Uganda: the audacity of sovereignty

Audacious Museveni...he gave the West a rude finger over gay "rights"

Tichaona Zindoga
The stakes were high; perhaps unnecessarily so.
Yet this week Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni decided to literally spit in the faces of Western powers that have been trying to foist the “new norm” of engagement based on recognition of gay “rights”.
These powers – the US, UK and the Commonwealth countries – have made their position clear: the world, and particularly Africa, should accept gay rights or risk losing aid that the West has been so generous to give.
In October 2011, British Prime Minister David Cameron told the BBC that those receiving UK aid should “adhere to proper human rights”, chief of which these days seems to be gay rights.
Two months later, US President Barack Obama reportedly instructed officials across government to “ensure that US diplomacy and foreign assistance promote and protect the human rights of lesbian, gay, and transgender persons”.
The then Secretary of State Hilary Clinton later said in a speech marking International Human Rights Day that “one of the remaining human rights challenges of our time,… gay rights, are human rights, and human rights are gay rights”.
She added: “It is violation of human rights when people are beaten or killed because of their sexual orientation, or because they do not conform to cultural norms about how men and women should look or behave.”
“It is a violation of human rights when governments declare it illegal to be gay, or allow those who harm gay people to go unpunished.”
Malawi had foreign aid support reduced because of its stance on gay rights and has had to do a lot of climbing down to keep good books with outside benefactors.
Canada threatened to cut diplomatic ties with Uganda if the anti-homosexuality Bill was passed. There were even shrill ‘holy’ cries from South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who is on record as stating that he does “not worship a homophobic God”.
Museveni is not foolish or foolhardy; the only attributes that would ordinarily attend those who oppose big powers, if they have no reason to be brave.
His defiance can be put in the same bracket as the forthrightness of President Mugabe who has been vocal on the gay issue and Zimbabwe’s right to political and economic self-determination.
Museveni could be showing the world the audacity of sovereignty.
It should be borne in mind that his country has been pursuing a hardline stance on homosexuality. His senior advisor, Joseph Nagenda, has been lashing out at both at the UK and the US for trying to foist homosexuality on Africa.
He said in 2011: “If the Americans think they can tell us what to do, they can go to hell.” Nagenda was also quoted by the Christian Science Monitor as saying: “I don’t like her tone, at all … I’m amazed she’s not looking to her own country and lecturing them first, before she comes to say these things which she knows are very sensitive issues in so many parts of the world, not least Africa.
“Homosexuality here is taboo, it’s something anathema to Africans, and I can say that this idea of Clinton’s, of Obama’s, is something that will be seen as abhorrent in every country on the continent that I can think of.” Following Monday’s signing of the Anti-Homosexuality Act, Canada, the US and Britain made familiar noises.
Canada said: “This Act is a serious setback for human rights, dignity and fundamental freedoms and deserves to be widely condemned. Regrettably, this discriminatory law will serve as an impediment in our relationship with the Ugandan government.”
The UK said it was “deeply saddened and disappointed” while to the US, this was a “tragic day for Uganda and for all who care about the cause of human rights” which “complicates a valued relationship.”

Leverage
Here comes the real reason that gives Museveni all the aces and the sovereignty that he showed in an audacious manner: Uganda is a strategic country in East Africa and after this storm, nothing serious is likely to happen to the country.
Uganda is a US pivot to East and Central Africa.
Uganda is essential to the defeat of Joseph Kony and his Lord’s Resistance Army, to which the US is committed.
Obama undertook this in his first year in office and on October 14, 2011 committed troops to help find Kony.
Already in 2008, the US Treasury had put Kony on a list of global terrorists and in 2010 Congress unanimously passed the Lord’s Resistance Army Disarmament and Northern Uganda Recovery Act of 2009.
This Ugandan pivot is key in securing US interests in South Sudan, the Central African Republic and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
Uganda has oil, too.
Commercially viable oil deposits were discovered in 2006.
Authorities say by the end of 2013, Uganda’s proven oil reserves were estimated by the Ugandan Petroleum Exploration and Production Department to be 3,5 billion barrels, expected to yield at least US$2 billion per year for 30 years once oil production commences.
Now this is interesting. Uganda has a considerable geostrategic value.
This may not – cannot – be lost over an issue like gay rights; and proponents of the same know it.

