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Writers Articles And Opinions |
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8 February 2010 By Reason Wafawarova
MDC-T mouthpieces, together with mainstream Western
media, as well as the party’s information department
have over the years been in a splendid overdrive
manufacturing credibility for Morgan Tsvangirai, but
true to the dictates of the saying, easy come easy go;
Tsvangirai has this terrible reputation for
squandering this manufactured credibility — and that
must be a cause for concern for those whose job it is
to build the status of the Western controlled
politician.
Zimbabwe has become a battle of ideas and it does
not appear like Tsvangirai is too much of a man of
ideas and clearly he is playing like a reckless boozer
in a team of professionals.
The Prime Minister’s call for the phasing of
sanctions removal is not only uncalled for,
unpatriotic and ill informed, but is also a deadly
disaster by way of political strategy.
In that call Tsvangirai managed to emphatically
confirm that British foreign and Commonwealth
secretary David Miliband was precisely correct in
asserting that the British government is "above all"
guided by the MDC-T on matters relating to sanctions
on Zimbabwe.
He also unwittingly proved to everyone that him in
particular, and his party in general have it within
their power to reverse their call for sanctions on
Zimbabwe, and that reversal will be respected the same
way their mass-killing call was respected in 2001.
As Professor Jonathan Moyo has already predicted
through this paper, the EU, the US and other Western
minor players like Australia, Canada and New Zealand
are going to adopt this phasing "proposal" from
Tsvangirai, not because it is a call from a man whose
opinion they respect, but because it is their own call
which Tsvangirai was parroting.
It stands to reason that the goal in battles of
ideas is to win the hearts and minds of people.
Tsvangirai seems so focussed on winning the hearts and
minds of Western donors and his Western controllers
ahead of those of Zimbabweans.
This week, this writer will revisit our 2008
political history and will centre his argument on
views already expressed by Netfa Freeman, the Director
of IPS’ Social Action and Leadership School for
Activists and an activist in the internationalist and
Pan Africanist movements, and those views will be put
in context to what is happening in the inclusive
Government of Zimbabwe right now.
Freeman wrote an article titled "Zimbabwe and The
Battle of Ideas" just after the signing of the
inter-party political agreement on September 15 2008;
an agreement that was to herald the inclusive
Government.
He pointed out that the West dominates the most
sophisticated and pervasive methods of information
today, and there is this dire need to carefully
scrutinise ideas pushed and popularised by these
sources.
One of the issues that has been so unjustly
popularised by this system is the issue of the
so-called "outstanding issues" in this agreement,
whose equally unjustly popularised name has of late
become "the Global Political Agreement".
Among the critical points of this power sharing
agreement are the following:
. Reaffirm the principle of the United Nations
Charter on non-interference in the internal affairs of
member (states/nations). Agree that no outsiders have
a right to call or campaign for regime change in
Zimbabwe.
. Call upon the governments that are hosting and/or
funding external radio stations broadcasting into
Zimbabwe to cease such hosting and funding; (this is
illegal under international law but something the US
sponsors and has sponsored in several other places
like Central America and Eastern Europe).
. Accept the irreversibility of land acquisitions
and redistribution.
. Agree to call upon the United Kingdom government
to accept the primary responsibility to pay
compensation for land acquired from former landowners
for resettlement.
. Recognise the consequent contribution of Western
financial and economic isolation (sanctions) to the
further decline of the economy; and;
. Agree that all forms of measures and sanctions
against Zimbabwe be lifted.
These are the core issues of the agreement and
unsurprisingly they are dead silent in Western media
circles. Those who do not bother to read the agreement
for themselves and only understand it through the web
of corrupt ideas spun around it by Western sources are
sure to misunderstand Zimbabwe. This is the argument
pushed forward by Freeman.
So we have what Malcolm X would call a "bamboozled"
audience at the mercy of a propaganda machinery that
preaches scepticism and reluctance to deal with
Zimbabwe "as long as Mugabe is in power" and this is
attributed to an alleged inability to trust a
"repressive Zanu-PF", a party portrayed as hanging on
to power for power’s sake.
The backdrop to this attitude is the well
documented Western meddling and interference during
the negotiations that led to the coalition agreement.
US and British diplomats confirmed this meddling to
Business Daily when they said they had "advised"
Tsvangirai not to sign the agreement and to "negotiate
for more power".
The whole argument is premised on this popularised
misimpression that says an "authoritarian" Mugabe
assumed the Zimbabwe Presidency in an uncontested 2008
election. This is the dominating version of events in
Western circles and it is the officially documented
thinking from conservatives to liberals in the West.
"Uncontested" implies an undemocratic process where
the electorate had only one choice, Robert Gabriel
Mugabe. Then we are bombarded heavily with this idea
that state-sponsored violence of the Kenya December
2007 levels preceded the run-off date so as to
intimidate voters that even the secrecy of the ballot
was not enough for the 2 303 269 people that voted in
the run off to express their will. That must make
sense, we are told.
These are the stories parroted even by so-called
leftist analysts and activists supposedly respected
for their "progressive and democratic" ideals. The aim
of such activism and analysis is clearly to popularise
the acceptance of the regime change writings aimed at
Zimbabwe.
This position is the one reinforced by all
imperialist governments, the corporate and liberal
media and most of the more than 2 500 Western
sponsored NGOs resident in Zimbabwe. Netfa Freeman
deconstructed these misleading narratives making
incisive analysis of two essays deemed to be
progressive by those that admire the effectiveness of
imperialism.
He looked at "African Dictatorships and Double
Standards" by Stephen Zunes and "Ballots vs Bullets in
Kenya and Zimbabwe by Briggs Bomba.
Bomba failed to clarify that Zimbabwe has no ethnic
tensions playing a part in the political polarity
between the MDC formations and Zanu-PF, as was the
case with the manipulated tensions between the Kikuyu
and Luo of Kenya.
