is reinforced by his one remarkable attribute which can also be a source of official frustration when the tempo of politics picks up and menacingly speeds off as if a real runaway. You want him to say something; you want him to do something, quickly too, so he puts to an abrupt stop the inauspicious. This abiding attribute is one of being very slow to anger, of being deliberate, of wanting to get to the truth first before deciding on a course of action. More accurately, it is self-caution against acting harshly on a mere whim, as opposed to a condemnable character. A long-time teacher, a commander, a skilful negotiator, a husband, a father, a Catholic, he has met humanity in its diverse frailties.
Many mistake this attribute of the President to a lack of knowledge or appreciation of what dangers he might be, his Party of Government might be. They are dead wrong, the same way I was for a long time. He can look detached, even oblivious to developments around him, while actively taking in the outrage, understanding it before finally taking a position. And once he does, the game is over. I must confess that trait used to baffle, even frustrate me too. Often it levied much from his fame and popularity, as happened when the Willowvale Motor Industries' so-called car scandal broke out in 1988. The expectation in the country was that the President would act swiftly and decisively against the so-called malfeasance, against the so-called wrongdoers, however mighty, however close.
You read me right. I am not convinced that our society ever quite understood what the real offence in this matter was. The word "corrupt" was a convenient shorthand to all that we could not quite pin down. Few, very few of the so-called wrongdoers actually derived any pecuniary benefits from the whole matter. Fame maybe, better regard from all those they helped, friends, relatives and in some few cases, close associates included. Yet in the majority of cases, no huge and direct financial benefits. Their real crime was that they had failed the onerous code of a pre-commercial society where vehicles were still status markers, never utilities to be taken for granted. This is why this country will never another Willogate, another Geoff Nyarota.
Interestingly, the one person who challenged the President on this very matter was Mrs Margaret Thatcher, the British Prime Minister then, who could not understand why the President was destabilising his own government. Robert, what you are terming corruption, which really is speculation, happens in my country every day, with my ministers taking part every day. I would have to fire my whole Government if I were to go by your moral standard Mr President. Why are you rocking your Government, Robert? Words to that effect. She was genuinely concerned.
The waters got murkier when the President decided on setting up an inquiry under Justice Sandura. Fingered members from his still "juvenile" Cabinet - man and women who were coming into something called Government for the first time, all of them from jails, universities, or from the war - who barely knew how to behave in a court of a formal inquiry, simply self-indicted, either through ignorance or simply through tactless arrogance of a reviled people who never quite grasped what was going on around them. Interestingly, the second such inquiry on gratuities which then happened much later into Independence, much later into experience, produced a less dramatic verdict. Did this society not judge its mildly wayward children too harshly?
Be that as it may, the inquiry dragged on and on, all the time providing drama of its own. As a fresher from college working under the President, I did not quite understand what was going on. But I could feel the strains as the already taut system daily got a new tag and another stretch. It simply became unbearable, and then worse. The President started dropping affected ministers, with tragic consequences in one, very visible instance. Overcome by extreme guilt, Cde Maurice Nyagumbo took his life. Still the inquiry went on, followed by remedial actions. More ministers fell. The feral media smelt blood and sought more victims.
One Monday, the President's briefing team congregated at State House for a routine briefing session. Or so we all thought. I was the youngest member in a team that comprised Dr Charles Utete, then Chief Secretary to the President and Cabinet; Dr Elleck Mashingaidze, then Secretary for Foreign Affairs, later to become Director General of the Central Intelligence Organisation (CIO); the late Cde Edison Shirihuri, then Deputy Director General of CIO. I stood in for the head of the Presidential Press Unit, Lindiwe Sadza, daughter to a well-known physician, now in retirement. I had just summarised the latest developments on the "Willowgate" case, ironically to a man who was a principal actor in the matter.
"Aa-ah Shefu ngazvichipera izvi. Zvanyanya kani. Chistoppai izvi Shefu." Words wrapped in agony, all along suppressed, all along mounting. The utterer was Dr Mashingaidze, the only one from the group who had accumulated enough outrage, or plucked enough courage to openly confront the President on the matter. He now stays in Bulawayo, now a widower battling failing eyesight. I wonder whether he still recalls that day. "The process will continue and remedial action has to be taken-ka, Dr Mashingaidze," came the answer, in an amazingly calm and richly intoned voice. "Shefu, how far do you want to go? Zvakwana kani shefu. Mavakudestabiliza system. Mavakuwuraya party kani Shefu." It was a profound plea coming from a man of trusted, mature judgement. Apart from this problem, Zimbabwe faced a hostile neighbour to the south of us. Apartheid South Africa was really enjoying this one, diligently fishing in already troubled waters. Was this not evidence that Africans were not ready for self-rule. Is this what these terrorists planting bombs in South Africa wanted for the great country? Both Bothas were hard at work, and the Secretary for Foreign Affairs was right. All the eyes trained on the President, who did not need a sangoma to know that we all threw the weight of our collective judgement behind Dr Mashingaidze. "Sure, the Party is stretched, but you finish this one, and you start to reorganise yourselves, to reorganise the Party." We got our answer, with enough tonal cues to warn us that the President would not budge on this one matter. An unsolicited bonus from a determined President! What followed is all recorded in history.
As a young officer, I had the bliss of refuge. There was Dr Utete - my boss - at the top. Mine was not to be worried. Someone else was paid to take all the worry, and on that fateful Monday, their assignment had fallen due! And beyond Dr Utete was the President himself - a man who had fought and won a war. Surely Willowgate would be a stroll in the green garden. I bet I was the first to liberate my person from the agony of Willowgate. Even feeling reckless about it too!
Many, many years later, at another briefing. Save for Dr Utete and myself, the rest of the faces had changed, partly because of redeployment, illness or sadly, by mortality. In the CIO seat sat Cde Chipanga, now a parliamentarian from Manicaland. Representing Foreign Affairs was Dr Tichaona Jokonya, or TJB as we popularly called him, then its Permanent Secretary. TJB would later bounce back as my Minister of Information and Publicity, after Professor Jonathan Moyo. He had won the Chikomba seat in the preceding 2005 election.
A long and well experienced senior diplomat, Dr Jokonya simply was huge intellect, that kind of boss in whose glory you luxuriated, in whose stupendous intellect you flourished. Together with Dr Utete and Dr Mashingaidze, you felt like the proverbial round-based clay pot, so securely sat on all three! With the arrival of Dr Misheck Sibanda later, the stability simply became formidable. I had little to worry, a surfeit of quality internship. For Dr Jokonya, that morning had started normally, the sun as usual peeping at the world from the East. But Dr Jokonya had not the slightest presentiment on what Providence had written into his day, that Monday. As before, we gathered at State House, ready to deliver to the President our offerings for the day. That too was done with no incident, done uneventfully.
As per tradition, administrative issues came last and the first one to raise such matters was TJB. Accompanying him was a clean, red-ribboned set of papers which told anyone old enough in the game of Government that the President's signature was about to be asked for, and hopefully granted. All of us who have worked with the man know only too well that you do not take his "imprimatur" for granted. He is a tough customer, quite thorough and even fastidious to some. Not for me. That has always been the aspect of him I cherish most, I have profited the most from. His exacting standards then become my personal benchmark, in my search for elusive excellence. But that is to digress.
Dr Jokonya walked up to the President's desk and in no time asked for the President's signature to a set of papers whose arrangements pointed to weighty matters of State. He did more. He isolated the page on which the President would append his signature. If he was a junior officer, one with soaring ambitions, I would have added that he sought to bring an unasked for convenience to the President, all in the hope of some indeterminate favour in an uncertain future. But TJB had seen it all, done it all. He had little more to look forward to. He was just being helpful. Therein lay the problem that would change the colour of his whole day. "Cde President, if we could get your signature apa, Sir," requested the good doctor. To which request the President responded by indifferently leafing through the document about to be signed, page by page, pouring over the contents of each page. "Shefu, tinokumbiraiwo signature yenyu apa," cut in the good doctor, seemingly proffering benign advice to a Head of State who did not have to bother himself with details, but who sat there, equanimously, seemingly deaf to helpful solicitations from a dutiful senior officer. Still the President continued leafing through the document, remarkably opaque and staid. "Cde President, it is just your signature we require here, on this page I have isolated. Kumwe kwese hakuna basa." You could not miss the strain of frustration in Dr Jokonya, possibly frustration arising from self-importance. Here was a man who had been many things in the Service and for long, right from the first day of our Independence. Why wouldn't the President trust his drafting skills? Why? And all this disgruntlement on a personality well known for haughty impudence! He felt slighted by Gushungo's "fastidiousness". Another page flips. "Gushungo, sainai apa chete!" In calmer, ordinary times, TJB's forehead always bore habitual wrinkles, creases. But their permanence had made them such a part of him that they threatened no one. In any case there was always this infectious laughter to dispel any doubts, to reassure the mistaken. But by this time, the forehead wrinkled less from habit, more from impotent anger. What then followed will forever remain etched on my mind, right through to the grave.
"Dr Jokonya, my name is Robert Mugabe; not Robot Mugabe! Do you hear? I swear by my mother Bona. She never meant my name to be spelt out in any other way, let alone that my behaviour took after a robot. Do you understand!" The briefing semi-circle simply snapped as each one of us fell over available space, all in utterly uncontrollable laughter. Not even TJB, himself the butt of that memorable light-hearted Presidential rebuke, could help himself, could save his own ribs from vibrating up and down, nay, from quivering with reckless laughter. By the time we all recovered, the President had finished signing the document, and sedately sat in his chair, chin doubly supported by his veinous palms, and ready for the next item. After that most "mortal" blunder, we all knew how not to hurry the President of Zimbabwe.
Years later, TJB would accord me the dubious honour of being among the first three persons to see his cold and still body curled in a water-full tub, as if wrapped in the kindly waters of the womb - in a suite at a local hotel, stony dead. He had fatally dozed off in his bath, fatefully turned in his sleep as the temperature in the bath tub gradually fell. That turn to sleep by his side, fatally proved his last. He drowned. He lies at the National Heroes Acre, among fellow comrades who have done so much for this seemingly thankless, forgetful Nation.
My own fate would arrive sooner. But mine was infinitely more humane, less taxing than that suffered by my seniors. Another briefing session this time at Zimbabwe House, the President's home Offices. That morning we had picked a story on an extremely angry Brother Leader, Muammar Gaddafi, the Libyan leader. He had just taken his country out of the Arab League, all in deep anger. His colleagues in the Arab League had failed him, betrayed him even. They had let down the Palestinian people. They had cut deals with Zionist Israel, in his mind the archetypal evil for all Arabs. The Arabs had zipped their mouths, kept mum while his country was being wrecked by sanctions over the Lockerbie issue. And when he had completed his great man-made river - a reference to a massive, interminable pipe stretching across vast desert sand, all to cart water across the desert, to turn Libya green, to slack Libyan thirst. This massive project had been completed at great cost, all under conditions of crippling sanctions. Besides, it was an engineering feat, a real marvel to watch. Yet no Arab cheer had been forthcoming to celebrate this loud symbol of Arab indomitableness.
Worse had happened too. The Americans had tried to assassinate him using missiles and fighter jets. Luckily he had escaped, barely, but not without losing a son in that act of naked and deadly American aggression still to be atoned for to this day. Surprisingly, no Arab protests. Only feeble statements of solidarity, even then tendered through nightly whispers. The Arab world would not go to war, much to the Brother Leader's chagrin. On sanctions it was Africa - not the Arab League - which had taken a leading role, Africa led by President Mugabe. The President had flown to US to tell the Americans and their Europeans sanctions against Libya had to be lifted, or else Africa would breach them in solidarity with Libya. The first line of that breach would be to fly African airlines to Libya, and dare the Americans to shoot down the planes. America buckled. Europe buckled and in no time, the sanctions were removed. That reinforced Africa's affinities with Libya, or the corollary, alienated the Brother Leader from the Arab League.
"For far too long, I have been barking towards the desert. No one heard me. I now turn to Africa, my home," the brother leader proclaimed, building great poetry on the grandeur of Africa, great diatribe on the iniquity of imperial Europe and Satanic America. Then came the bit which really got me, and which I felt the President could not miss. "Europe steals from Africa all the time, starting with stealing our history, our lofty achievements," added the Colonel. "Shakespeare was an Arab, a great Arab bard." This was just too much and the President had to hear this claim from his own brother. So that morning I read out to the President an extract from Gaddafi's speech, including the piece on Shakespeare. The President rocked his chair in great laughter. We joined him, but for a short stretch of the laughter, thinking this was a short chuckle, itself a fitting tribute to a maverick politician, a much wronged and angry African leader seeking to even it out with the imperialists.
The President kept laughing, his laughter self-feeding with each peel. We all wondered. The President had laughed for far too long. What was going on? "Sheikh-speare!" Aa-ah the house came down! "An Arab bard indeed!" He left us laughing uproariously, as he quietly went back to signing a pile of papers. By the time we recovered, he was through, waiting for us.
To work with the President can be great fun. You meet a legend who is so ordinary, a myth which is so human.
Happy Birthday, Comrade President!
The Herald
 |
| Larger than life...President Robert Mugabe |
By George Charamba
THE one question I am always pelted with from people who get to know that I work with President Mugabe, nay, articulate his views, is just how it feels, more accurately how it works out.
"Uri romo-romo remukuru wenyika kaiwe, unombozviita sei? You mean unenge wakagara apa, ivo apa, muchitotaura?" (You are the mouth of the President of the country; just how does it work out? You mean you sit here and he sits there - sit with him - and you actually talk?)
You see genuine disbelief, deep bemusement, mingling with swelling eagerness to find out just how a man who has become a legend or myth for many, a monster and gorgon for those whose world he has toppled - how this larger-than-life man comes down to interact with mortals in the work-a-day world, in order to discharge duties of the State.
The clear implication is that he cannot be of this world, an interlocutor to mere mortals.
I enjoy the question. Who wouldn't?
It is a much-needed raisin to my ever wilting, dwindling ego.
Since birth, I have been a creature of small, mundane or pedestrian deeds and misdeeds.
Nothing outstanding, nothing spectacular to my name, or to that of my clan.
I suppose the closest I got to the hemp of fame was when America put me on the fourth place in its first ever list of persons guilty of "posing a continuing, extraordinary threats to American interests".
Before my name was that of Robert Gabriel Mugabe, followed by that of his wife, Grace Mugabe.
After the First Couple came that of Stanslaus Mudenge, then Foreign Minister.
There may have been one or two more, I can't quite recall. But I was well within the zone of the top three, four, at most five, most notorious men and women Zimbabwe had spawned, of course in the jaundiced eyes of America.
Then, America was too angry to be alphabetic, and gradation was by degree of "culpability". The alphabet came much later in the sanctions saga, to push me a good many positions down the list. Who now remembers I was among the first to be charged by America?
This little fame I had stumbled upon, in my arduous search for glory, turned out to be short-lived, remarkably ephemeral. I largely remain a man of little acts, all with little staying power.