Uganda has not been the loveliest of fellows with its involvement in wars in Central and East Africa; not least its dalliance with the US Africa Command project, but it has shown that it has muscle particularly to fight cultural imperialism which this hullabaloo around gay rights is all about.

One lesson there is: African countries could leverage what advantages they have – Zimbabwe is rich and the gateway to Southern Africa – and start standing their ground.
Africa has to be audacious in light of political, economic and cultural imperialism from the West.

Western media keeping Cold War hot

That Presidents Mugabe and Putin end up in the same bracket, according to the West, confirms the continuance of the Cold War which the western media is fanning whether in courting confrontations and advancing preemptive purposes or by way of interpreting events. Sochi thus became a new Cold War metaphor in an overdrive of western media propaganda.

Bad Guy...Vladmir Putin is to the Western and its media

Tichaona Zindoga
It is hardly surprising — it is a norm rather — that western media follow the flag on foreign policy.
Sometimes it even leads it.
That is how this world has gotten along in the Cold War, and in recent times, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya, Zimbabwe, Uganda and even lately Ukraine and Sochi Winter Olympics in Russia.
There are other innumerable examples.
Lies about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, terrorists in Afghanistan, horror stories of government crackdown on “civilians” in Libya and Syria; among others, have been peddled the media.
Libya’s Muammar Gaddaffi, whom the western media liked to call “Mad Dog”, was toppled.
Syria’s Bashir still stands, hanging by the cliff rather, after the US nearly invaded Syria for having crossed some dubious “red line” last year.
Zimbabwe has been fodder for negative western media following the revolutionary land reform and indigenisation and pro-poor policies. President Mugabe became a villain. He is also so because of his stance against homosexuality.
Unsurprisingly, the western media sunk to new lows by appearing to begrudge the Zimbabwe’s leader’s 90th birthday last week.
The UK Independent, for example, had a piece entitled “Robert Mugabe’s 90th birthday, and why no-one on earth should have turned up to his party”.
Many Zimbabweans did with a lot of goodwill. But the Independent emblematically said President Mugabe’s has been a “catastrophic dictatorship that continues to claim lives. And for that reason, Mugabe, we’re afraid we can’t make it.”
One Vince Musewe, nowadays very useful in western commentary on Zimbabwe, thought celebrating the milestone was “just irresponsible”. There were other reasons, according to the Independent, for not celebrating President Mugabe.
One of them: “Because what he says about homosexuality makes (Russian President Vladmir) Putin look like a pussy cat . . .”
The juxtaposition of President Mugabe and Putin is significant. Coincidentally, President Putin sent a warm congratulatory message to President Mugabe saying, “You enjoy well-deserved respect as one of the leaders of the African national liberation movement,” and appreciating friendly Russia-Zimbabwean relations.
That Presidents Mugabe and Putin end up in the same bracket, according to the West, confirms the continuance of the Cold War which the western media is fanning whether in courting confrontations and advancing preemptive purposes or by way of interpreting events.
Sochi thus became a new Cold War metaphor. Many analysts and experts saw an overdrive of western media propaganda.
Stephen F Cohen, professor emeritus at New York University and Princeton University writes about the US media’s “shameful” treatment of the games.
“If the recent tsunami of shamefully unprofessional and politically inflammatory articles in leading newspapers and magazines — particularly about the Sochi Olympics, Ukraine and, unfailingly, President Vladimir Putin — is an indication, this media malpractice is now pervasive and the new norm,” he says in an article.

