African delegates recently cautioned the UN Security Council members at a summit on Africa in France that they (Africans) needed to set their own agenda. "Africa's agenda will be increasingly defined by the AU," said AU Chairperson Oumar Konare.

We Africans are the authors and finishers of our destiny. African leaders, particularly those like president Robert Mugabe who preside over autocratic dictatorships, and exhibit a skewed understanding of participatory democracy, have single-handedly and articulately devised a self-destructive agenda that exposes Africans to global ridicule.

At the danger of being accused of having a low self-esteem, I will hazard to say that Mr Oumar Konare emerges out of that generation of African leaders who refuse to accept responsibility for their own actions. Africa is in a state of sordid economic and political regression because our leaders limit their agenda only to one item – own selfish political survival – and then subjugate and relegate the aspirations of their people to second best, unfortunately with the complicity of the largely patronised AU.

The history of Southern and Central Africa is littered with carcasses of monumental governance failures like Mobutu Seseseko, Julius Nyerere, Kenneth Kaunda, Robert Mugabe, Samora Machel and Hastings Kamuzu Banda. These African nationalists hijacked the cause of their people, the agenda of self-determination, and fraudulently converted it to their own personal aggrandisement. Yes, we African Zimbabweans had a simple agenda of emancipation. We were convinced that it was through armed struggle that we could obliterate the shackles of white slavery. Nobody wrote that script for us, because on our own energy, we created a vision of what it is to be a free nation. Robert Mugabe was part of that high command of dedicated African Zimbabweans who meticulously created the agenda for the future of my country, Zimbabwe. All the Conservative government of England did at the Lancaster House was to re-package this agenda into legally acceptable form, and of course, protect the interests of the minority race, a mere aesthetic gesture.

So twenty seven years down the line, one cannot argue that George Bush, Tony Blair, the EU bloc and the Australians have gradually imposed an agenda on Zimbabwe that has impacted negatively on our sovereignty. No! It was Julius Nyerere who impoverished Tanzanians with his utopic Ujamaa. It was the blood thirsty Mobutu who left the legacy of hatred and vengeance in the DRC. I cannot ignore the Jomo Kenyatta legacy of greed, corruption and tribalism in the continuum of Africa’s self-destructive agenda. Robert Mugabe inherited one of the most sophisticated industrial infrastructures on the continent, but because of his own personal agenda of political survival, his [mis] rule has rapidly eroded the will of the people. How then can he point to the Western countries and claim that they are trying to impose their agenda on him? This has become the clarion call of the pretenders to the throne, the masked hypocrites who masquerade as the people’s liberators seeking sympathy and pretending to suffer from being vilified for giving the land to their people.     

What Mr Oumar Konare is actually saying is that which Mugabe has always said: let me be the one to oppress my people without being admonished by the world. Our agenda, as African Zimbabweans has never changed since 1975 – freedom and liberty. Mugabe came onto the picture and added another dimension to it – control and more control.

The world cannot sit by and watch the Darfur crisis escalate into another Rwanda case study. Naturally, the United Nations cannot sit on the terraces and applaud while Mugabe does another Operation Murambatsvina on gullible Zimbabweans. We Africans have created a vacuum of good governance and effective democracy. Our agenda must always remain political and economic freedom. We should be driven by the desire to be part of the league of erstwhile nations that trade with each other and share notes on liberty. We cannot allow ourselves to be perched high on the pedestals of splendid isolation and pretend that the world can and must ignore our excesses. Of course Zimbabwe in on the world map, so the turbulences and the tremors that besets it should and must send shivers to its neighbours and the world. When the world raises a hand to make a point about electoral fraud, the violation of human rights and crippling poverty, then Mr Oumar Konare claims that our sovereignty has been desecrated with an alien agenda.

The world has a right to intervene, especially when African nationalists kidnap the values of freedom and make them their own. Weakening the military institutions of dictators can effect the guaranteeing of the safety of the vulnerable citizens. For instance, Bashir and Mugabe are using Chinese and Israeli military hardware to instil fear in weak and hungry citizens. It is within the right of the United Nations to employ the blockade strategy to starve such dictators in the short term. The world can also finance local, regional and international diplomacy and democracy campaigns against dictators - the 'diplocratic' onslaught and then 100% economic sanctions as applied to the Rhodesian post-UDI approach. If these dictators feel that their self-propelling agenda is being defeated by international intervention, we can live with that!