Once, I even beat the President in being "more guilty", this time in the eyes of the French.
The President was scheduled to attend the second or so-called France-Africa Summit in Paris.
As likely, the issue of sanctions and travel bans cropped up, whipped to shrillness by the British media, as always.
The French leadership did not want their Summit to flop, all against the potentially damning backdrop of a successful Commonwealth Summit still too fresh in the world's memory.
France's tiff with Rwanda was a freshly opened wound, set to fester as President Kagame kept poking France's already angry eyes.
Already, he had turned Rwanda English speaking, away from the traditional French. No, France could not afford any sanctions-related controversy, sure to alienate most of Africa.
South Africa had already indicated it would not come if Zimbabwe was excluded.
That was bad enough and France buckled.
After all the whole sanctions argument was perfidious Albion's, the same country pecking at her severely diminished colonial backyard.
The President got his visa, finally. So did everyone else set to accompany him. Except I, George Charamba. Quite amused at the turn of events, I walked up to the President with a clear heart to confront him: "Cde President, I haven't got my visa to France. The French Embassy will not oblige," hardly able to hold back laughter.
The Chief of Protocol, Cde Munyaradzi Kajese was on hand to underline the severity of the matter.
He told the President everyone else's visas were out, except raComrade Charamba.
At which point laughter just got the better of me, volubly shooting past my clenched teeth and lips, for a direct hit somewhere behind the Presidential desk.
"Comrade Charamba, you look amused?" "No sir, I mean to sound great, greater than the President of Zimbabwe.
"The French think I am guiltier than you are, you my boss and President! I thought all I do is to speak your mind, implement your policies? Sir, with due respect, you have enough reason to feel junior in my presence!"
It was only after a while of unrestrained laughter - President, Chief (of Protocol), Charamba alike - that we gathered ourselves once, composed enough to transact.
Since the President was to proceed to Malaysia from France, to attend the Langkawi International Dialogue, a decision was taken that I fly straight to Malaysia, well away from France.
I tore off from the rest of the delegation, fame whirling in my tall head, ego puffed by brimming pride and triumph, partly against my President.
I had succeeded in upsetting mighty America, true together with the President.
But in upsetting France I was alone, done it singlehandedly.
Let my scion and history take good note, I kept whispering to myself, all in gratuitous self-ravishment.
For months that followed, I regaled myself with this sparse, inchoate glory!
As such incidental, frankly fortuitous greatness whirled and swelled my head, then comes this question of how I, George Charamba, manages to work with President Mugabe!
I have committed this question to my mind as a pet-question, one that loyally serves me when I am in self-doubt.
Each time my ego is mauled or bruised, often by a reckless world which does not seem to know who I am, more accurately who I speak for, I trawl in the deep blue of my subconscious to fish out this delightful question.
Who else can they ask such a question? Does the question itself not confirm a portion of my own greatness?
I delight myself that way, erecting mighty castles in thin dry air. Of course these curious Zimbabweans will not be marvelling at me.
Rather, they are curious to know how a legend relates to mere mortals like me. Far from being a tribute to me, it is an oblique rebuke.
My minister and I have a duty to present the President to the public. Such a question means we have not done a good job, especially me!
But that is an offence for another day, for another court. For now I must enjoy the flimsy glory I cull from the enquiry.
It is a very difficult question, to tell you the truth. The question has come repeatedly. I am still not able to answer it.
Yet I have had the privilege of working with President Mugabe since 1988, more intensively since 1990 as Head of his small Press Unit, then Deputy Principal Private Secretary before going back to the Press Department, this time as its Director.
I grew in that seat until I doubled up as a Permanent Secretary and his spokesman, a duality that has since discomfited the Prime Minister and his party.
All this means I have worked with the President for slightly over two decades, clearly his longest serving Press Secretary to date, possibly ever.
Still I find this simple question quite difficult, yet so important to address it.
An honest and comprehensive answer to that question goes some significant way in constructing some small face to this multifaceted, most round, very rich character who been at the helm of our country since 1980, at the helm of Zimbabwean politics since 1960.
But also a figure commanding intense curiosity, a figure whose real pith remains elusive to many writers of whatever motive.
Mugabe gazing has become the single largest preoccupation in opposition politics and diplomacy.
So too is Mugabe-bashing, all of it founded on ill-clad malice so brazen so obvious to pass for bona fide mischaracterization by those searching for a difficult truth. One classical case of such malice is Heidi Holland's "Dinner with Mugabe, a book which has turned out to be such an a propaganda runaway, yet such an atrociously lie, so well written by some old, bitter white Rhodesian girl whose deeply ingrained racist contempt for Africans, clawed to a plinth of respectability once Robert Mugabe did a few good things for his long-denied people, thereby making the white man weep.
People get surprised when I tell them the President was interviewed well after the book had been written; that he was a postscript to his portrait by a woman already working the embittered the British, with the angry Rhodesians, with the eager MDC-T, all to lay propaganda material just ahead of the March 2008 harmonised polls.
Which is why his not-so-long interview with the girl, one granted after so much reluctance, was taken not to the printers, but to people in London who claimed to be experts in psychoanalysis, all to validate a mythic monster with which they want history to replace the flesh-and-blood Robert Mugabe.
Thankfully, that interview is available, and shall one day play, clearly showing the man he could never be.
While some Mugabe watchers turn him into a monster, others graft onto him acute vulnerability. He is depicted as a hapless "kid" who is so vulnerable as to require collective gentle cradling. Or worse, a leader who does not know, who is misled and smothered by a parapet of official duplicity. That, too, is another variant to the same myth of vulnerability. I have always thought the President often brings that upon himself. To see his small frame curled in one corner of a remarkably standard chair - his small, well sculpted head slightly fallen back - is to get a picture of a "small" hurdled in an ever diminishing corner, unsure and all alone, against an engulfing danger. That impression is reinforced by his one remarkable attribute which can also be a source of official frustration when the tempo of politics picks up and menacingly speeds off as if a real runaway. You want him to say something; you want him to do something, quickly too, so he puts to an abrupt stop the inauspicious. This abiding attribute is one of being very slow to anger, of being deliberate, of wanting to get to the truth first before deciding on a course of action. More accurately, it is self-caution against acting harshly on a mere whim, as opposed to a condemnable character. A long-time teacher, a commander, a skilful negotiator, a husband, a father, a Catholic, he has met humanity in its diverse frailties.
Many mistake this attribute of the President to a lack of knowledge or appreciation of what dangers he might be, his Party of Government might be. They are dead wrong, the same way I was for a long time. He can look detached, even oblivious to developments around him, while actively taking in the outrage, understanding it before finally taking a position. And once he does, the game is over. I must confess that trait used to baffle, even frustrate me too. Often it levied much from his fame and popularity, as happened when the Willowvale Motor Industries' so-called car scandal broke out in 1988. The expectation in the country was that the President would act swiftly and decisively against the so-called malfeasance, against the so-called wrongdoers, however mighty, however close.
You read me right. I am not convinced that our society ever quite understood what the real offence in this matter was. The word "corrupt" was a convenient shorthand to all that we could not quite pin down. Few, very few of the so-called wrongdoers actually derived any pecuniary benefits from the whole matter. Fame maybe, better regard from all those they helped, friends, relatives and in some few cases, close associates included. Yet in the majority of cases, no huge and direct financial benefits. Their real crime was that they had failed the onerous code of a pre-commercial society where vehicles were still status markers, never utilities to be taken for granted. This is why this country will never another Willogate, another Geoff Nyarota.
Interestingly, the one person who challenged the President on this very matter was Mrs Margaret Thatcher, the British Prime Minister then, who could not understand why the President was destabilising his own government. Robert, what you are terming corruption, which really is speculation, happens in my country every day, with my ministers taking part every day. I would have to fire my whole Government if I were to go by your moral standard Mr President. Why are you rocking your Government, Robert? Words to that effect. She was genuinely concerned.
The waters got murkier when the President decided on setting up an inquiry under Justice Sandura. Fingered members from his still "juvenile" Cabinet - man and women who were coming into something called Government for the first time, all of them from jails, universities, or from the war - who barely knew how to behave in a court of a formal inquiry, simply self-indicted, either through ignorance or simply through tactless arrogance of a reviled people who never quite grasped what was going on around them. Interestingly, the second such inquiry on gratuities which then happened much later into Independence, much later into experience, produced a less dramatic verdict. Did this society not judge its mildly wayward children too harshly?
Be that as it may, the inquiry dragged on and on, all the time providing drama of its own. As a fresher from college working under the President, I did not quite understand what was going on. But I could feel the strains as the already taut system daily got a new tag and another stretch. It simply became unbearable, and then worse. The President started dropping affected ministers, with tragic consequences in one, very visible instance. Overcome by extreme guilt, Cde Maurice Nyagumbo took his life. Still the inquiry went on, followed by remedial actions. More ministers fell. The feral media smelt blood and sought more victims.
One Monday, the President's briefing team congregated at State House for a routine briefing session. Or so we all thought. I was the youngest member in a team that comprised Dr Charles Utete, then Chief Secretary to the President and Cabinet; Dr Elleck Mashingaidze, then Secretary for Foreign Affairs, later to become Director General of the Central Intelligence Organisation (CIO); the late Cde Edison Shirihuri, then Deputy Director General of CIO. I stood in for the head of the Presidential Press Unit, Lindiwe Sadza, daughter to a well-known physician, now in retirement. I had just summarised the latest developments on the "Willowgate" case, ironically to a man who was a principal actor in the matter.
"Aa-ah Shefu ngazvichipera izvi. Zvanyanya kani. Chistoppai izvi Shefu." Words wrapped in agony, all along suppressed, all along mounting. The utterer was Dr Mashingaidze, the only one from the group who had accumulated enough outrage, or plucked enough courage to openly confront the President on the matter. He now stays in Bulawayo, now a widower battling failing eyesight. I wonder whether he still recalls that day. "The process will continue and remedial action has to be taken-ka, Dr Mashingaidze," came the answer, in an amazingly calm and richly intoned voice. "Shefu, how far do you want to go? Zvakwana kani shefu. Mavakudestabiliza system. Mavakuwuraya party kani Shefu." It was a profound plea coming from a man of trusted, mature judgement. Apart from this problem, Zimbabwe faced a hostile neighbour to the south of us. Apartheid South Africa was really enjoying this one, diligently fishing in already troubled waters. Was this not evidence that Africans were not ready for self-rule. Is this what these terrorists planting bombs in South Africa wanted for the great country? Both Bothas were hard at work, and the Secretary for Foreign Affairs was right. All the eyes trained on the President, who did not need a sangoma to know that we all threw the weight of our collective judgement behind Dr Mashingaidze. "Sure, the Party is stretched, but you finish this one, and you start to reorganise yourselves, to reorganise the Party." We got our answer, with enough tonal cues to warn us that the President would not budge on this one matter. An unsolicited bonus from a determined President! What followed is all recorded in history.
As a young officer, I had the bliss of refuge. There was Dr Utete - my boss - at the top. Mine was not to be worried. Someone else was paid to take all the worry, and on that fateful Monday, their assignment had fallen due! And beyond Dr Utete was the President himself - a man who had fought and won a war. Surely Willowgate would be a stroll in the green garden. I bet I was the first to liberate my person from the agony of Willowgate. Even feeling reckless about it too!
Many, many years later, at another briefing. Save for Dr Utete and myself, the rest of the faces had changed, partly because of redeployment, illness or sadly, by mortality. In the CIO seat sat Cde Chipanga, now a parliamentarian from Manicaland. Representing Foreign Affairs was Dr Tichaona Jokonya, or TJB as we popularly called him, then its Permanent Secretary. TJB would later bounce back as my Minister of Information and Publicity, after Professor Jonathan Moyo. He had won the Chikomba seat in the preceding 2005 election.
A long and well experienced senior diplomat, Dr Jokonya simply was huge intellect, that kind of boss in whose glory you luxuriated, in whose stupendous intellect you flourished. Together with Dr Utete and Dr Mashingaidze, you felt like the proverbial round-based clay pot, so securely sat on all three! With the arrival of Dr Misheck Sibanda later, the stability simply became formidable. I had little to worry, a surfeit of quality internship. For Dr Jokonya, that morning had started normally, the sun as usual peeping at the world from the East. But Dr Jokonya had not the slightest presentiment on what Providence had written into his day, that Monday. As before, we gathered at State House, ready to deliver to the President our offerings for the day. That too was done with no incident, done uneventfully.
As per tradition, administrative issues came last and the first one to raise such matters was TJB. Accompanying him was a clean, red-ribboned set of papers which told anyone old enough in the game of Government that the President's signature was about to be asked for, and hopefully granted. All of us who have worked with the man know only too well that you do not take his "imprimatur" for granted. He is a tough customer, quite thorough and even fastidious to some. Not for me. That has always been the aspect of him I cherish most, I have profited the most from. His exacting standards then become my personal benchmark, in my search for elusive excellence. But that is to digress.
Dr Jokonya walked up to the President's desk and in no time asked for the President's signature to a set of papers whose arrangements pointed to weighty matters of State. He did more. He isolated the page on which the President would append his signature. If he was a junior officer, one with soaring ambitions, I would have added that he sought to bring an unasked for convenience to the President, all in the hope of some indeterminate favour in an uncertain future. But TJB had seen it all, done it all. He had little more to look forward to. He was just being helpful. Therein lay the problem that would change the colour of his whole day. "Cde President, if we could get your signature apa, Sir," requested the good doctor. To which request the President responded by indifferently leafing through the document about to be signed, page by page, pouring over the contents of each page. "Shefu, tinokumbiraiwo signature yenyu apa," cut in the good doctor, seemingly proffering benign advice to a Head of State who did not have to bother himself with details, but who sat there, equanimously, seemingly deaf to helpful solicitations from a dutiful senior officer. Still the President continued leafing through the document, remarkably opaque and staid. "Cde President, it is just your signature we require here, on this page I have isolated. Kumwe kwese hakuna basa." You could not miss the strain of frustration in Dr Jokonya, possibly frustration arising from self-importance. Here was a man who had been many things in the Service and for long, right from the first day of our Independence. Why wouldn't the President trust his drafting skills? Why? And all this disgruntlement on a personality well known for haughty impudence! He felt slighted by Gushungo's "fastidiousness". Another page flips. "Gushungo, sainai apa chete!" In calmer, ordinary times, TJB's forehead always bore habitual wrinkles, creases. But their permanence had made them such a part of him that they threatened no one. In any case there was always this infectious laughter to dispel any doubts, to reassure the mistaken. But by this time, the forehead wrinkled less from habit, more from impotent anger. What then followed will forever remain etched on my mind, right through to the grave.