He says “Overall pre-Sochi coverage was even worse, exploiting the threat of terrorism so licentiously it seemed pornographic.”
On the opening day of the games the Times “found space for three anti-Putin articles and a lead editorial, a feat rivaled by the (Wahington) Post. Facts hardly mattered.” Cohen says, “US media on Russia today are less objective, less balanced, more conformist and scarcely less ideological than when they covered Soviet Russia during the Cold War.” The history of this degradation is also clear. It began in the early 1990s, following the end of the Soviet Union, when the US media adopted Washington’s narrative that almost everything President Boris Yeltsin did was a “transition from communism to democracy” and thus in the US’ best interests. This included his economic “shock therapy” and oligarchic looting of essential state assets, which destroyed tens of millions of Russian lives; armed destruction of a popularly elected parliament and imposition of a “presidential” constitution, which dealt a crippling blow to democratisation and now empowers Putin; brutal war in tiny Chechnya, which gave rise to terrorists in Russia’s North Caucasus; rigging of his own re-election in 1996; and leaving behind, in 1999, his approval ratings in single digits, a disintegrating country laden with weapons of mass destruction. Indeed, most US journalists still give the impression that Yeltsin was an ideal Russian leader.”
This explanation illustrates two vital points: one that everything that serves the interests of the US is best; and secondly, and in relation, that someone or a country may afford to be bad and still get western support as long as that serves western interests. Prof Cohen further debunks US media practice noting that since the early 2000s, “the media have followed a different leader-centric narrative, also consistent with US policy, that devalues multifaceted analysis for a relentless demonization of Putin, with little regard for facts.”
The Hollywood Reporter Hollywood also explains the anti-Russia media obsession. It notes that, Google, the giant US multimedia company, ran a doodle on its homepage expressing solidarity with gay athletes in Sochi, which a government figure dismissed as “provocation created out of fear to weaken a strong Russia.”
It cited Vladimir Yakunin a government official, saying, “There is an impression that what is hiding behind the democratic principle of ‘freedom of speech,’ is not the diversity of opinion, but a well-organised information war (against Russia).”  Finian Cunningham of the Strategic Culture Foundation wrote on NSNBC, noted that apart from the superlatives associated with the cost and preparation of the games, “Another superlative is that no other sporting event has attracted so much lurid and negative media coverage, emanating largely from the Western corporate news outlets…”
This coverage, especially on alleged problems, ranged from “grimly serious to the sublimely ridiculous.”
For example, Cunningham, cited the New York Times, a whole paper of record, carrying a story on “Racing to Save the Stray Dogs of Sochi” on the same top foreign stories along with Egypt and Ukraine.  By the way, Ukraine has become another Cold War front, with the media in tow. And Prof Cohen notes that US media has been “highly selective, partisan and inflammatory”. It is “Ukraine’s chance for democracy, prosperity” versus “escape from Russia, . . . (the) “bullying” Putin and his “cronies” in Kiev.” He explains: “But the most crucial media omission is Moscow’s reasonable conviction that the struggle for Ukraine is yet another chapter in the West’s on-going, US-led march toward post-Soviet Russia, which began in the 1990s with NATO’s eastward expansion and continued with US-funded NGO political activities inside Russia, a U.S.-NATO military outpost in Georgia and missile-defense installations near Russia.”
Cunningham concludes “The saying goes: don’t mix sport with politics. From Western media and their governments’ point of view, Sochi is evidently all about politics and very little about sport.”

Zim sanctions: Less pique, more of bigger picture

Unless and until the EU lifts the sanctions as a whole, which makes perfect political and economic sense, its sincerity will be in serious doubt.
Or has a whole bloc reduced itself to the politics of personalities and egos and find itself bogged down by Britain’s whimsical demands? 

