Mugabe and Tsvangirai Sign Deal

There is an air of sinister glee emanating from the Western press as it announces the ‘historic’ power-sharing agreement between Tsvangirai and Mugabe. It is as if the West after years of battering has managed to get a toe in the doorway and is determined to choreograph by stealth the dance that is to come. Ostensibly, the agreement is being hailed as a 'cautious breakthrough,' in the press. But "Can Mugabe be 'trusted'?" They ask.

 

By whom and for what? Tsvangirai is still the West’s point-man in Zimbabwe. We would be naïve if we refuse to accept that on several levels, the MDC is receiving instructions and aid from Washington and London to de-mythologize and discredit Mugabe’s type of independent politics in the eyes of Africans. Tsvangirai, alas, is the perfect straw man for the external forces as witnessed by his scripted responses to Mugabe, turns of phrases and clichés that are directly lifted from the mouths of Western critics and his penchant for running to the West and excoriating his country and government from a distance.

 

He has on more than one occasion called for foreign intervention to replace the government in his country. [His handlers seem to have reined him in somewhat.] Tsvangirai, despite the praise heaped on him by the Western press, is in a better position to torpedo the agreement than Mugabe, since he has never articulated any concrete plans to re-animate the economy or unite the country – his only constant has been an unreasoning zeal to dismantle Mugabe’s government and restore ‘the rule of law,’ which properly translated means the dismantling of the agrarian reform. Should he even suggest such a course of action publicly now, he would be signing his own political death warrant.

 

The other thing to watch for are the disgruntled ex-Rhodies, [who have never been able to accept that Africans have booted them out and reclaimed their land] attempting to sneak back under the shield of the MDC and intriguing to regain some kind of influence. We know the mind-set of these unregenerate racists, we have seen the negative pressure their type is exerting in South Africa through the press, disparaging everything Africans do or attempt to do, even to wishing and praying for South Africa to fail at hosting the World Cup. They desire and intrigue for failure in Africa and that is no exaggeration.

 

They have criticized Mbeki in the most disparaging and disrespectful terms and the amazing thing is that Africans have tolerated this vitriol for so long, tolerated snakes within their midst. The role of post-liberation whites in Southern Africa has unfailingly been that of spoilers, worms in the apple, forever crying for the ‘good old days’ of white rule, mounting insidious campaigns of disinformation in and out of Africa against the Continent and its people. These are the creatures lurking in Tsvangirai’s shadow, looking for a rat-hole back into Zimbabwe’s economic and political infrastructure.

 

Given Tsvangirai’s track record of running to the West anytime he disagreed with Mugabe and his repeated calls for sanctions against his own people, it should come as no surprise that in the background [or even the foreground] his Western advisers will be manipulating him to use promises of Western aid as blackmail. We have seen previously in Libya and North Korea and even Afghanistan that Western promises are not trustworthy.

 

Mugabe knows from bitter experience that Western promises of aid for the land reform offered at Lancaster House were nothing more than a convenient ploy to end the guerrilla war. The thing is, Mugabe has been so skillfully demonized by the West that any complaint or action he takes against Tsvangirai’s inevitable collusion with the West will be decried as proof of his intransigence.

 

The only true guarantee of Zimbabwe’s so-called power-sharing agreement is the solidarity of Africa’s leaders. We have seen that Africa’s closing ranks behind Sudan effectively stalemated attempts to arrest and try Omar el-Bashir on political charges created by the West. We have seen Latin America working increasingly together frustrating US interventionist tactics in the region. Africa needs to circle the wagons and appropriate the principles of cooperation and self-reliance so effectively applied during the Liberation War period.

 

Collectively, SADC must make it clear to the West and aid donors that any attempt to exert influence and insert their agenda in the affairs of the Zimbabwe government would be viewed as hostile and provocative acts, and would jeopardize the West’s relations with the region if not the entire Continent.

 

The power-sharing agreement, so-called, is the culmination of a relentless Western effort to undermine and discredit Mugabe and by association the Liberation Struggle which engulfed Southern Africa two decades past and invalidate its principles of sacrifice and regional solidarity which encouraged Africans to work together for a common goal against a common enemy and triumph. The myth that is being mooted in these times of chronic African crisis is that the Liberation Struggle is of the past, obsolete and unnecessary. All that is needed, affirm Western donors and powers, is for Africa to fall in line with the West’s economic and social policies, submit to ‘good governance’ and transparency, especially countries that do not toe the Western line.

 

A ruthless dictator runs Chad, leaders of questionable integrity and democratic credentials rule in Gabon, Ethiopia, the CAR, and a leader who actually lost an election in Kenya managed with Western help to co-op his way back into government and so on. The bottom line is that these examples are of leaders and governments in the pockets of Western political and economic forces, yet Zimbabwe is singled out for especially vicious retribution because it dared to reclaim land that was stolen from Africans by Europeans who abode by no ‘rule of law’ except their own pirate’s code.

 

Now that the Trojan Horse is within the gates, will the Zimbabweans allow their hard-won liberation to be compromised by collaborators and power-hungry politicians who are more of creations of Downing Street and Washington than they are of the bloody fields of combat and sacrifice which lifted the foreign yoke from the region’s neck? Who can forget the bloody battles of the Independence Period, the lives lost, economies shattered, terror sanctioned and covertly aided by the West? Who can forget NATO’s arming of the Portuguese as they burned and killed in East and West Africa? Africans, by their willingness to believe in the better nature of their enemies, have been fooled and exploited time and again.

 

Can we truly believe that the West has our best interests at heart when repeatedly their aid has been unhelpful, their political advice detrimental and divisive? Can we be so naïve as to believe that with their own economies in severe crisis, with banks and airlines failing, the West will front the necessary funds to assist the Zimbabwe economy, unless they have a majority share in how the country will be run and that every vestige of progressive, independent thought and action is uprooted? Surely we are not as stupid as they are trying to convince themselves that we are.  The economies of SADC are not so weak and inefficient that they cannot, with will and creative cooperation, genuine cooperation, help the Zimbabwe economy back on its feet.

 

We must not forget that Western sanctions and pressure by the West on investors have largely contributed to the economic crisis in Zimbabwe. If we do our homework and read behind the lines, ignoring BBC and CNN propaganda, we will find that the West has blocked loans and investors from Zimbabwe, hoping to provoke a crisis that would have brought anti-government mobs into the streets. It is a tried and true destabilization technique, in action right now in Bolivia. Unfortunately, that trick did not work so behind the scenes the Kenya Plan was dusted off and primed for Zimbabwe. The game plan is not to restore Zimbabwe to a functioning economy, but to punish Mugabe who dared stand on his feet and take back the people’s land that rightfully belongs to them.

 

Morgan Tsvangirai will now be ‘invited’ to Western capitals, feted and given Freedom medals and built up in the European and American press as this great ‘democrat’ while behind the curtains, the strings will be pulled. We are facing the second phase of the Liberation Period.