"Dr Jokonya, my name is Robert Mugabe; not Robot Mugabe! Do you hear? I swear by my mother Bona. She never meant my name to be spelt out in any other way, let alone that my behaviour took after a robot. Do you understand!" The briefing semi-circle simply snapped as each one of us fell over available space, all in utterly uncontrollable laughter. Not even TJB, himself the butt of that memorable light-hearted Presidential rebuke, could help himself, could save his own ribs from vibrating up and down, nay, from quivering with reckless laughter. By the time we all recovered, the President had finished signing the document, and sedately sat in his chair, chin doubly supported by his veinous palms, and ready for the next item. After that most "mortal" blunder, we all knew how not to hurry the President of Zimbabwe.
Years later, TJB would accord me the dubious honour of being among the first three persons to see his cold and still body curled in a water-full tub, as if wrapped in the kindly waters of the womb - in a suite at a local hotel, stony dead. He had fatally dozed off in his bath, fatefully turned in his sleep as the temperature in the bath tub gradually fell. That turn to sleep by his side, fatally proved his last. He drowned. He lies at the National Heroes Acre, among fellow comrades who have done so much for this seemingly thankless, forgetful Nation.
My own fate would arrive sooner. But mine was infinitely more humane, less taxing than that suffered by my seniors. Another briefing session this time at Zimbabwe House, the President's home Offices. That morning we had picked a story on an extremely angry Brother Leader, Muammar Gaddafi, the Libyan leader. He had just taken his country out of the Arab League, all in deep anger. His colleagues in the Arab League had failed him, betrayed him even. They had let down the Palestinian people. They had cut deals with Zionist Israel, in his mind the archetypal evil for all Arabs. The Arabs had zipped their mouths, kept mum while his country was being wrecked by sanctions over the Lockerbie issue. And when he had completed his great man-made river - a reference to a massive, interminable pipe stretching across vast desert sand, all to cart water across the desert, to turn Libya green, to slack Libyan thirst. This massive project had been completed at great cost, all under conditions of crippling sanctions. Besides, it was an engineering feat, a real marvel to watch. Yet no Arab cheer had been forthcoming to celebrate this loud symbol of Arab indomitableness.
Worse had happened too. The Americans had tried to assassinate him using missiles and fighter jets. Luckily he had escaped, barely, but not without losing a son in that act of naked and deadly American aggression still to be atoned for to this day. Surprisingly, no Arab protests. Only feeble statements of solidarity, even then tendered through nightly whispers. The Arab world would not go to war, much to the Brother Leader's chagrin. On sanctions it was Africa - not the Arab League - which had taken a leading role, Africa led by President Mugabe. The President had flown to US to tell the Americans and their Europeans sanctions against Libya had to be lifted, or else Africa would breach them in solidarity with Libya. The first line of that breach would be to fly African airlines to Libya, and dare the Americans to shoot down the planes. America buckled. Europe buckled and in no time, the sanctions were removed. That reinforced Africa's affinities with Libya, or the corollary, alienated the Brother Leader from the Arab League.
"For far too long, I have been barking towards the desert. No one heard me. I now turn to Africa, my home," the brother leader proclaimed, building great poetry on the grandeur of Africa, great diatribe on the iniquity of imperial Europe and Satanic America. Then came the bit which really got me, and which I felt the President could not miss. "Europe steals from Africa all the time, starting with stealing our history, our lofty achievements," added the Colonel. "Shakespeare was an Arab, a great Arab bard." This was just too much and the President had to hear this claim from his own brother. So that morning I read out to the President an extract from Gaddafi's speech, including the piece on Shakespeare. The President rocked his chair in great laughter. We joined him, but for a short stretch of the laughter, thinking this was a short chuckle, itself a fitting tribute to a maverick politician, a much wronged and angry African leader seeking to even it out with the imperialists.
The President kept laughing, his laughter self-feeding with each peel. We all wondered. The President had laughed for far too long. What was going on? "Sheikh-speare!" Aa-ah the house came down! "An Arab bard indeed!" He left us laughing uproariously, as he quietly went back to signing a pile of papers. By the time we recovered, he was through, waiting for us.
To work with the President can be great fun. You meet a legend who is so ordinary, a myth which is so human.
Happy Birthday, Comrade President!
Getting Perilously Close to Truth about US Foreign Policy
US foreign policy makers weren't opposed to what they called "Soviet expansionism" because they valued "democracy" but because they valued nearly limitless exploitation of labour, which expanding Soviet influence would have pared back.
The problem with Islamic radicalism isn't that it offends Western values (even if it does), but that it inspires regimes that place national interests above those of US oil companies. Arab peace with Israel is desirable because Israel is beholden to Washington to act on its behalf to prevent an Arab pan-nationalism that might see oil-rich countries balk at domination by US oil interests.
By Stephen Gowans
It started off promisingly enough. Over the weekend, the New York Times' Scott Shane wondered why "the drama unfolding in Cairo" seems "so familiar" if "the United States, as so many presidents have said in so many speeches [is] the world's pre-eminent champion of democracy."
Shane never arrived at the obvious explanation: that the United States isn't the world's pre-eminent champion of democracy. But he came close.
He touched on some of the more egregious examples of Washington's dictator-backing: Batista in Cuba; Mahammed Reza Pahlavi in Iran; Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines (whose "adherence to democratic principles and to the democratic process" then US vice president George H. W. Bush conjured out of a vacuum and then shamelessly praised.)
"The list could be extended," Shane admitted, to "at least a couple of dozen despots" since World War II alone.
Rarely does the New York Times acknowledge that the United States has a long record of backing dictators, all right-wing and not a few fascist (though the Times brushed over the political character of the dictatorships the US favors.) On the contrary, the newspaper's accustomed practice is to reinforce what "so many presidents have said in so many speeches": that the country's foreign policy is guided by the core US value of spreading democracy.
The reason may be that there is no way the United States can plausibly continue to back its three-decade-long paladin in Egypt, Hosni Mubarak – and the continuation of Mubarak's regime by his heir apparent Omar Suleiman – and still invoke pro-democracy rhetoric to justify its support (though secretary of state Hilary Clinton, who talks of Suleiman overseeing a transition to democracy, is game to try.)
With US hypocrisy laid bare, the follow-the-flag New York Times has had to make a concession – to truth, at least a partial one.
What Shane concedes is that the United States has values and interests, and that circumstances often conspire to keep the two from intersecting. But that's as far as he'll go. Admitting that the United States has "interests" which don't always align with its "values" comes dangerously close to the truth. But if you follow what Shane has acknowledged to its limit, and ask a key question, dangerously close becomes dangerously there.
Go where Shane fears to tread.
Shane never arrived at the obvious explanation: that the United States isn't the world's pre-eminent champion of democracy. But he came close.
He touched on some of the more egregious examples of Washington's dictator-backing: Batista in Cuba; Mahammed Reza Pahlavi in Iran; Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines (whose "adherence to democratic principles and to the democratic process" then US vice president George H. W. Bush conjured out of a vacuum and then shamelessly praised.)
"The list could be extended," Shane admitted, to "at least a couple of dozen despots" since World War II alone.
Rarely does the New York Times acknowledge that the United States has a long record of backing dictators, all right-wing and not a few fascist (though the Times brushed over the political character of the dictatorships the US favors.) On the contrary, the newspaper's accustomed practice is to reinforce what "so many presidents have said in so many speeches": that the country's foreign policy is guided by the core US value of spreading democracy.
The reason may be that there is no way the United States can plausibly continue to back its three-decade-long paladin in Egypt, Hosni Mubarak – and the continuation of Mubarak's regime by his heir apparent Omar Suleiman – and still invoke pro-democracy rhetoric to justify its support (though secretary of state Hilary Clinton, who talks of Suleiman overseeing a transition to democracy, is game to try.)
With US hypocrisy laid bare, the follow-the-flag New York Times has had to make a concession – to truth, at least a partial one.
What Shane concedes is that the United States has values and interests, and that circumstances often conspire to keep the two from intersecting. But that's as far as he'll go. Admitting that the United States has "interests" which don't always align with its "values" comes dangerously close to the truth. But if you follow what Shane has acknowledged to its limit, and ask a key question, dangerously close becomes dangerously there.
Go where Shane fears to tread.
US values and interests sometimes conflict. Okay, fine. But when they do – and here are the dots Shane fails to connect – US values take a back seat.
In other words, what's important in US foreign policy are not the country's values, but its interests.
Okay, but what are its interests? R. Palme Dutt once observed that the idea that countries have interests in other countries was an abomination of geography and democracy.
Okay, but what are its interests? R. Palme Dutt once observed that the idea that countries have interests in other countries was an abomination of geography and democracy.
How could the United States have interests in Egypt? Do Egyptians have interests in the United States, to be enforced by shipping billions of dollars to a dictator to hold the interests of US citizens in check, subordinate to their own?
If so Americans would surely call this imperialism, rather than failure of values and interests to align. If Egyptians said that they really valued democracy, but that other considerations were senior, Americans would say that Egypt's commitment to democracy was rhetorical. It's the other considerations that really matter.
According to Shane, Mubarak has served US interests as "a staunch ally against Soviet expansionism," by maintaining "a critical peace with Israel," as "a bulwark against Islamic radicalism" and in promoting "a trade- and tourist-friendly Egypt."
According to Shane, Mubarak has served US interests as "a staunch ally against Soviet expansionism," by maintaining "a critical peace with Israel," as "a bulwark against Islamic radicalism" and in promoting "a trade- and tourist-friendly Egypt."
Shane's New York Times colleague Mark Landler sums it up this way: Mubarak's regime protects US strategic and commercial interests.
Commercial interests are, of course, business interests, and more specifically, big business interests. They aren't directly the interests of the bulk of US citizens, nor in many cases do they represent their indirect interests either.
Commercial interests are, of course, business interests, and more specifically, big business interests. They aren't directly the interests of the bulk of US citizens, nor in many cases do they represent their indirect interests either.
An investment by US investors in an existing Egyptian business profits the investors, not other US citizens.
A call centre set up by a US firm in Egypt to take advantage of low-wage labour benefits the US firm's wealthy shareholders – many of whom are not even US citizens – while putting downward pressure on US wages and exporting jobs abroad.
In other words, the business interests that Mubarak and other US-backed autocrats protect on behalf of the United States are not the interests of most US citizens, but of an upper stratum of investors, bankers and wealthy shareholders whose sole loyalty is to their bottom lines.
In other words, the business interests that Mubarak and other US-backed autocrats protect on behalf of the United States are not the interests of most US citizens, but of an upper stratum of investors, bankers and wealthy shareholders whose sole loyalty is to their bottom lines.
The interests of average Americans hardly matter.
Indeed, in many cases, their interests are diametrically opposed to those of the investors and shareholders US foreign policy represents (as in the export of jobs).
And who's footing the bill for the billions of dollars in military aid Mubarak's regime receives?
And who's footing the bill for the billions of dollars in military aid Mubarak's regime receives?
Given the low corporate tax policies the US government pursues, and the corporations' skill at minimizing the taxes they pay, the answer is average Americans, not the direct beneficiaries of US foreign policy.
It's worse.
It's worse.
While it might seem that big business interests aren't the only interests guiding US foreign policy – after all, there are strategic interests too – strategic interests really boil down to the interests of big business.
US foreign policy makers weren't opposed to what they called "Soviet expansionism" because they valued "democracy" but because they valued nearly limitless exploitation of labour, which expanding Soviet influence would have pared back.
The problem with Islamic radicalism isn't that it offends Western values (even if it does), but that it inspires regimes that place national interests above those of US oil companies. Arab peace with Israel is desirable because Israel is beholden to Washington to act on its behalf to prevent an Arab pan-nationalism that might see oil-rich countries balk at domination by US oil interests.
So what of US values? We're supposed to believe that US policy-makers value liberal democracy, even if they're willing to place profit-making interests first.
So what of US values? We're supposed to believe that US policy-makers value liberal democracy, even if they're willing to place profit-making interests first.
But if big business interests win out over liberal democracy when the two collide, what Washington really values – if value is to have any meaning at all – is profit.
It's like this: I say I value literature, but I always toss my books aside whenever someone turns on the TV.
It's like this: I say I value literature, but I always toss my books aside whenever someone turns on the TV.
And I never miss an episode of Cribs. So, where do my values really lie?
The significance of this might seem all the greater if it is realised that none of this is bounded by foreign policy.
The significance of this might seem all the greater if it is realised that none of this is bounded by foreign policy.
Embracing liberal democracy where it doesn't conflict with the naked pursuit of profit applies equally in the domestic sphere as well.
The readiness of US policy-makers to trash civil liberties in the Red Scare years following the Bolshevik Revolution – when capitalists cowered at the thought of socialist revolution spreading around the world (with little justification it turned out) – attests to this.
Civil and political liberties also took a beating later on when fears of spreading Soviet influence also seemed to threaten the capitalist system and the wealth and position of those at the top of it.
As for the democracy Washington is prepared to embrace, it looks good on paper, but comes up short in practice.
As for the democracy Washington is prepared to embrace, it looks good on paper, but comes up short in practice.
Washington-friendly democracy is not democracy in its original sense as the rule of a previously oppressed class (the rabble), but democracy of the currently dominant class, the capitalist rich.
True, democracy of the kind cabinet secretaries and editorial writers rhapsodize about appears to provide equal opportunity to all to influence the political process, but the reality is that the wealthy use their money to dominate the process through lobbying, funding of political parties and candidates, ownership of the media and placement of their representatives in key positions in the state.
How many cabinet secretaries in Obama's administration held top corporate jobs and will return to them when their sojourn in Washington ends, replaced by other corporate luminaries who travel in the same circles, sit on the same boards of directors, and whose children go to the same schools and intermarry? The art of politics in capitalist democracy, to paraphrase a key Labour politician of the past, is to enable the wealthy to persuade the rest of us to use our votes to keep the wealthy in power.
How many cabinet secretaries in Obama's administration held top corporate jobs and will return to them when their sojourn in Washington ends, replaced by other corporate luminaries who travel in the same circles, sit on the same boards of directors, and whose children go to the same schools and intermarry? The art of politics in capitalist democracy, to paraphrase a key Labour politician of the past, is to enable the wealthy to persuade the rest of us to use our votes to keep the wealthy in power.
Democracy, then, is not a core US value – and it is not, on two counts.
First, the democracy Washington embraces isn't democracy in any substantial sense, but is more aptly termed a plutocracy with democratic trappings. Second, the real core US value is profits. Even Washington's preferred democracy of the rich gets pushed aside when, for whatever reasons, big business interests cannot be accommodated adequately – that is, whenever real expressions of democracy threaten to break through the restraints the system provides to hold it in check.
Development aid enemy of emancipation
In an interview with Basta! at the World Social Forum (WSF), Firoze Manji, editor-in-chief of Pambazuka News, discusses the problems of the ‘aid industry’, the resurgence of Africa’s popular movements and the need for a new people-centred ideology.
BASTA!: What are the features of Africa’s civil society?
FIROZE MANJI: In Africa there have historically been two types of civil society, those that have collaborated with the colonial power and those which have opposed it. Today we face the same situation: there are those who associate with the aid industry – who draw benefits from it and who use the language of development – and there are those who talk about emancipation. There are, of course, many nuances between these two groups, between those who work with a charitable developmental vision and those who work towards the emancipation of Africans. In general, local organisations, trade unions and peasants’ movements – in light of their direct interest in their own freedom – have a very different dynamic to those who participate in the aid industry.
