Jendayi Fraser

US envoy Jendayi Fraser’s announcement on 24th April 2008 that ‘Morgan Tsvangirai is the clear  winner’ in Zimbabwe’s recent elections is the most egregious display of unwarranted intervention in the internal affairs of a sovereign African country. This sets the template for future Western intervention to twist Zimbabwe in the mould of US and Western strategic policy planners. That these interventionist statements should issue from the mouth of an African-American woman is all the more instructive.

The US, conscious of its lack of racial credibility in the non-white developing world, has always sought to use black Americans as mouthpieces for positions and statements that coming from white Americans, would carry the baggage of America’s ongoing chronic race struggle. The US likes to project to the world that it is a democracy where ‘opportunity exists for all’ and any boy ‘can grow up to be President of the United   States.’ Even were Jendayi Fraser not African-American, the statement coming from her about the results of Zimbabwe’s elections reveals the utter disregard in which Africa and its institutions are held by the West.

Could any African dare to criticize the results of elections in England, Australia, Canada, the US or Germany, implying that one or the other candidate has cheated on the elections? The consequences of such presumption would be immediate and catastrophic. Yet Africa succumbs daily to these contemptuous attacks against its sovereignty and political choices. Where and how has the AU defended the integrity of the Continent? Which leaders have stated unequivocally that Africa’s problems can and will be solved by Africans and outsiders should mind their business?

Mugabe has unswervingly stood his ground against Western attempts to demonize him and force him to back off his principles.  Scraping off the muck that has been heaped on the Zimbabwe ‘situation,’ what lies at the root of the rabid Western hatred of Mugabe is the fact that he dared to take back for his people what had been brutally stolen from them 100 years earlier. This in Western eyes is unforgivable. He had to be punished.

Zimbabwe’s economic problems have less to do with economic mismanagement and farm seizures but more to do with the deliberate attempt by the West to grind Zimbabwe to dust and ensure that it does not set a bad example for Africans seeking true independence. Cuba suffers under a 50-year US embargo because she dared proclaim true independence. Sanctions have ostensibly been targeted against Mugabe and his leadership but they have fallen heavily on the masses in the hope that they would blame their leadership and thus overturn them.

We have seen how the West, to influence events in Palestine, refuses to recognize Hamas’s legitimate election victory and punishes the population in the hope of provoking uprisings against its leadership. How can we even be certain that Western intelligence, frustrated with Tsvangirai’s political incompetence, have not themselves manipulated the election and recounts are indeed necessary? All we have are media offensives by the West and unproven allegations of violence and intimidation. We have seen in the run-up to the war on Iraq how easily the Western media can twist the truth to suit any agenda. There are far greater crises in Africa than Zimbabwe. Somalia, for instance, is bleeding copiously from a brutal war that has been deliberately precipitated by the United States. The Islamic Courts had brought a great measure of stability to Somalia, but the paranoid US, with a ‘terrorism’ bee behind it seems to prefer chaos to order wherever it puts its hands. Ethiopia, a US client state with less ‘democratic’ bona fides than Zimbabwe, was used to hurl Somalia into the abyss once more.

Left to themselves, the Zimbabwe people will find ways unique to their culture to solve their problems. That is why the mouthpiece of the Bush administration, Jendayi Fraser has crossed the line with her open intervention in Zimbabwe’s affairs which implies that the US is more interested in promoting chaos than in encouraging solutions. But this also seems to be an incurable habit of the West: the inability to stop condescending and directing and ordering the developing world about, especially Africa, even when it is against the West’s own interests. Is it any wonder that the Chinese have outflanked them strategically in Africa?