Tichaona Zindoga
ON February 18, 2002 the European Union Council adopted the “common position concerning restrictive measures against Zimbabwe” (2002/145/CFSP) authorising sanctions against the country. “The council has assessed that the Government of Zimbabwe continues to engage in serious violations of human rights and of the freedom of opinion, of association and of peaceful assembly,” said the paper signed by J Pique I Camps, Council president.
“Therefore, for as long as the violations occur, the Council deems it necessary to introduce restrictive measures against the Government of Zimbabwe and those who bear a wide responsibility for such violations.”
The sanctions would include an arms embargo, designation of certain individuals for travel sanctions and asset freezes and freezing of funds and financial assets or economic resources “directly or indirectly” to Government (since it was run by the listed individuals).
The paper also said: “In order to maximise the impact of the above mentioned measures, the European Union shall encourage third States to adopt restrictive measures similar to those contained in this common position.”
It said the measures would be “kept under constant review”.
On the eve of elections in July last year, the EU Ambassador to South Africa promised the removal of the embargo.
“If the process goes well, we will suspend (the sanctions) and I am sure they will be removed,” he said.
“We don’t have the right to continue with that if the elections are acceptable. If the outcome of the elections is clear, is accepted, who are we, all Europeans, to say (no). . .”
The elections were endorsed by all major observer missions, including Sadc, the African Union, the Pan African Parliament and scores of world leaders congratulated President Mugabe on his victory in the plebiscite.
Days later, though, EU ambassador to Zimbabwe Aldo Dell’Ariccia would say: “The elections were peaceful, but the weaknesses in the process reported by observers mean that they were not wholly transparent and that impacted on their credibility.”
Eight months after elections should give the EU a sober picture of Zimbabwe in relation to the political processes.
There are critical things to consider on whether to remove its sanctions or not. The first relates to the conduct of elections.
As outlined above, the main observer missions gave the process a clean bill of health.
The only gripe came from the losing opposition, in particular the MDC-T, which claimed “monumental fraud” and “grand theft”.
The party’s claims, contained in a dossier, formed the basis of Western misgivings about the elections. The British Ambassador to Zimbabwe Deborah Bronnert went to town with MDC-T’s wild claims that, for example, 10 000 voters had been assisted to vote in one constituency.
It turned out to be a lie and her office on August 10 wrote to the MDC-T, raising “concern over misleading election data”.
Reads part of the letter addressed to the party’s secretary general: “The British Embassy wishes to register its disquiet over misleading election information related to the July 31, 2013 polls which was received from your party.
“The information received related to the polling processes and your party’s monitoring efforts which unearthed, inter alia, that about 10 000 people were assisted to vote on election day in a certain constituency.
“It has, however, emerged that such information was not correct.”
The letter went on to regret that “based on this incorrect information, the British Ambassador, Her Excellency Deborah Bronnert went to give comments on the July 2013 polls . . . (which) exposed her to attacks from the state media much as it invited the wrath of the victorious Zanu-PF party.”
The embassy urged the MDC-T to channel information that is “credible, factual and have little potential to damage the image of the Embassy.”
Tendai Biti, the MDC-T secretary general, duly wrote back on August 20, to give the party’s “sincere apology for providing you with apparently false and misleading information on the electoral malpractices that were witnessed during the July 2013 harmonised elections.”
After this, any doubt about the credibility of elections should have been removed, and is it any wonder that a dossier by the MDC-T purporting to outline the “grand theft” never found any serious takers?
The elections may not have been perfect — they are never perfect anywhere on earth as former Nigerian president Olusegun Obasanjo told us — but they passed the legitimate test.
Holding them to further scrutiny may not be motivated by any good. So an honest EU is expected to take note.
The other critical thing, perhaps contextually and legally important, is how Zimbabwe has fared in relation to the benchmarks set out in the 2002/145/CFSP.
The EU claimed the Zimbabwe government was engaged in “serious violations of human rights and of the freedom of opinion, of association and of peaceful assembly”.
Zimbabwe is not involved in any human rights violations, serious or otherwise, and the evidence is there for all to see.
Navi Pillay, the United Nations Commissioner for Human Rights, visited Zimbabwe in 2012 and found no evidence of gross human rights violations.
Her visit was not well publicised. It would have been different if she had come up with an adverse report. Freedom of opinion and freedom of expression, which can be defined as the freedom to hold and impart opinion, including through the media, is flourishing in Zimbabwe.
Since 2009, Zimbabwe has licensed a dozen of newspapers and two private radio stations while hundreds of community radio stations will operationalise this year.
Commercial television stations will be licensed, too, in an unprecedented media liberalisation drive. On the other hand, freedoms of assembly and association are extensively enjoyed in Zimbabwe where political activity is unrestrained.
This year the opposition is too preoccupied with fighting itself to stage-manage persecutions and call for the extension of sanctions, which it has done previously. The EU may also look to its more honest and pragmatic members like Belgium that have seen a lot of economic opportunities fluffed by this ungainly policy which has little more sense than trying to placate or accommodate Britain, the originator of sanctions against Zimbabwe.
European People’s Party vice president Dr Mario David of Portugal has pointed out that the EU said: “At the end of the day they (sanctions) are damaging.”
It remains to be seen on what basis the EU will prolong the said damaging sanctions: will it be out of pique (no pun intended) or the bigger picture?
The decision on Monday to remove eight top officials leaving President Mugabe suggests that either the body is beset by pique or resentment of President Mugabe or it is not sincere in its revision of sanctions.
The sanctions should go in toto and a situation in which the President remains sanctioned means that the country cannot fully function or engage.
Unless and until the EU lifts the sanctions as a whole, which makes perfect political and economic sense, its sincerity will be in serious doubt.
Or has a whole bloc reduced itself to the politics of personalities and egos and find itself bogged down by Britain’s whimsical demands?
The hope is it is not.