BASTA!: Are the big NGOs (non-governmental organisations) harmful towards Africa?
FIROZE MANJI: Let’s not talk about their motivations, which are often good. The question is not about evaluating their intentions, but rather the actual consequences of their actions. In a political context where people are oppressed, a humanitarian organisation does nothing but soften the situation, rather than addressing the problem. If you look at this from a historical perspective, a number of NGOs unconsciously participate in a situation involving oppression. Here you can see similarities with occupied France. Some people, albeit with good intentions, objectively participated in the Vichy regime. Between active collaboration and resistance, a large spectre of possibilities exists. We find the same situation in Africa today.
Who will change the world, African citizens or paternalist organisations? And according to whose interests? Let’s make a parallel with the feminist movement. It was born because women used their own tools of struggle. They didn’t call upon men to resolve the problem on their behalf. It’s similar for Africans. We can’t depend on others. Farmers and workers must be capable of organising themselves. When you look at the extraordinary range of natural resources in Africa, one of the richest continents in the world, why does it house the poorest population? Our role, as members of civil society who have had the benefit of an education, is to challenge this situation.
BASTA!: Will development aid be stopped?!
FIROZE MANJI: I have become anti-development. This wasn’t the case before. Let’s have an analogy: did those enslaved need to develop themselves, or to be free? I think that we need emancipation, not development. This concept was created at the beginning of the 1950s in a report by the US State Department. It was invented as a counterpoint to socialist influences and their popularity. This was done consciously. To speak of development is apolitical. We need to re-politicise the question of poverty.
BASTA!: If there are slaves, who are the masters?
FIROZE MANJI: We are dealing with an imperialist system, a new form of colonialism. These last 20 years we have faced a major change: the financialisation of capitalism. Now, nobody can do anything without capital. Finance controls each and every sector of society. It is time to ask who are these masters. To ask this question 10 years ago would mean you’d be treated as crazy. Today, it’s become a legitimate question. There are different interpretations, but nobody in Africa proclaims that we are independent anymore, not even the ruling class.
BASTA!: At the time of independence, all the sectors of African civil society were well-organised. Why have these organisations been swept aside?
FIROZE MANJI: At the heart of the newly independent states, the new ruling classes declared themselves solely in charge of development. In Kenya for example, peasants’ organisations were closed and integrated within the political parties, as happened with the women’s movements. Then the political parties themselves were closed in order to have nothing but the state party. Immediately after Kenya’s independence (1963), a great many important liberation figures were imprisoned, exiled or killed, such as Patrice Lumumba in Congo and Thomas Sankara in Burkina Faso. Each time a leader had the courage to rebel, Europe and the United States forced them to back down. We then came to know an empty period until the mid-1990s, when people began to resist and organise themselves again. Today in Kenya, spaces for discussion and debate are not lacking. It’s vibrant, alive and a general trend, including in Europe.
BASTA!: Does this spell a renaissance in both political consciousness and mobilisations alike?
FIROZE MANJI: People are asking questions more and more, and protesting. In the United Kingdom, people are asking why more money is always given to the banks, while hospitals and schools close. The number of people engaged in analysis and critical perspectives is growing greatly. Something new has appeared, and you see a resurgence in action. Of course, activism is not enough. The problem we have in Kenya is that capitalism is perceived, despite everything, as the only alternative.
We’re trying, therefore, to improve things. Capitalism is terrifying in itself. The facts speak for themselves: enormous land-grabbing, unemployment, impoverishment, rising infant mortality, rising food prices… In less than 10 years, more than half of the population will live around cities, trying to survive. The current questions change nothing, but they’re a good start!
BASTA!: Do new technologies play a role in the emergence of new social movements?
FIROZE MANJI: Of course, new technologies allow us communication and organisation, but let’s not forget that it is people who do it. Look at Tunisia: you hear that the revolution was caused by Twitter – this can’t be serious! Pens were also used as a means of information and mobilisation. Does this mean that pens caused the revolution? This illustrates a tendency towards technological determinism, towards hi-tech fetishism. We imagine that mobile phones, SMS (short message service), Twitter and Facebook have a power. This type of discussion tends to underestimate the role of those who use them. In Tunisia, protesting in the road called for a lot of courage. A protestor who embraces a soldier, as is seen in a photo, is not produced by technology. It’s thought that this can resolve everything, but a third of Africans have one and there hasn’t been revolution everywhere.
BASTA!: To give power back to the citizen, you talk about democratisation rather than democracy. Which is to say…?
FIROZE MANJI: Take for example agriculture: the bulk of what’s produced in Africa goes to feed Europe, multinationals and supermarkets. In Kenya we produce millions of flowers. Every day, they leave for Amsterdam. The amount of water used and the chemical products involved destroy our environment. While this goes on, populations have difficulty gaining access to water and food. The countryside ought to be used to produce food!
The question is, who decides this? Could we democratise decisions around what is produced, how it is produced and for whom? There is no procedure, no decision-making structure; there’s not even a debate around this, but simply an elite who decides and decrees what to do. Who should decide about what to grow and how to grow it? Agricultural production needs to be democratised.
The same thing happens with industrial production. Look at the unbelievable African natural resources; why don’t African benefit from them? I talked about this with some Venezuelan people. They told us their power of negotiation lies in their production of oil. In Africa, we’ve got oil, so why don’t we have this power of negotiation? This is essentially a political question. I think that Latin America is a dozen years ahead of us. Structural adjustment policies began there two decades ago. I think that in Africa a popular movement will rise up from this from 2020. Chávez is not an exception; he is the product of his history, of a movement for emancipation, like Lula. The question is, how can we ourselves politicise this process? It’s not easy; there’s no technical solution. Workers and farmers need to become organised. This takes time. The positive thing is that this point is now discussed; this wasn’t the case 10 years ago.
BASTA!: The crisis of confidence towards the capitalist system is a starting point. But if the best is possible, so too is the worst, as we see in the xenophobic actions spreading in Europe…
FIROZE MANJI: This could go in any direction. Following the 1929 crisis, a crisis of confidence swept across Europe, and Germany was a part of this, in the bad sense. The crisis of confidence is a necessary part of the process, but it’s not enough. With the discrediting of Stalinism, the concept of socialism is not longer attractive, and we therefore have to create a new ideology, of new aspirations. If this isn’t produced, we’ll enter into a very dangerous phase. Without a viable alternative, anybody could take advantage. This is a situation which is both terrifying and full of hope at the same time.
BASTA!: What are the features of Africa’s civil society?
FIROZE MANJI: In Africa there have historically been two types of civil society, those that have collaborated with the colonial power and those which have opposed it. Today we face the same situation: there are those who associate with the aid industry – who draw benefits from it and who use the language of development – and there are those who talk about emancipation. There are, of course, many nuances between these two groups, between those who work with a charitable developmental vision and those who work towards the emancipation of Africans. In general, local organisations, trade unions and peasants’ movements – in light of their direct interest in their own freedom – have a very different dynamic to those who participate in the aid industry.
BASTA!: Are the big NGOs (non-governmental organisations) harmful towards Africa?
FIROZE MANJI: Let’s not talk about their motivations, which are often good. The question is not about evaluating their intentions, but rather the actual consequences of their actions. In a political context where people are oppressed, a humanitarian organisation does nothing but soften the situation, rather than addressing the problem. If you look at this from a historical perspective, a number of NGOs unconsciously participate in a situation involving oppression. Here you can see similarities with occupied France. Some people, albeit with good intentions, objectively participated in the Vichy regime. Between active collaboration and resistance, a large spectre of possibilities exists. We find the same situation in Africa today.
Who will change the world, African citizens or paternalist organisations? And according to whose interests? Let’s make a parallel with the feminist movement. It was born because women used their own tools of struggle. They didn’t call upon men to resolve the problem on their behalf. It’s similar for Africans. We can’t depend on others. Farmers and workers must be capable of organising themselves. When you look at the extraordinary range of natural resources in Africa, one of the richest continents in the world, why does it house the poorest population? Our role, as members of civil society who have had the benefit of an education, is to challenge this situation.
BASTA!: Will development aid be stopped?!
FIROZE MANJI: I have become anti-development. This wasn’t the case before. Let’s have an analogy: did those enslaved need to develop themselves, or to be free? I think that we need emancipation, not development. This concept was created at the beginning of the 1950s in a report by the US State Department. It was invented as a counterpoint to socialist influences and their popularity. This was done consciously. To speak of development is apolitical. We need to re-politicise the question of poverty.
BASTA!: If there are slaves, who are the masters?
FIROZE MANJI: We are dealing with an imperialist system, a new form of colonialism. These last 20 years we have faced a major change: the financialisation of capitalism. Now, nobody can do anything without capital. Finance controls each and every sector of society. It is time to ask who are these masters. To ask this question 10 years ago would mean you’d be treated as crazy. Today, it’s become a legitimate question. There are different interpretations, but nobody in Africa proclaims that we are independent anymore, not even the ruling class.
BASTA!: At the time of independence, all the sectors of African civil society were well-organised. Why have these organisations been swept aside?
FIROZE MANJI: At the heart of the newly independent states, the new ruling classes declared themselves solely in charge of development. In Kenya for example, peasants’ organisations were closed and integrated within the political parties, as happened with the women’s movements. Then the political parties themselves were closed in order to have nothing but the state party. Immediately after Kenya’s independence (1963), a great many important liberation figures were imprisoned, exiled or killed, such as Patrice Lumumba in Congo and Thomas Sankara in Burkina Faso. Each time a leader had the courage to rebel, Europe and the United States forced them to back down. We then came to know an empty period until the mid-1990s, when people began to resist and organise themselves again. Today in Kenya, spaces for discussion and debate are not lacking. It’s vibrant, alive and a general trend, including in Europe.
BASTA!: Does this spell a renaissance in both political consciousness and mobilisations alike?
FIROZE MANJI: People are asking questions more and more, and protesting. In the United Kingdom, people are asking why more money is always given to the banks, while hospitals and schools close. The number of people engaged in analysis and critical perspectives is growing greatly. Something new has appeared, and you see a resurgence in action. Of course, activism is not enough. The problem we have in Kenya is that capitalism is perceived, despite everything, as the only alternative.
We’re trying, therefore, to improve things. Capitalism is terrifying in itself. The facts speak for themselves: enormous land-grabbing, unemployment, impoverishment, rising infant mortality, rising food prices… In less than 10 years, more than half of the population will live around cities, trying to survive. The current questions change nothing, but they’re a good start!
BASTA!: Do new technologies play a role in the emergence of new social movements?
FIROZE MANJI: Of course, new technologies allow us communication and organisation, but let’s not forget that it is people who do it. Look at Tunisia: you hear that the revolution was caused by Twitter – this can’t be serious! Pens were also used as a means of information and mobilisation. Does this mean that pens caused the revolution? This illustrates a tendency towards technological determinism, towards hi-tech fetishism. We imagine that mobile phones, SMS (short message service), Twitter and Facebook have a power. This type of discussion tends to underestimate the role of those who use them. In Tunisia, protesting in the road called for a lot of courage. A protestor who embraces a soldier, as is seen in a photo, is not produced by technology. It’s thought that this can resolve everything, but a third of Africans have one and there hasn’t been revolution everywhere.
BASTA!: To give power back to the citizen, you talk about democratisation rather than democracy. Which is to say…?
FIROZE MANJI: Take for example agriculture: the bulk of what’s produced in Africa goes to feed Europe, multinationals and supermarkets. In Kenya we produce millions of flowers. Every day, they leave for Amsterdam. The amount of water used and the chemical products involved destroy our environment. While this goes on, populations have difficulty gaining access to water and food. The countryside ought to be used to produce food!
The question is, who decides this? Could we democratise decisions around what is produced, how it is produced and for whom? There is no procedure, no decision-making structure; there’s not even a debate around this, but simply an elite who decides and decrees what to do. Who should decide about what to grow and how to grow it? Agricultural production needs to be democratised.
The same thing happens with industrial production. Look at the unbelievable African natural resources; why don’t African benefit from them? I talked about this with some Venezuelan people. They told us their power of negotiation lies in their production of oil. In Africa, we’ve got oil, so why don’t we have this power of negotiation? This is essentially a political question. I think that Latin America is a dozen years ahead of us. Structural adjustment policies began there two decades ago. I think that in Africa a popular movement will rise up from this from 2020. Chávez is not an exception; he is the product of his history, of a movement for emancipation, like Lula. The question is, how can we ourselves politicise this process? It’s not easy; there’s no technical solution. Workers and farmers need to become organised. This takes time. The positive thing is that this point is now discussed; this wasn’t the case 10 years ago.
BASTA!: The crisis of confidence towards the capitalist system is a starting point. But if the best is possible, so too is the worst, as we see in the xenophobic actions spreading in Europe…
FIROZE MANJI: This could go in any direction. Following the 1929 crisis, a crisis of confidence swept across Europe, and Germany was a part of this, in the bad sense. The crisis of confidence is a necessary part of the process, but it’s not enough. With the discrediting of Stalinism, the concept of socialism is not longer attractive, and we therefore have to create a new ideology, of new aspirations. If this isn’t produced, we’ll enter into a very dangerous phase. Without a viable alternative, anybody could take advantage. This is a situation which is both terrifying and full of hope at the same time.
Africa: Trading with the enemy
But a quick look at the trade policy itself shows that this sugary rhetoric of American benevolence and concern for African welfare is deeply misleading. It does little more than cloak an agenda firmly rooted in economic realpolitik.
http://allafrica.com/stories/201102211463.html?viewall=1
By Jason Hickel
The last decade has seen a remarkable surge in U.S. economic interest in the continent of Africa. Policymakers who once considered Africa the languid backwater of global economics are now rushing in to stake a claim in the continent's enormous resource endowment.
Most of this effort operates with a rhetoric focused on "partnership" and "development," with the vision of using US trade and investment to lift Africans out of poverty. U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton exemplified this attitude when she spoke last year at a US-Africa trade policy forum, saying, "Let's help each other make Africa all that it can be."
But a quick look at the trade policy itself shows that this sugary rhetoric of American benevolence and concern for African welfare is deeply misleading. It does little more than cloak an agenda firmly rooted in economic realpolitik. Michael Battle, the U.S. Ambassador to the African Union, has revealed the blunt urgency of this agenda in a candid but troubling statement: "If we don't invest on the African continent now, we will find that China and India have absorbed its resources without us, and we will wake up and wonder what happened to our golden opportunity of investment."
The centerpiece of U.S. trade policy for Africa is the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA). Signed into law by President Clinton in 2000, AGOA is, according to Congress, "perhaps the most significant American initiative on Africa in our country's history." It provides trade preferences for duty-free entry into the United States for certain goods from sub-Saharan Africa, which is touted as a way to boost African business by encouraging exports. President Bush signed the AGOA Acceleration Act of 2004, which extends the policy until 2015.