He failed to recognise that the polarisation in
Zimbabwe is of an ideological nature, two opposing
political tendencies.
Bomba misled his readers, as do many writers in
Western media and elsewhere today; that there was "a
victorious opposition" in the March 2008 election.
This is despite that Zanu-PF commanded the popular
vote for the Lower and Upper House, falling one seat
behind the MDC-T in the Lower House and leading by a
clear six seats in the Upper House.
This is also despite that the constitution of
Zimbabwe requires a presidential candidate to gain
more than 50 percent of the vote to be victorious and
neither Cde Mugabe nor Mr Tsvangirai did so. Despite
the widely portrayed view that President Mugabe is
immensely unpopular, he did receive 43 percent of the
March 29 vote, only 4 percent less than Tsvangirai.
The candidate who received the most votes in the
constitutionally required run-off was Robert Mugabe; 2
150 269 votes to Tsvangirai’s 233 000.
Bomba maintained that false premise that says the
run-off election was uncontested, but Freeman rightly
argued that "Tsvangirai never followed established
procedures for rescinding his candidacy" — a
requirement of a 21 day notice before Election Day.
Tsvangirai’s grandstanding media announcement was only
done five days before the election date.
Freeman looked at factors that could have
contributed to President Mugabe receiving 1 106 818
more votes in June than he did in March and Tsvangirai
to receive 936 860 less.
Firstly he looked at the post March premature and
immature MDC-T announcements of election results ahead
of the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission — all
announcements being false declarations of various
victory margins, even contrary to the MDC-T’s own
figures. Results like 58 percent, 53 percent and 50,3
percent were all publicised variously by the MDC-T as
the official results and in any country, a political
party that does that is bound to lose most if not all
of its credibility.
Freeman also cited the behaviour of the MDC-T when
there was a five-week delay in announcing the March
election result.
MDC-T knew that this was the first harmonised
election for Zimbabwe and such a delay was not out of
question by way of possibility.
They chose to join Gordon Brown and Condoleezza
Rice in portraying ZEC as an extension of Zanu-PF,
regardless of the fact that some of ZEC’s polling
officers were caught manipulating results in favour of
the MDC-T.
Then there was complicit Western media chipping in
with a fabricated headline story carried by the New
York Times, backed by a photo of an 11 month old baby,
whose misfortune of disabled little legs was
attributed to "Zanu-PF brutes looking to terrorise the
opposition".
MDC-T strongly backed this false story and when it
became clear to all Zimbabweans that the whole story
was a deliberate fabrication more credibility was
squandered on the part of Tsvangirai and his party.
Then there was the discredited attempt by the MDC-T
to dress up their own youths in Zanu-PF regalia and
then attack their own supporters so as to discredit
Zanu-PF. Trudy Stevenson will be a star witness to the
charge that the MDC-T has no serious problems
attacking its own people.
Zanu-PF geared up its campaign in realisation of
this combined onslaught by the MDC-T and its mighty
Western backers. This campaign was greatly aided by
Tsvangirai’s behaviour.
He called for more foreign intervention, went on a
gallivanting misadventure of Western capitals during
the time he should have been campaigning inside the
country and none of his stops was in any part of
Africa.
Freeman asks, "If you were Zimbabwean would you
vote for him?"
Members of his own party were calling him back in
anger and it had to take US Ambassador to Zimbabwe,
James McGee to instruct Tsvangirai to return to his
own country, reportedly because he was "squandering
his credibility".
Once in Zimbabwe, Tsvangirai embarked on an
extremely badly advised sympathy-gaining gimmick to
discredit the runoff.
With the majority of his supporters so angry at his
unwarranted and unexplained prolonged absence from
duty, and with almost no one really caring, Tsvangirai
vaingloriously decided to pretend that his life was in
danger and took "refuge" in the Dutch embassy in
Zimbabwe, of all places.
Every Zimbabwean saw and heard of Tsvangirai
fleeing into this least expected place for dear life,
but none of them believed for once that there was
someone following. The claim was just so ludicrous
that the loudest noise for Morgan to come out of the
Dutch embassy and join the race came from the MDC-T
supporters themselves.
Tsvangirai came out of the embassy and was
correctly briefed that the politics on the ground had
drastically changed and his usual instructors ordered
him to stage a pull out in order to avoid the pending
humiliation. He obliged and the rest is history.
Briggs Bomba decided to insist that with
Tsvangirai’s credibility eroded this much, he was or
could be "victorious" all the same. That is what
happens when you write to manufacture credibility for
personalities.
But factual reality is that at the time of the June
2008 election runoff, Tsvangirai had
characteristically squandered whatever manufactured
credibility had carried him to a 47 percent vote lead
in the first round of elections.
This writer will pursue the issue of the battle of
ideas next week, looking further at Netfa Freeman,
Briggs Bomba, Stephen Gowans and Stephen Zunes.
The reality on the ground is that Tsvangirai has no
capacity to retain the manufactured credibility ever
poured on him by Western powers and each day passes
with the man destroying whatever artificial image is
created in his favour.
The matter of the sanctions regime is going to do
more damage to Tsvangirai’s cause than did his
forgettable drama at the Dutch embassy.
The MDC-T leader would do himself and his party a
great favour if he came out clear on sanctions.
The only thing Zimbabweans want to hear about that
matter is an unconditional and emphatic call for the
lifting of the illegal economic sanctions — nothing
more and nothing less.
Any appeasing gimmicks targeted at Western masters
and donors will cost Tsvangirai and his party so
dearly that that they may never really recover.
Nelson Chamisa must also take this advice seriously
and must be reminded that looking away when Miliband
is exposing the game plan will not take away the
problem.
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