SEE ALSO: EU, who are you trying to fool?

Violence: Morgan Tsvangira's survival tactic

Bashed...Elton Mangoma

He looked every inch the picture of a man coming out of a drunken brawl. His shirt was torn, his face swollen, nose bloodied and the skin sagging under his eyes. He could be mistaken for the typical villager coming from a drinking binge. Only this was Elton Mangoma, the deputy treasurer-general of the MDC-T.
No, the torn clothes were not out of want or even some traditional penitential rite that requires one to humble themselves; nor was he coming out of a village drink where he had been involved in a brawl.
Mangoma was coming from Number 44 Nelson Mandela Avenue in Harare, known as Harvest House, the headquarters of MDC-T.
He was waylaid by 20 youths that beat him black and blue for being the face of internal opposition to Morgan Tsvangirai, who has fruitlessly led the party for the past 14 years within which he has lost three successive presidential elections.
In 2000, Tsvangirai was rejected by his own in Buhera where he lost a parliamentary election.
The natural calls for change of leadership, which Mangoma captured in a letter to Tsvangirai a couple of weeks ago, have brought the worst in the MDC-T and Tsvangirai.
Mangoma, who was the unluckier on Saturday as secretary-general Tendai Biti, youth leaders Solo Madzore and Promise Mkwananzi escaped barely scathed, could have met his Saturday much earlier.
It was long coming.
On January 27, MDC-T leader Morgan Tsvangirai “came to the rescue” of Mangoma as youths wanted to assault him over his letter.
It is reported that Tsvangirai briefly addressed the youths who were saying they wanted “to teach Mangoma a lesson” — which could be a lesson in anything but democracy.
The youths even mocked Mangoma for his physical handicap.
A newspaper column aptly pointed out that Tsvangirai’s “saves” had become one too many.
Over the weekend, at least five more people were assaulted for their perceived connections with Mangoma; four at Harvest House on Saturday and one in Glen Norah at a rally that Tsvangirai addressed on Sunday.
                                                                 SEE ALSO
Mangoma’s ordeal falls into a lengthening list of orchestrated violence against Tsvangirai’s opponents which has been directed at former secretary Welshman Ncube; legislators Priscilla Misihairabwi-Mushonga and Trudy Stevenson; and party officials Toendepi Shonhe, Fortune Gwaze and Peter Guhu.
Outside the party HQ, activists have been involved in acts of violence and thuggery and urban terrorism that saw the torching of buses and the petrol bombing of police stations.
Last year, a journalist, Herbert Moyo, was assaulted by MDC-T thugs at Harvest House.
What the latest turn of events is pointing to is essentially a party in crisis and the deployment of fear and violence as an instrument of control.
That instrument is firmly in the hands of Morgan Tsvangirai.
The control is both physical and psychological.
It is a throwback to the year 2005 and the month of October.
MDC was then a united party.
The issue of whether to participate in the senatE elections after the bicameral system had been reintroduced divided opinion, with the majority wanting the MDC to take part in the elections while Tsvangirai wanted to boycott.
Tsvangirai made the minority of the top leadership of the party.
After a narrow national council vote that favoured participation, Tsvangirai used a non-existent veto to shoot down the democratic feeling of his party.
The party split right through the middle.
The times were dangerous.
Fear and violence became instruments of control.
Those that believe politics should be cleaner, like Welshman Ncube, became targets of violence.
Ncube has remained disgusted by the use of violence in the MDC-T and its deployment by Tsvangirai and it is one of the reasons that he has refused to join hands with Tsvangirai even for their mutual benefit ahead of elections.
In the run up to last year’s elections when calls were made for a combined MDC front, Ncube told a newspaper that his differences with Tsvangirai stemmed from the latter’s disregard for certain values and principles.
“And those values and principles included that it is an affront on anyone to be subjected to violence in order to secure the support of that person,” said the former University of Zimbabwe lecturer.