The Big Catch
It's hard to quarrel with the idea that reduced trade barriers around American markets would be a boon for African exporters. The quintessential example is Lesotho, whose textile industry has flourished since joining AGOA and now exports more than $400 million worth of garment manufactures to the United States annually.
But there's a catch. The U.S. president reserves the right to reevaluate each country for AGOA eligibility on an annual basis; 41 made the cut last year. In order to qualify, African countries have to meet a specific set of stringent "conditions." Topping the list is the requirement that the beneficiary promote "a market-based economy that protects private property rights...and minimizes government interference in the economy through such measures as price controls, subsidies, and government ownership of economic assets."
In addition - and here's the big one - the beneficiary must make progress toward "the elimination of barriers to United States trade and investment."
In other words, AGOA eligibility requires not just mild economic deregulation but the outright destruction of any and all tariff protections, flinging open African markets to a flood of American goods that inevitably undermine local industry. And African countries don't really have a choice in the matter, for if they refuse to meet these conditions, they effectively forfeit their access to the American market. For all of the positive spin that U.S. policymakers put on AGOA, nobody ever so much as mentions these draconian measures, which are easily as destructive as the dreaded "structural adjustment" conditions that the International Monetary Fund attaches to its loans. Essentially, AGOA amounts to a coercive free trade agreement with most of the subcontinent.
Given that AGOA requires its beneficiaries to eliminate barriers to U.S. investment, it's not surprising that the balance of trade comes out strongly in favor of the United States. Trade data shows that Benin, for example, has exported almost nothing to the United States since it became an AGOA member, but has imported some $600 million worth of U.S. goods that have significantly undercut local producers. Some countries do actually export a great deal under AGOA rules - but only those with substantial petroleum and mineral deposits. Take Angola, for instance; 99 percent of all of Angola's exports under AGOA have been energy-related. In the Congo, that number reaches closer to 100 percent. The same is true of Nigeria, Botswana, and every other country with an oil and mineral portfolio. Indeed, more than 80 percent of all exports under AGOA fall under this sector.
AGOA, in other words, is designed to pry open new markets for U.S. goods while making it easier for the United States to extract oil and minerals. And since most of Africa's oil and minerals are controlled by Western corporations like Exxon, Shell, and Anglo-American, this is hardly an arrangement designed to benefit African businesses.
Dubious Eligibility
If that's the tragedy, then here's the farce. AGOA actually does include a number of progressive conditions for membership. In order to qualify, beneficiaries must develop "economic policies to reduce poverty," uphold "the rule of law, political pluralism, and the right of due process, a fair trial, and equal protection," construct "a system to combat corruption and bribery," and refrain from "gross violations of human rights."
In addition, beneficiaries must implement "the protection of worker rights, including the right to organize and bargain collectively, a prohibition on the use of any form of forced or compulsory labour, a minimum age for the employment of children, and acceptable conditions of work with respect to minimum wages, hours of work, and occupational safety and health."
In practice, however, none of this actually applies.
Countries renowned for corruption, human rights abuses, and labour law violations are routinely approved for AGOA eligibility.
Indeed, the countries with the most flagrant abuses are those that trade the most under AGOA, giving blatant lie to the claim that good governance is a necessary precondition for successful U.S. investment in Africa.
Cameroon, for example, enjoys AGOA eligibility even though the government there rules an undemocratic, one-party state, regularly obstructs political meetings, harasses journalists, tortures human rights activists, and turns a blind eye to child labour. But it has a lot of oil.
Neighbouring Chad also enjoys AGOA eligibility, despite rampant corruption and a long tradition of arbitrary detentions and extra-judicial killings.
But it has the Chad-Cameroon pipeline - the single biggest US investment in Sub-Saharan Africa - and Bush and Obama have been devoted to protecting the project's U.S. investors.
Eritrea is another example.
In 2003, the UN named Eritrea one of the "World's Most Repressive Regimes." But it gets AGOA eligibility in exchange for having joined "the coalition of the willing" during Bush's war in Iraq.
Burkina Faso, Angola, Swaziland, and the Congo all benefit from similar double standards.
The issue here is not just that the United States benefits from corrupt and repressive regimes, but that while AGOA claims to create incentives for political reform in Africa, it actually does the opposite.
By encouraging the deregulation of oil- and mineral-based economies, AGOA contributes to the development of "rentier states" that do not have to rely on income taxes for their revenue.
Such states have no incentive to build up a strong middle class, diversify their economies, or respond to the needs of their citizens.
In turn, citizens have no incentive to scrutinize government priorities. As the social contract between citizens and the state erodes, endemic corruption inevitably follows, and states become increasingly repressive in order to maintain their grip on power.
This is what economists call "the resource curse" or "the paradox of plenty."
An over-reliance on huge oil and mineral deposits ends up generating corruption, inequality, and widespread poverty instead of positive development outcomes.
This pattern contradicts the common assumption that economic liberalisation translates into political freedom or democratic reforms.
Who Benefits?
Although AGOA purports to leverage exports as a way of boosting economic development in Africa, it does not stipulate that the exporting companies must be African.
Indeed, most of them are American, Chinese, and Indian.
The vast majority of beneficiaries under AGOA are not impoverished Africans, but wealthy foreign corporations.
Indeed, AGOA's insistence on the elimination of local trade barriers allows U.S. companies to bid freely on things like mineral concessions and government contracts.
And given that these companies have deep capital reserves, they can usually win, effectively blocking out their African competitors.
In addition, when it comes to industries like textile manufacturing, AGOA stipulates that producers must use U.S. raw materials, which effectively blocks investment in local upstream sectors.
Furthermore, because AGOA requires that goods exported to the United States "originate" in the host country, Chinese and Indian clothing manufacturers frequently label their goods "Made in Kenya" and transship them to the United States through Africa to get preferential treatment.
The overall effect, then, is that AGOA does not create greater market share for African companies but actively diminishes it.
One might argue that regardless of where the investment comes from, at least it creates jobs.
This may be true.
But AGOA does not require that the new jobs go to Africans.
Indeed, many of the extractive industries that benefit from AGOA import highly skilled labour from developed countries like the United States.
In Angola, for example, most of Exxon's engineers are Americans.
Furthermore, the jobs that AGOA does create for Africans are often deeply exploitative.
AGOA has encouraged the development of Export Processing Zones (EPZs) across the continent, where labor laws are nearly non-existent and wages are rock-bottom in order to attract foreign manufacturers.
In the textile industry, the net effect is that Asian sweatshops relocate to Africa to take advantage of AGOA incentives.
In Kenya in 2006, the average wage of EPZ workers in Asian sweatshops was a paltry 20 cents per hour, which amounts to barely more than a dollar a day - the lowest wages in the country.
Most EPZ workers - the majority of whom are women and doubly vulnerable to exploitation - have to work excessive overtime just to meet their basic needs, and live in constant danger of being laid off without compensation.
Changing AGOA
It doesn't have to be this way. With a few thoughtful changes, AGOA could be used to make trade work for everyday Africans.
First, the economic liberalization condition should be dropped.
Rich countries like the United States, Britain, Japan, and China initially used tariff protections and subsidies to promote their industries in the early stages of development; it's cruel to deny those basic strategies to African countries desperately in need of development.
Second, the political reform conditions should be taken seriously, and used to leverage best practices in human rights and labour law.
Third, Local Content rules should require that all U.S. investments in Africa should tier up over a set period to at least 80 percent local labour and local contracts - characterized by genuine registration - and should require investment in local capacity where it proves too poor to meet the necessary standards.
Finally, targeted quotas should be used to channel foreign investment to where it's needed most, rather than to where the regulations are most relaxed.
But changes of this order are not on the horizon, for - as I have demonstrated - the United States is concerned less about the well-being of Africans than about meeting its own energy needs and promoting the interests of American corporations.
We need to cut through the deceptive rhetoric of U.S. trade policy and ask the tough questions: Who really benefits from AGOA? Does AGOA enhance welfare and development, or facilitate extraction and exploitation?
As Ambassador Battle's statement illustrates, the present trade arrangement between the United States and Africa is eerily reminiscent of the era of colonial conquest.
In 1875, as Europe set its sights on Africa's vast riches, King Leopold II of Belgium wrote to his ambassador in London, "I do not want to miss a good chance of getting us a slice of this magnificent African cake."
It's America's turn now, and it appears that the Obama administration - like Bush before him - is driven by a similarly disturbing vision: a new scramble for Africa.
Hickel is an instructor and PhD candidate in anthropology at the University of Virginia. His research focuses on trade, development, and political conflict in Sub-Saharan Africa. This article was originally published by Foreign Policy in Focus. It is published under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.
http://allafrica.com/stories/201102211463.html?viewall=1
By Jason Hickel
The last decade has seen a remarkable surge in U.S. economic interest in the continent of Africa. Policymakers who once considered Africa the languid backwater of global economics are now rushing in to stake a claim in the continent's enormous resource endowment.
Most of this effort operates with a rhetoric focused on "partnership" and "development," with the vision of using US trade and investment to lift Africans out of poverty. U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton exemplified this attitude when she spoke last year at a US-Africa trade policy forum, saying, "Let's help each other make Africa all that it can be."
But a quick look at the trade policy itself shows that this sugary rhetoric of American benevolence and concern for African welfare is deeply misleading. It does little more than cloak an agenda firmly rooted in economic realpolitik. Michael Battle, the U.S. Ambassador to the African Union, has revealed the blunt urgency of this agenda in a candid but troubling statement: "If we don't invest on the African continent now, we will find that China and India have absorbed its resources without us, and we will wake up and wonder what happened to our golden opportunity of investment."
The centerpiece of U.S. trade policy for Africa is the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA). Signed into law by President Clinton in 2000, AGOA is, according to Congress, "perhaps the most significant American initiative on Africa in our country's history." It provides trade preferences for duty-free entry into the United States for certain goods from sub-Saharan Africa, which is touted as a way to boost African business by encouraging exports. President Bush signed the AGOA Acceleration Act of 2004, which extends the policy until 2015.
The Big Catch
It's hard to quarrel with the idea that reduced trade barriers around American markets would be a boon for African exporters. The quintessential example is Lesotho, whose textile industry has flourished since joining AGOA and now exports more than $400 million worth of garment manufactures to the United States annually.
But there's a catch. The U.S. president reserves the right to reevaluate each country for AGOA eligibility on an annual basis; 41 made the cut last year. In order to qualify, African countries have to meet a specific set of stringent "conditions." Topping the list is the requirement that the beneficiary promote "a market-based economy that protects private property rights...and minimizes government interference in the economy through such measures as price controls, subsidies, and government ownership of economic assets."
In addition - and here's the big one - the beneficiary must make progress toward "the elimination of barriers to United States trade and investment."
In other words, AGOA eligibility requires not just mild economic deregulation but the outright destruction of any and all tariff protections, flinging open African markets to a flood of American goods that inevitably undermine local industry. And African countries don't really have a choice in the matter, for if they refuse to meet these conditions, they effectively forfeit their access to the American market. For all of the positive spin that U.S. policymakers put on AGOA, nobody ever so much as mentions these draconian measures, which are easily as destructive as the dreaded "structural adjustment" conditions that the International Monetary Fund attaches to its loans. Essentially, AGOA amounts to a coercive free trade agreement with most of the subcontinent.
Given that AGOA requires its beneficiaries to eliminate barriers to U.S. investment, it's not surprising that the balance of trade comes out strongly in favor of the United States. Trade data shows that Benin, for example, has exported almost nothing to the United States since it became an AGOA member, but has imported some $600 million worth of U.S. goods that have significantly undercut local producers. Some countries do actually export a great deal under AGOA rules - but only those with substantial petroleum and mineral deposits. Take Angola, for instance; 99 percent of all of Angola's exports under AGOA have been energy-related. In the Congo, that number reaches closer to 100 percent. The same is true of Nigeria, Botswana, and every other country with an oil and mineral portfolio. Indeed, more than 80 percent of all exports under AGOA fall under this sector.
AGOA, in other words, is designed to pry open new markets for U.S. goods while making it easier for the United States to extract oil and minerals. And since most of Africa's oil and minerals are controlled by Western corporations like Exxon, Shell, and Anglo-American, this is hardly an arrangement designed to benefit African businesses.
Dubious Eligibility
If that's the tragedy, then here's the farce. AGOA actually does include a number of progressive conditions for membership. In order to qualify, beneficiaries must develop "economic policies to reduce poverty," uphold "the rule of law, political pluralism, and the right of due process, a fair trial, and equal protection," construct "a system to combat corruption and bribery," and refrain from "gross violations of human rights."
In addition, beneficiaries must implement "the protection of worker rights, including the right to organize and bargain collectively, a prohibition on the use of any form of forced or compulsory labour, a minimum age for the employment of children, and acceptable conditions of work with respect to minimum wages, hours of work, and occupational safety and health."
In practice, however, none of this actually applies.
Countries renowned for corruption, human rights abuses, and labour law violations are routinely approved for AGOA eligibility.
Indeed, the countries with the most flagrant abuses are those that trade the most under AGOA, giving blatant lie to the claim that good governance is a necessary precondition for successful U.S. investment in Africa.
Cameroon, for example, enjoys AGOA eligibility even though the government there rules an undemocratic, one-party state, regularly obstructs political meetings, harasses journalists, tortures human rights activists, and turns a blind eye to child labour. But it has a lot of oil.
Neighbouring Chad also enjoys AGOA eligibility, despite rampant corruption and a long tradition of arbitrary detentions and extra-judicial killings.
But it has the Chad-Cameroon pipeline - the single biggest US investment in Sub-Saharan Africa - and Bush and Obama have been devoted to protecting the project's U.S. investors.
Eritrea is another example.
In 2003, the UN named Eritrea one of the "World's Most Repressive Regimes." But it gets AGOA eligibility in exchange for having joined "the coalition of the willing" during Bush's war in Iraq.
Burkina Faso, Angola, Swaziland, and the Congo all benefit from similar double standards.
The issue here is not just that the United States benefits from corrupt and repressive regimes, but that while AGOA claims to create incentives for political reform in Africa, it actually does the opposite.
By encouraging the deregulation of oil- and mineral-based economies, AGOA contributes to the development of "rentier states" that do not have to rely on income taxes for their revenue.
Such states have no incentive to build up a strong middle class, diversify their economies, or respond to the needs of their citizens.
In turn, citizens have no incentive to scrutinize government priorities. As the social contract between citizens and the state erodes, endemic corruption inevitably follows, and states become increasingly repressive in order to maintain their grip on power.
This is what economists call "the resource curse" or "the paradox of plenty."
An over-reliance on huge oil and mineral deposits ends up generating corruption, inequality, and widespread poverty instead of positive development outcomes.
This pattern contradicts the common assumption that economic liberalisation translates into political freedom or democratic reforms.
Who Benefits?
Although AGOA purports to leverage exports as a way of boosting economic development in Africa, it does not stipulate that the exporting companies must be African.
Indeed, most of them are American, Chinese, and Indian.
The vast majority of beneficiaries under AGOA are not impoverished Africans, but wealthy foreign corporations.
Indeed, AGOA's insistence on the elimination of local trade barriers allows U.S. companies to bid freely on things like mineral concessions and government contracts.
And given that these companies have deep capital reserves, they can usually win, effectively blocking out their African competitors.
In addition, when it comes to industries like textile manufacturing, AGOA stipulates that producers must use U.S. raw materials, which effectively blocks investment in local upstream sectors.
Furthermore, because AGOA requires that goods exported to the United States "originate" in the host country, Chinese and Indian clothing manufacturers frequently label their goods "Made in Kenya" and transship them to the United States through Africa to get preferential treatment.
The overall effect, then, is that AGOA does not create greater market share for African companies but actively diminishes it.
One might argue that regardless of where the investment comes from, at least it creates jobs.
This may be true.
But AGOA does not require that the new jobs go to Africans.
Indeed, many of the extractive industries that benefit from AGOA import highly skilled labour from developed countries like the United States.
In Angola, for example, most of Exxon's engineers are Americans.
Furthermore, the jobs that AGOA does create for Africans are often deeply exploitative.
AGOA has encouraged the development of Export Processing Zones (EPZs) across the continent, where labor laws are nearly non-existent and wages are rock-bottom in order to attract foreign manufacturers.
In the textile industry, the net effect is that Asian sweatshops relocate to Africa to take advantage of AGOA incentives.
In Kenya in 2006, the average wage of EPZ workers in Asian sweatshops was a paltry 20 cents per hour, which amounts to barely more than a dollar a day - the lowest wages in the country.
Most EPZ workers - the majority of whom are women and doubly vulnerable to exploitation - have to work excessive overtime just to meet their basic needs, and live in constant danger of being laid off without compensation.
Changing AGOA
It doesn't have to be this way. With a few thoughtful changes, AGOA could be used to make trade work for everyday Africans.
First, the economic liberalization condition should be dropped.
Rich countries like the United States, Britain, Japan, and China initially used tariff protections and subsidies to promote their industries in the early stages of development; it's cruel to deny those basic strategies to African countries desperately in need of development.
Second, the political reform conditions should be taken seriously, and used to leverage best practices in human rights and labour law.
Third, Local Content rules should require that all U.S. investments in Africa should tier up over a set period to at least 80 percent local labour and local contracts - characterized by genuine registration - and should require investment in local capacity where it proves too poor to meet the necessary standards.
Finally, targeted quotas should be used to channel foreign investment to where it's needed most, rather than to where the regulations are most relaxed.
But changes of this order are not on the horizon, for - as I have demonstrated - the United States is concerned less about the well-being of Africans than about meeting its own energy needs and promoting the interests of American corporations.
We need to cut through the deceptive rhetoric of U.S. trade policy and ask the tough questions: Who really benefits from AGOA? Does AGOA enhance welfare and development, or facilitate extraction and exploitation?
As Ambassador Battle's statement illustrates, the present trade arrangement between the United States and Africa is eerily reminiscent of the era of colonial conquest.
In 1875, as Europe set its sights on Africa's vast riches, King Leopold II of Belgium wrote to his ambassador in London, "I do not want to miss a good chance of getting us a slice of this magnificent African cake."
It's America's turn now, and it appears that the Obama administration - like Bush before him - is driven by a similarly disturbing vision: a new scramble for Africa.
Hickel is an instructor and PhD candidate in anthropology at the University of Virginia. His research focuses on trade, development, and political conflict in Sub-Saharan Africa. This article was originally published by Foreign Policy in Focus. It is published under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.
No going back on land issue
Therefore, in terms of the history of the people’s struggle to regain total control of their resources, it is important to remember that those who stole African resources also stole African history or tried to destroy and deny that history in order to justify the dispossession of the African.
The Sunday Mail
AFRICAN FOCUS with Tafataona Mahoso
The Financial Gazette of February 17 2011 tucked an important story at Page 15 which should have qualified for top-page treatment. The story was entitled “Land reform not complete disaster”.
It was based on reports of a study by Professor Ian Scoones of the Institute of Development Studies at Sussex University in the UK which concluded that Zimbabwe’s African land reclamation and redistribution is popular, largely successful (despite illegal sanctions imposed on the country) and clearly beneficial to the once dispossessed and impoverished African majority. Professor Scoones’ study is entitled “Zimbabwe’s land reform: Myths and realities”.
As The Sunday Mail and The Herald had already reported before the Financial Gazette’s grudging recognition of the reports, there are studies carried out by Zimbabweans which reached the same conclusions as the one by Professor Ian Scoones.
One of these is by Professor Sam Moyo of Zimbabwe.
But the Financial Gazette’s reporting of the existence of Scoones’ report is important not only because of its grudging tone and its reliance on the white racist Commercial Farmers’ Union for comment; it is important because the Financial Gazette has been a leader in predicting gloom and doom for the African land reclamation movement and the land redistribution programme for the last 12 years or more.
At one time the Financial Gazette chose to rely on a report by the United States Department of Agriculture (which the paper reproduced wholesale) rather than carry out its own research or use local experts.
The Financial Gazette, the Zimbabwe Independent and The Daily News were among the local papers who dismissed Zimbabwe’s land reclamation and redistribution as “Mugabe’s last straw” and as a mere “election gimmick” intended to enable President Robert Mugabe and his party, Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front (Zanu-PF) to win the 2000 and 2002 elections.
The message of these papers together with the MDC formations and their Rhodesian allies during the 2000 and 2002 elections was that the redistributed land would be returned to the former white settlers once Zanu-PF and President Mugabe had achieved their objective of winning those two elections and thereby holding on to power a little longer.
These papers and the MDC formations also alleged that only “Mugabe’s close cronies” actually received land, although it was not clear how the President and his party would win a majority of votes by giving land to only a few close “cronies” of the President.
On the basis of this myth, more than 1 000 whites flocked back to Zimbabwe in April 2008, when Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai’s MDC-T party made them believe that they had won the 2008 elections.
The whites believed that the so-called “election gimmick” would now be reversed because it would seem to have served no purpose.
But why are the media houses which used to denigrate land reform as a temporary election gimmick trying now to revise their position?
Fruits of land reclamation
First, the fruits of land reclamation and redistribution are accumulating and improving every year since 2009. This means the ordinary citizen is reading a different local situation from that which these media predicted. This reading of the real situation by the average citizen threatens to discredit the opposition media as hopeless doomsayers and liars.
Accumulation, improving land reclamation
Second, the accumulating and improving fruits of land reclamation and redistribution are motivating more and more Zimbabweans to ask for land, to take part in the revolution. This exposes as a lie the claim by Jan Raath in The Mail & Guardian for November 28 1997 that:
“It’s official.
“The people of Zimbabwe don’t want land.
“They want jobs in a market economy, and an opportunity to work for a decent living.”
Here, Jan Raath was telling the world not only that most Zimbabweans did not want land redistribution; he was telling the world that the majority of Zimbabweans wanted neoliberal reforms such as those which have brought crisis and grief to Tunisia, Egypt, Kenya, Greece, Ireland, Portugal, Spain, France, Albania and even the US itself.
Timing of land revolution
Third, the timing of Zimbabwe’s land revolution has been such that the best year for results, 2011, coincides with bad or inadequate harvests in Australia, Russia, Ukraine and Argentina. These bad or inadequate harvests have caused food prices to escalate, precipitating hunger and starvation around the world.
Pakistan is a special case where the grain-producing heartland the size of the UK was wiped out by floods.
This means Pakistan has to import a lot more grain than normal.
In other words, all food-deficit countries are in trouble unless they are rich in petroleum or minerals.
In other words, Zimbabwe will have enough food, in the hands of the very same people who grow and eat it, exactly at that moment when the world food situation is at its worst because of rising prices and reduced supply.
In addition, Zimbabwe’s mineral resources are also ready for exploitation and value addition by the same majority.
Zimbabwe would be even further ahead of all these other countries, including its committed detractors, if it was not for the illegal economic sanctions, if it was not for MDC-T’s deliberate efforts to destroy the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe and the Grain Marketing Board, who were stopped from helping farmers by Finance Minister Tendai Biti.
The success of land reform despite these efforts to stop it is the reason why the MDC formations have always been afraid of genuine elections.
Therefore, in terms of the history of the people’s struggle to regain total control of their resources, it is important to remember that those who stole African resources also stole African history or tried to destroy and deny that history in order to justify the dispossession of the African.
The war over history accompanies the war over resources. And this war has shifted over the years, as follows:
We begin with the white racist position that Africa has no history.
According to the Regius professor of Modern European History at Oxford University, Hugh Trevor-Roper in The Spectator magazine in 1963:
“Undergraduates, seduced, as always, by the breath of journalistic fashion, demand that they should be taught African history.
“Perhaps, in the future, there will be some African history to teach. But at present the only history there is in Africa is the history of Europeans.
“The rest is darkness . . . and darkness is not the subject of history.”
However, in 1963, as Professor Trevor-Roper was pontificating about Africa at Oxford, many Africans were creating big African history. Some formed the Zimbabwe African National Union (Zanu) which together with the Zimbabwe African People’s Union (Zapu) now forms the United Zanu-PF in the Government of Zimbabwe.
Still other Africans were forming the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) in Addis Ababa, which laid the foundation for the current African Union and which played a big role in the liberation of Southern Africa from British imperialism and colonialism.
As a result of these and many other African replies to white lies, the claim that Africans have no history retreated into another lie, as follows:
“Africans may have invented both civilisation and history, but they have since degenerated so much that all their liberated states are failed states.
“For this reason, Africans need white intervention in the form of recolonisation.”
This line is repeated so often that many African professors teach it to their students today.
So the myth of “the failed state” is being used to justify intervention in African affairs, with attempts being made to define Zimbabwe as such a state.
The problem is that it is strong states such as Zimbabwe which imperialism is struggling to weaken so that they fail.
By exposing the fact that it is the strong sovereign state which is singled out for attack in order to make it fail, we have also forced a retreat from that position.
So, in order to deter us from adopting a truly militant position on the revaluation of Africa and the reclamation of its assets, imperialism retreats to yet another position:
“What Africans in Zimbabwe are trying to achieve through land reclamation could be achieved more smoothly and harmoniously if they allowed international financial institutions and donors to finance a proper planning process, to design a blueprint for land tenure, to fund a land bank, and so forth, without precipitating the disruption and chaos caused by the Third Chimurenga.”
This is in fact what Jan Raath meant by waiting for the market economy to create jobs.
However, Zimbabweans by 2000 replied that they had seen too many aid offers and packages which had served to create detours by-passing the clear objectives of the First and the Second Chimurenga.
This persistence led the imperialist propagandists to retreat to yet another position: Many are called but a few are chosen.
White settlers were chosen by God to turn Zimbabwe into a breadbasket. Let them continue.
“Yes, the land was stolen from the majority by white settlers. Yes, the best farmland is in the hands of a few white farmers, but that is the trend worldwide.
“In most advanced countries, it is a tiny minority that remains on the farms. Moreover, after a hundred years of colonialism, most Africans in Zimbabwe do not want land.
“They want jobs, which they know the white settlers and foreign companies can best provide.”
So the attacks on land reform automatically become attacks on economic indigenisation and empowerment.
The land reclamation movement refused to listen to this interpretation and the propagandists were forced to abandon it and move to yet another:
“Africans may have moved on to the land in droves, but they can’t farm. They are not good farmers.”
However, since 2000, there has been clear evidence that production on the farms is steadily increasing and improving and that even those who have no farming experience are eager to learn fast.
What they lack are funds, equipment and inputs which the state could provide if it was not for illegal sanctions.
This has forced yet another retreat to a contradictory position.
“Yes, the people of Zimbabwe have shown that they really wanted their land and that they are eager to farm.
“However, this farming will not take off, will not succeed, unless and until the people first get rid of President Robert Mugabe and the Zanu-PF Government.
“This government is so corrupt and so incompetent that it is the biggest hindrance to a successful agrarian revolution.”
Put another way: President Mugabe and Zanu-PF were good only for political liberation. They must now give way to a new group who will bring economic liberation.
Again the people see through this position: That, first, it seeks to avoid the question of sanctions and their negative effects on the provision of resources for agriculture.
In the second place, this position seeks to deny the reality revealed by both Professor Sam Moyo and Professor Ian Scoones.
Most of the redistributed land went to the povo, the small producers who used to be restricted to congested and barren “tribal trust lands” of Rhodesian days.
If that is not development and economic liberation, then, what is it?
Moreover, when more than 1 000 white settlers tried to come back to reverse land reform in March and April 2008, it was President Mugabe and Zanu-PF who defended land reform against the efforts of the MDC formations to reverse the same. And when Copac went out to seek people’s views for a new constitution, the people upheld the position of President Mugabe and the liberation movement on land reform, economic indigenisation and African economic empowerment.
The position taken by The Financial Gazette is not different from the other previous retreats. Where objective professional research demonstrates a popular land revolution aiming to empower the povo as well as a resounding success in light of the illegal sanctions and droughts — the best The Financial Gazette can grant is: “Land reform not complete disaster”.
Even this had to be tucked away at Page 15! This effort to hide the light under the bushel means that the internal detractors of Zimbabwe’s land reform will be the last to admit that their interpretations of the Third Chimurenga were wrong
The Sunday Mail
AFRICAN FOCUS with Tafataona Mahoso
The Financial Gazette of February 17 2011 tucked an important story at Page 15 which should have qualified for top-page treatment. The story was entitled “Land reform not complete disaster”.
It was based on reports of a study by Professor Ian Scoones of the Institute of Development Studies at Sussex University in the UK which concluded that Zimbabwe’s African land reclamation and redistribution is popular, largely successful (despite illegal sanctions imposed on the country) and clearly beneficial to the once dispossessed and impoverished African majority. Professor Scoones’ study is entitled “Zimbabwe’s land reform: Myths and realities”.
As The Sunday Mail and The Herald had already reported before the Financial Gazette’s grudging recognition of the reports, there are studies carried out by Zimbabweans which reached the same conclusions as the one by Professor Ian Scoones.
One of these is by Professor Sam Moyo of Zimbabwe.
But the Financial Gazette’s reporting of the existence of Scoones’ report is important not only because of its grudging tone and its reliance on the white racist Commercial Farmers’ Union for comment; it is important because the Financial Gazette has been a leader in predicting gloom and doom for the African land reclamation movement and the land redistribution programme for the last 12 years or more.
At one time the Financial Gazette chose to rely on a report by the United States Department of Agriculture (which the paper reproduced wholesale) rather than carry out its own research or use local experts.
The Financial Gazette, the Zimbabwe Independent and The Daily News were among the local papers who dismissed Zimbabwe’s land reclamation and redistribution as “Mugabe’s last straw” and as a mere “election gimmick” intended to enable President Robert Mugabe and his party, Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front (Zanu-PF) to win the 2000 and 2002 elections.