“There is no greater affront on the dignity of a human being than to subject a person to violence whether it’s within the family to say you must comply as my wife with my dictates, if you don’t I beat you. In the political arena it’s the same thing.
“If you don’t agree with me I then subject you to violence. It is an affront. It is a basic violation of the dignity of every person. And we agreed that we will never do that as a political party”.
Tsvangirai thrives on intra-party violence, never mind that he tries to play dove outside.
Professor Ncube let us in on the intricate organic violence in the MDC.
He said Tsvangirai’s MDC had “a rhetorical commitment to anti-violence. (But) day in, day out, beginning with the time of the split, they employ violence.”
“In the MDC, by 2005 we were running a militia in the party to abuse, to abduct, to beat up people.
“There were senior party members who were being abducted and taken to the sixth floor boardroom of Harvest House and stripped naked in front of girls and beaten,” he was quoted in Daily News on April 25, 2013.
He related: “(Tichaona) Mudzingwa (late former deputy minister of Transport), for instance, was stripped naked at the party head office and made to stand on a table to address young people who included girls as young as 20 years, and was beaten.
“Frank Chamunorwa, who is our vice chairperson today, was beaten right at the gate of my house and had his arm broken.
“When the national council said we expel these people, the president of the party (Tsvangirai) said I reinstate them on my own, unilaterally. It simply says we do not have a commitment to the principle of non-violence.
“It’s a matter of public record that within the party, they use violence as an instrument of getting their way even among themselves,” Ncube told the paper.
The ghost of 2005 haunts the party.
The worst is coming and the coming days are likely to be messier.
Intra-MDC-T violence will be commonplace and it will be for the benefit of Tsvangirai who uses violence and mobs to stifle debate partly because he is not naturally endowed with a capacity for sustained, cogent and compelling reasoning.
Mob rule, mock leadership
There is scant doubt that Tsvangirai, buoyed by perceived popularity in the grassroots, believes he is the fittest leader and that emboldens him to use violence, after all the party bears his surname.
In his mind, all the party youths on the streets and townships belong to him, making it unsafe for anyone that is opposed to him.
This gives him a sense of security.
However inside, he is empty and that is why he has been trying to maintain his increasingly tenuous hold on the party by calling on grassroots leadership and even the rally on Sunday.
He seeks a rest for his ego.
However, all discerning watchers should be alive to certain fundamentals in Tsvangirai and the MDC.
First, his reliance on youth mobs and violence and coercion speak volumes about his leadership style which, in the unlikely event that he becomes leader of Zimbabwe, means that the country will be an unsafe dictatorship run by a militia of loyalists.
Tsvangirai will be the typical “African dictator”.
Second, Tsvangirai has shown us he is unable to take criticism and engage in dialogue without resorting to violence or coercion.
It does not matter, though it should have been surprising, that today Tsvangirai is surrounded by some rather smooth fellows like Nelson Chamisa, Obert Gutu and Douglas Mwonzora.
This is the politics of survival and even the now religious Chamisa stands to benefit from the blood-letting Tsvangirai to save his bacon.
He has been accused of failure to commissar his party to victory and there is growing currency for the likes of Solomon Madzore.
It is conceivable that the clique around Tsvangirai, including electoral losers like Gutu and Mwonzora, could be eyeing another October 12, 2005, after which they will become Tsvangirai’s right hand men.
It is all intriguing.
Yet the bottom line, and this by now may have become apparent to MDC-T supporters in and out of the country, is that Tsvangirai is a desperate man who is now relying on the instrument of coercion and a comforting mirage of grassroots popularity.