The message of these papers together with the MDC formations and their Rhodesian allies during the 2000 and 2002 elections was that the redistributed land would be returned to the former white settlers once Zanu-PF and President Mugabe had achieved their objective of winning those two elections and thereby holding on to power a little longer.
These papers and the MDC formations also alleged that only “Mugabe’s close cronies” actually received land, although it was not clear how the President and his party would win a majority of votes by giving land to only a few close “cronies” of the President.
On the basis of this myth, more than 1 000 whites flocked back to Zimbabwe in April 2008, when Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai’s MDC-T party made them believe that they had won the 2008 elections.
The whites believed that the so-called “election gimmick” would now be reversed because it would seem to have served no purpose.
But why are the media houses which used to denigrate land reform as a temporary election gimmick trying now to revise their position?
Fruits of land reclamation
First, the fruits of land reclamation and redistribution are accumulating and improving every year since 2009. This means the ordinary citizen is reading a different local situation from that which these media predicted. This reading of the real situation by the average citizen threatens to discredit the opposition media as hopeless doomsayers and liars.
Accumulation, improving land reclamation
Second, the accumulating and improving fruits of land reclamation and redistribution are motivating more and more Zimbabweans to ask for land, to take part in the revolution. This exposes as a lie the claim by Jan Raath in The Mail & Guardian for November 28 1997 that:
“It’s official.
“The people of Zimbabwe don’t want land.
“They want jobs in a market economy, and an opportunity to work for a decent living.”
Here, Jan Raath was telling the world not only that most Zimbabweans did not want land redistribution; he was telling the world that the majority of Zimbabweans wanted neoliberal reforms such as those which have brought crisis and grief to Tunisia, Egypt, Kenya, Greece, Ireland, Portugal, Spain, France, Albania and even the US itself.
Timing of land revolution
Third, the timing of Zimbabwe’s land revolution has been such that the best year for results, 2011, coincides with bad or inadequate harvests in Australia, Russia, Ukraine and Argentina. These bad or inadequate harvests have caused food prices to escalate, precipitating hunger and starvation around the world.
Pakistan is a special case where the grain-producing heartland the size of the UK was wiped out by floods.
This means Pakistan has to import a lot more grain than normal.
In other words, all food-deficit countries are in trouble unless they are rich in petroleum or minerals.
In other words, Zimbabwe will have enough food, in the hands of the very same people who grow and eat it, exactly at that moment when the world food situation is at its worst because of rising prices and reduced supply.
In addition, Zimbabwe’s mineral resources are also ready for exploitation and value addition by the same majority.
Zimbabwe would be even further ahead of all these other countries, including its committed detractors, if it was not for the illegal economic sanctions, if it was not for MDC-T’s deliberate efforts to destroy the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe and the Grain Marketing Board, who were stopped from helping farmers by Finance Minister Tendai Biti.
The success of land reform despite these efforts to stop it is the reason why the MDC formations have always been afraid of genuine elections.
Therefore, in terms of the history of the people’s struggle to regain total control of their resources, it is important to remember that those who stole African resources also stole African history or tried to destroy and deny that history in order to justify the dispossession of the African.
The war over history accompanies the war over resources. And this war has shifted over the years, as follows:
We begin with the white racist position that Africa has no history.
According to the Regius professor of Modern European History at Oxford University, Hugh Trevor-Roper in The Spectator magazine in 1963:
“Undergraduates, seduced, as always, by the breath of journalistic fashion, demand that they should be taught African history.
“Perhaps, in the future, there will be some African history to teach. But at present the only history there is in Africa is the history of Europeans.
“The rest is darkness . . . and darkness is not the subject of history.”
However, in 1963, as Professor Trevor-Roper was pontificating about Africa at Oxford, many Africans were creating big African history. Some formed the Zimbabwe African National Union (Zanu) which together with the Zimbabwe African People’s Union (Zapu) now forms the United Zanu-PF in the Government of Zimbabwe.
Still other Africans were forming the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) in Addis Ababa, which laid the foundation for the current African Union and which played a big role in the liberation of Southern Africa from British imperialism and colonialism.
As a result of these and many other African replies to white lies, the claim that Africans have no history retreated into another lie, as follows:
“Africans may have invented both civilisation and history, but they have since degenerated so much that all their liberated states are failed states.
“For this reason, Africans need white intervention in the form of recolonisation.”
This line is repeated so often that many African professors teach it to their students today.
So the myth of “the failed state” is being used to justify intervention in African affairs, with attempts being made to define Zimbabwe as such a state.
The problem is that it is strong states such as Zimbabwe which imperialism is struggling to weaken so that they fail.
By exposing the fact that it is the strong sovereign state which is singled out for attack in order to make it fail, we have also forced a retreat from that position.
So, in order to deter us from adopting a truly militant position on the revaluation of Africa and the reclamation of its assets, imperialism retreats to yet another position:
“What Africans in Zimbabwe are trying to achieve through land reclamation could be achieved more smoothly and harmoniously if they allowed international financial institutions and donors to finance a proper planning process, to design a blueprint for land tenure, to fund a land bank, and so forth, without precipitating the disruption and chaos caused by the Third Chimurenga.”
This is in fact what Jan Raath meant by waiting for the market economy to create jobs.
However, Zimbabweans by 2000 replied that they had seen too many aid offers and packages which had served to create detours by-passing the clear objectives of the First and the Second Chimurenga.
This persistence led the imperialist propagandists to retreat to yet another position: Many are called but a few are chosen.
White settlers were chosen by God to turn Zimbabwe into a breadbasket. Let them continue.
“Yes, the land was stolen from the majority by white settlers. Yes, the best farmland is in the hands of a few white farmers, but that is the trend worldwide.
“In most advanced countries, it is a tiny minority that remains on the farms. Moreover, after a hundred years of colonialism, most Africans in Zimbabwe do not want land.
“They want jobs, which they know the white settlers and foreign companies can best provide.”
So the attacks on land reform automatically become attacks on economic indigenisation and empowerment.
The land reclamation movement refused to listen to this interpretation and the propagandists were forced to abandon it and move to yet another:
“Africans may have moved on to the land in droves, but they can’t farm. They are not good farmers.”
However, since 2000, there has been clear evidence that production on the farms is steadily increasing and improving and that even those who have no farming experience are eager to learn fast.
What they lack are funds, equipment and inputs which the state could provide if it was not for illegal sanctions.
This has forced yet another retreat to a contradictory position.
“Yes, the people of Zimbabwe have shown that they really wanted their land and that they are eager to farm.
“However, this farming will not take off, will not succeed, unless and until the people first get rid of President Robert Mugabe and the Zanu-PF Government.
“This government is so corrupt and so incompetent that it is the biggest hindrance to a successful agrarian revolution.”
Put another way: President Mugabe and Zanu-PF were good only for political liberation. They must now give way to a new group who will bring economic liberation.
Again the people see through this position: That, first, it seeks to avoid the question of sanctions and their negative effects on the provision of resources for agriculture.
In the second place, this position seeks to deny the reality revealed by both Professor Sam Moyo and Professor Ian Scoones.
Most of the redistributed land went to the povo, the small producers who used to be restricted to congested and barren “tribal trust lands” of Rhodesian days.
If that is not development and economic liberation, then, what is it?
Moreover, when more than 1 000 white settlers tried to come back to reverse land reform in March and April 2008, it was President Mugabe and Zanu-PF who defended land reform against the efforts of the MDC formations to reverse the same. And when Copac went out to seek people’s views for a new constitution, the people upheld the position of President Mugabe and the liberation movement on land reform, economic indigenisation and African economic empowerment.
The position taken by The Financial Gazette is not different from the other previous retreats. Where objective professional research demonstrates a popular land revolution aiming to empower the povo as well as a resounding success in light of the illegal sanctions and droughts — the best The Financial Gazette can grant is: “Land reform not complete disaster”.
Even this had to be tucked away at Page 15! This effort to hide the light under the bushel means that the internal detractors of Zimbabwe’s land reform will be the last to admit that their interpretations of the Third Chimurenga were wrong
Friday, February 18, 2011
Are Africans misreading the Egyptian crisis?
The African struggle has always been about democracy. This is not new. The African anti-colonial struggle was about democracy and the paradox of Africa is that many autocratic regimes on the continent have been helped to stay in power by the west. Yet the same western countries abandon those regimes when the African tide turns.
By Itayi Garande
A United States writer remarked that "Euphoria spreads across the face of our nation like the broad grin of an idiot" in describing the mood that gripped America during the period leading to the presidency of Barack Obama.
Obama had the momentum and everyone from Talk Show Queen Oprah Winfrey to Hip Hop mogul, P. Diddy, was gripped by Obamamania. Obama's message resonated with the young, many claimed, and he represented change.
He was televisual, had a better campaign website than his rivals in the Democratic and presidential race - all marks of superior savvy in the realm of what's happening now and what the youth want to see.
Once president, he would be different from his predecessor, George W. Bush, we were told and promised. He spoke well and with rare charisma reminiscent of Malcolm X and Dr Martin Luther King Jr.
His rivals had typical US politicians' websites with the America flag backdrop, looking presidential, scary and pro-establishment.
Not a single newscaster criticised Obama, well, except Fox News.
Years later, U.S. policy has not shifted significantly.
U.S. domestic concerns have not changed dramatically, at least compared with the expectations advanced by the Obama campaign. Obama is now pretty much a typical US president: with rehearsed speeches, predictable political punchlines and carefully chosen words, unlike during his presidential campaign.
Many people are now wondering if this is the same Obama whom they saw move the U.S., the world into believing history was being made, not because he was the First Black President for the US, but because under him "things would never be the same again" and that "change we can believe in" would occur.
That euphoria has died down.
Enter Egypt.The events in Egypt are heralded as the "end of dictatorships" and many Egyptians care less about what comes after Mubarak
They want to replace his administration with a pro-democracy one. Democracy building is a messy, tedious and all too easily derailed business. More so when it comes to Egypt which has no tradition of democracy, a pervasive secret police culture and no credible institutions barring the army.
It's strange but true that the army will be building democracy in Egypt, led by a man Field Marshal Hussain Tantawi described in the WikiLeaks cables as "Mubarak's poodle" and anti-reform in every sense of the word.
Tantawi it is said epitomises the strong centrist traditions that have characterised governments in Egypt, traditions that go back thousands of years to the Pharoahs.
It partly explains the army's ambiguity on repeal of the emergency laws that have stifled dissent and outlawed opposition.
Mubarak's power grip was the product, to a more or less extent, of the U.S. administration, which poured billions into his military establishment, and helped sustain and extend his crony capitalist class.
Obama visited Egypt in June 2009, when he was still green as a president. Human rights groups seized that opportunity to tell the world about Mubarak's regime.
Obama gave a speech at Cairo University, which largely avoided the issue of human rights and the poverty that gripped millions of Egyptians who live below the global poverty index of US$2 a day.
Before the crisis, little was known about Mubarak's violations, outside of Egypt, and his police state was largely ignored by the western powers. In fact, they helped Mubarak survive for so long.
The incongruity between Mubarak and Obama's speeches in the media were almost childish given that barely a year before they had visited each other and played their public diplomacy very well.
An embattled Mubarak said he wanted no foreign interference in Egypt's political process and Obama said 'change' was coming to Egypt.
In his second speech during the Tahrir Square demonstrations, Mubarak spoke in Arabic, not Egyptian, to try and reassert his nationalism and connect with Egyptian sentiment, but it was too late.
The MilitaryNot much has changed so far in Egypt, insofar as the leadership is concerned. There's nothing novel about the 'change' - the Egyptians also did it in 1952. Lots and lots of countries all over the world have had military coups over the years.
The same lot are in power now who were in power yesterday. And these are the people who get all the money and power and privileges in Egypt - including all the US aid money - while ordinary Egyptians are poor and oppressed.
The people have indeed triumphed, but they do not have a proper organisation in the country to take over power.
To the west and the military the situation was unsustainable. Mubarak had to go because he was making the natives restless and that threatened to unravel the current system. So the Army put a word in his ear and he "retired" to "spend more time with his family", enjoy his golden years, etc.
It's not yet "change we can believe in" but a de facto 'military coup' that we see in Egypt today.
Mubarak might have been offered an exit package (money, immunity, etc.) given the speed with which he changed his mind in 24 hours.
The link between the US and Egyptian military is very strong, and the subtle U.S. public-private diplomatic manouvres are still intact in that country.
The last few days, especially, have seen the military in both the U.S. and Egypt play diplomatic roles usually played by foreign secretaries.
U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton did not feature much in the Egyptian crisis negotiations. She was replaced by the "big boys" -- Secretary of Defence Robert Gates and Joint Chief of Staff, Admiral Mike Mullen -- military characters.
When times get tough for the US, policies change dramatically; even to warrant running diplomacy out of the Pentagon.
Yet the shift is still only cosmetic, as it does not satisfy Egyptian nationalism.
The Egyptian Supreme Military Council running that country still has individuals who are very much pro-American and who were trained in US military colleges and establishments. It was loathed by the people, yet it took centrestage in the early days of the revolution. Why, and who made sure that that happened? Why did the police, which had no such strong connection whatsoever with the USintelligence, disappear off the streets of Cairo in the very early days?
Admiral Mullen admitted to Associated Press that the Egyptian military trained at the Pentagon in "thousands and their families lived with us" and that a strong connection exists between the two military establishments.
That line of communication and support has been alive and well for over 30 years and will not die because of Mubarak's exit. The changes we see in Egypt, to an extent, pretty much reflect US interests.
Mubarak is gone, but dismantling the age-old military and intelligence connection between the US and Egypt will be a daunting task, if at all possible.
Egypt is too strategically connected with the U.S. It was the first Arab country to sign a peace pact with Israel and the Suez Canal controlled by Egypt is important in in providing a passage for oil flows to the U.S. so a Tianamen Square option was out of the question for the U.S. The fights that broke between the police and the people in the first two days of the demonstrations would have made the situation worse. Who came up with the strategy to take the police, who are trained to deal with rioters, out of the equation?
There are US secrets embedded in the Mubarak regime's superstructure. WikiLeaks, among other revelations, told us that Egyptian 'torturers' were trained by the FBI, that the US knew of 'routine' police brutality in Egypt, but still supported that regime.
The Egyptian military has remained totally aligned with the U.S., while nationalistic sentiment has risen. This is a disastrous cocktail, and the bubble might just burst, in the days, months or years to come.
Crowds are demanding more than the change we see today. That's why they are still in Tahrir Square. The U.S. and Egypt's Supreme Military Council might just be underestimating the nationalistic sentiment in that country. Yet, the history of revolutions has taught us a lot. The 1979 Iranian Revolution took an unexpected turn. Egypt can also take unexpected twists.
While the Egyptian "Wall of Fear" has fallen, what is to follow that occasion?
Unfolding events in the Middle East might just provide a clue. Hamas is already celebrating this event. The opposition in Egypt is in a mess and there are no organised politicians that can effectively take over from the military, the Muslim Brotherhood commands very little support, and was even shocked and neutralised by the nationalistic sentiment.
Will the military easily relinquish power? Who will constitute Egypt's new Parliament? Who has the secret files of the Mubarak regime? What will be the interplay between Mubarak's vice president Omar Suleiman - a figurehead of Mubarak regime - and military characters like the Head of Artillery and the Head of the Infantry who do not really like him?
How will the CIA and the Mubarak's former intelligence deal with all intelligence files? What will happen to all the dark secrets shared by the U.S. and the Mubarak regime? Is Obama sincere in his rhetoric or it's mere public diplomacy?
While US, UK and other powers congratulate the masses in Egypt, behind those messages are their strategic interests in the region that they won't let go without giving a fight. Which means the Egyptian military now will serve the U.S. with same policies, the very policies people angrily rejected.
Enter Africa, ZimbabweWhile many Africans celebrate this new wave of changes, they are failing to make connection with the real message coming out of Egypt, out of Tunisia.
Former Egypt ruler Gamal Abdel Nasser Hussein was deposed for his anti-imperialist ideas and his nationalistic ideas, including the nationalisation of the Suez Canal.
This new revolution might just be a reaffirmation of Nassir's nationalism. We saw Egyptians, Muslim and otherwise, demonstrating peaceably together on Tarhir Square, putting Egypt's needs first. We heard more "I am an Egyptian" chants soon after Mubarak resigned.
The events in Egypt are also a reaffirmation that change is largely an internal process, although external forces can exert pressure. Those events can also be viewed as a triumph of Nasserism, and of the Egyptian people who were badly treated by colonialism, by governments that supported Mubarak over the years -- including the 18.9 million people who did not even make it to Tahrir Square.
The tragedy of Mubarak is that he crashed the Egyptian nationalistic sentiment and their dream of self-determination, of restoring the Egyptians' dream of success, of freedom, of self-determination.
Interestingly, this revolution has coincided with the 21st Celebration of Nelson Mandela's release from three decades of incarceration.
Africa is reaffirming its place in world history. While it embraces some basic democratic tenets, it is not necessarily embracing western democracy in its entirety.
The African struggle has always been about democracy. This is not new. The African anti-colonial struggle was about democracy and the paradox of Africa is that many autocratic regimes on the continent have been helped to stay in power by the west. Yet the same western countries abandon those regimes when the African tide turns.
Switzerland is now freezing Mubarak's assets, after 30 plus years. Britain today still has a multi-million pound townhouse in London, in Mubarak's son's name. ABC News reported that US taxpayers' money helped buy nine Gulf Stream jets for Mubarak. Why all these revelations now? And on what authority has the Swiss government done this? Is it panicking for some reason that we do not know?
Mubarak is still in Egypt and is still a very strong link in the transition despite his "resignation". We have to take a cautious approach and watch events as they unfold.
This is a lesson for Africa, for Zimbabwe.
Unless change comes from within, and the demands of the people are genuine and not driven by some external force, there will always be a disconnect between the people and their rulers.
Unless calls for democracy are modelled on a nation's aspirations, not necessarily western liberal democracy as we see today, there will never be true change.
All the euphoria and rhetoric about change in Zimbabwe has been largely disconnected from the nationalistic sentiment.
There has never been a sustained argument from opposition forces in Zimbabwe about nationalism; nor has there been genuine respectful policy debates on the Zimbabwean question and the restoration of dignity for Zimbabweans.
The inclusive Government has revealed some dark aspects of the disconnect between the so-called pro-democracy forces and those who directly participated in the Liberation Struggle.
That disconnect will remain forever, if change is desired simply to change the faces of the people in power.
The political groups in Zimbabwe squabble about positions as we have seen with the useless banter between the "nutty Professors" - Welshman Ncube and Arthur Mutambara.
They should expend their energy on providing Zimbabweans with their alternative policies on land, indigenisation and empowerment and the economy; and how they propose to resolve the inequities brought by decades of colonisation.
The misreading of the Egyptian and Tunisian revolutions will deal a huge blow to African countries if they do not take time to analyse and appreciate the spirit of nationalism, self-determination and quest for individual respect that underpin those revolutions.
It is time to go beyond the Facebook euphoria and start thinking about the real questions.
Obama had the momentum and everyone from Talk Show Queen Oprah Winfrey to Hip Hop mogul, P. Diddy, was gripped by Obamamania. Obama's message resonated with the young, many claimed, and he represented change.
He was televisual, had a better campaign website than his rivals in the Democratic and presidential race - all marks of superior savvy in the realm of what's happening now and what the youth want to see.
Once president, he would be different from his predecessor, George W. Bush, we were told and promised. He spoke well and with rare charisma reminiscent of Malcolm X and Dr Martin Luther King Jr.
His rivals had typical US politicians' websites with the America flag backdrop, looking presidential, scary and pro-establishment.
Not a single newscaster criticised Obama, well, except Fox News.
Years later, U.S. policy has not shifted significantly.
U.S. domestic concerns have not changed dramatically, at least compared with the expectations advanced by the Obama campaign. Obama is now pretty much a typical US president: with rehearsed speeches, predictable political punchlines and carefully chosen words, unlike during his presidential campaign.
Many people are now wondering if this is the same Obama whom they saw move the U.S., the world into believing history was being made, not because he was the First Black President for the US, but because under him "things would never be the same again" and that "change we can believe in" would occur.
That euphoria has died down.
Enter Egypt.The events in Egypt are heralded as the "end of dictatorships" and many Egyptians care less about what comes after Mubarak
They want to replace his administration with a pro-democracy one. Democracy building is a messy, tedious and all too easily derailed business. More so when it comes to Egypt which has no tradition of democracy, a pervasive secret police culture and no credible institutions barring the army.
It's strange but true that the army will be building democracy in Egypt, led by a man Field Marshal Hussain Tantawi described in the WikiLeaks cables as "Mubarak's poodle" and anti-reform in every sense of the word.
Tantawi it is said epitomises the strong centrist traditions that have characterised governments in Egypt, traditions that go back thousands of years to the Pharoahs.
It partly explains the army's ambiguity on repeal of the emergency laws that have stifled dissent and outlawed opposition.
Mubarak's power grip was the product, to a more or less extent, of the U.S. administration, which poured billions into his military establishment, and helped sustain and extend his crony capitalist class.
Obama visited Egypt in June 2009, when he was still green as a president. Human rights groups seized that opportunity to tell the world about Mubarak's regime.
Obama gave a speech at Cairo University, which largely avoided the issue of human rights and the poverty that gripped millions of Egyptians who live below the global poverty index of US$2 a day.
Before the crisis, little was known about Mubarak's violations, outside of Egypt, and his police state was largely ignored by the western powers. In fact, they helped Mubarak survive for so long.
The incongruity between Mubarak and Obama's speeches in the media were almost childish given that barely a year before they had visited each other and played their public diplomacy very well.
An embattled Mubarak said he wanted no foreign interference in Egypt's political process and Obama said 'change' was coming to Egypt.
In his second speech during the Tahrir Square demonstrations, Mubarak spoke in Arabic, not Egyptian, to try and reassert his nationalism and connect with Egyptian sentiment, but it was too late.
The MilitaryNot much has changed so far in Egypt, insofar as the leadership is concerned. There's nothing novel about the 'change' - the Egyptians also did it in 1952. Lots and lots of countries all over the world have had military coups over the years.
The same lot are in power now who were in power yesterday. And these are the people who get all the money and power and privileges in Egypt - including all the US aid money - while ordinary Egyptians are poor and oppressed.
The people have indeed triumphed, but they do not have a proper organisation in the country to take over power.
To the west and the military the situation was unsustainable. Mubarak had to go because he was making the natives restless and that threatened to unravel the current system. So the Army put a word in his ear and he "retired" to "spend more time with his family", enjoy his golden years, etc.
It's not yet "change we can believe in" but a de facto 'military coup' that we see in Egypt today.
Mubarak might have been offered an exit package (money, immunity, etc.) given the speed with which he changed his mind in 24 hours.
The link between the US and Egyptian military is very strong, and the subtle U.S. public-private diplomatic manouvres are still intact in that country.
The last few days, especially, have seen the military in both the U.S. and Egypt play diplomatic roles usually played by foreign secretaries.
U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton did not feature much in the Egyptian crisis negotiations. She was replaced by the "big boys" -- Secretary of Defence Robert Gates and Joint Chief of Staff, Admiral Mike Mullen -- military characters.
When times get tough for the US, policies change dramatically; even to warrant running diplomacy out of the Pentagon.
Yet the shift is still only cosmetic, as it does not satisfy Egyptian nationalism.
The Egyptian Supreme Military Council running that country still has individuals who are very much pro-American and who were trained in US military colleges and establishments. It was loathed by the people, yet it took centrestage in the early days of the revolution. Why, and who made sure that that happened? Why did the police, which had no such strong connection whatsoever with the USintelligence, disappear off the streets of Cairo in the very early days?
Admiral Mullen admitted to Associated Press that the Egyptian military trained at the Pentagon in "thousands and their families lived with us" and that a strong connection exists between the two military establishments.
That line of communication and support has been alive and well for over 30 years and will not die because of Mubarak's exit. The changes we see in Egypt, to an extent, pretty much reflect US interests.
Mubarak is gone, but dismantling the age-old military and intelligence connection between the US and Egypt will be a daunting task, if at all possible.
Egypt is too strategically connected with the U.S. It was the first Arab country to sign a peace pact with Israel and the Suez Canal controlled by Egypt is important in in providing a passage for oil flows to the U.S. so a Tianamen Square option was out of the question for the U.S. The fights that broke between the police and the people in the first two days of the demonstrations would have made the situation worse. Who came up with the strategy to take the police, who are trained to deal with rioters, out of the equation?
There are US secrets embedded in the Mubarak regime's superstructure. WikiLeaks, among other revelations, told us that Egyptian 'torturers' were trained by the FBI, that the US knew of 'routine' police brutality in Egypt, but still supported that regime.
The Egyptian military has remained totally aligned with the U.S., while nationalistic sentiment has risen. This is a disastrous cocktail, and the bubble might just burst, in the days, months or years to come.
Crowds are demanding more than the change we see today. That's why they are still in Tahrir Square. The U.S. and Egypt's Supreme Military Council might just be underestimating the nationalistic sentiment in that country. Yet, the history of revolutions has taught us a lot. The 1979 Iranian Revolution took an unexpected turn. Egypt can also take unexpected twists.
While the Egyptian "Wall of Fear" has fallen, what is to follow that occasion?
Unfolding events in the Middle East might just provide a clue. Hamas is already celebrating this event. The opposition in Egypt is in a mess and there are no organised politicians that can effectively take over from the military, the Muslim Brotherhood commands very little support, and was even shocked and neutralised by the nationalistic sentiment.
Will the military easily relinquish power? Who will constitute Egypt's new Parliament? Who has the secret files of the Mubarak regime? What will be the interplay between Mubarak's vice president Omar Suleiman - a figurehead of Mubarak regime - and military characters like the Head of Artillery and the Head of the Infantry who do not really like him?
How will the CIA and the Mubarak's former intelligence deal with all intelligence files? What will happen to all the dark secrets shared by the U.S. and the Mubarak regime? Is Obama sincere in his rhetoric or it's mere public diplomacy?
While US, UK and other powers congratulate the masses in Egypt, behind those messages are their strategic interests in the region that they won't let go without giving a fight. Which means the Egyptian military now will serve the U.S. with same policies, the very policies people angrily rejected.
Enter Africa, ZimbabweWhile many Africans celebrate this new wave of changes, they are failing to make connection with the real message coming out of Egypt, out of Tunisia.
Former Egypt ruler Gamal Abdel Nasser Hussein was deposed for his anti-imperialist ideas and his nationalistic ideas, including the nationalisation of the Suez Canal.
This new revolution might just be a reaffirmation of Nassir's nationalism. We saw Egyptians, Muslim and otherwise, demonstrating peaceably together on Tarhir Square, putting Egypt's needs first. We heard more "I am an Egyptian" chants soon after Mubarak resigned.
The events in Egypt are also a reaffirmation that change is largely an internal process, although external forces can exert pressure. Those events can also be viewed as a triumph of Nasserism, and of the Egyptian people who were badly treated by colonialism, by governments that supported Mubarak over the years -- including the 18.9 million people who did not even make it to Tahrir Square.
The tragedy of Mubarak is that he crashed the Egyptian nationalistic sentiment and their dream of self-determination, of restoring the Egyptians' dream of success, of freedom, of self-determination.
Interestingly, this revolution has coincided with the 21st Celebration of Nelson Mandela's release from three decades of incarceration.
Africa is reaffirming its place in world history. While it embraces some basic democratic tenets, it is not necessarily embracing western democracy in its entirety.
The African struggle has always been about democracy. This is not new. The African anti-colonial struggle was about democracy and the paradox of Africa is that many autocratic regimes on the continent have been helped to stay in power by the west. Yet the same western countries abandon those regimes when the African tide turns.
Switzerland is now freezing Mubarak's assets, after 30 plus years. Britain today still has a multi-million pound townhouse in London, in Mubarak's son's name. ABC News reported that US taxpayers' money helped buy nine Gulf Stream jets for Mubarak. Why all these revelations now? And on what authority has the Swiss government done this? Is it panicking for some reason that we do not know?
Mubarak is still in Egypt and is still a very strong link in the transition despite his "resignation". We have to take a cautious approach and watch events as they unfold.
This is a lesson for Africa, for Zimbabwe.
Unless change comes from within, and the demands of the people are genuine and not driven by some external force, there will always be a disconnect between the people and their rulers.
Unless calls for democracy are modelled on a nation's aspirations, not necessarily western liberal democracy as we see today, there will never be true change.
All the euphoria and rhetoric about change in Zimbabwe has been largely disconnected from the nationalistic sentiment.
There has never been a sustained argument from opposition forces in Zimbabwe about nationalism; nor has there been genuine respectful policy debates on the Zimbabwean question and the restoration of dignity for Zimbabweans.
The inclusive Government has revealed some dark aspects of the disconnect between the so-called pro-democracy forces and those who directly participated in the Liberation Struggle.
That disconnect will remain forever, if change is desired simply to change the faces of the people in power.
The political groups in Zimbabwe squabble about positions as we have seen with the useless banter between the "nutty Professors" - Welshman Ncube and Arthur Mutambara.
They should expend their energy on providing Zimbabweans with their alternative policies on land, indigenisation and empowerment and the economy; and how they propose to resolve the inequities brought by decades of colonisation.
The misreading of the Egyptian and Tunisian revolutions will deal a huge blow to African countries if they do not take time to analyse and appreciate the spirit of nationalism, self-determination and quest for individual respect that underpin those revolutions.
It is time to go beyond the Facebook euphoria and start thinking about the real questions.
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Tunisia, Egypt: Fatwa on US Middle-East strategy?
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