Republic of Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe at a press conference on July 30, 2013. Mugabe said he was certain of victory in the national elections., a photo by Pan-African News Wire File Photos on Flickr.
Mugabe hated for his vision, pro-African policies
September 26, 2013 Opinion & Analysis
Professor Mukutwa Aiwa Atiku
DayAfrica.com
NEVER mind the hullabaloo about President Mugabe being the “worst dictator” of our contemporary times. Never mind about Zimbabwe being the “rogue state” that is so undemocratic and lacks accountability and human rights. The truth of the matter is that Mugabe is actually a gentleman and hero who has successfully led a revolution that has made every sane African think about owning his or her natural resources.
President Mugabe is actually a qualified gentleman, an enigma, a revolutionary and a visionary.
And, and, Europe and the United States of America see him as a man having practical ideas about how to belittle and even destroy a foreign policy centred on exploitation of Africa’s resources, at the expense of Africans themselves. After the end of slave trade and colonialism, the fight to gain access to Africa’s resources has been a major cold war between mainly the USA and China. Mugabe is an enemy of the West and a friend of the Chinese, through his Look East Policy.
The Look East Policy has shaken the corridors of power in the US and Western Europe and the success story of Mugabe’s indigenisation policies has hit the western capital below the belt. They have failed to stop Mugabe and he has continued to score against them in more than one form. Mugabe is, therefore, a thorn in the flesh of the US and Western Europe. On a few occasions it has resulted in full-scale wars like in Libya and DRC, in others it has been through regime change, while in others it has been through military intervention disguised as rescue mission. Africa, which has become the focus of future world economic growth due to its vast natural resources, is under serious threat from militarisation by the US through its superior military outfit named Africom. The future development, independence and prosperity of Africa should be analysed from a very careful eye, an eye that is able to see American undercurrents, in each new political party that emerges in Africa with the word democracy as part of its nomenclature.
Africom is a counter-revolutionary military outfit, meant to create the right atmosphere for America to control and exploit Africa’s natural resources for the benefit of even unborn Americans, as enshrined in the White House Foreign Policy. America, which was not part of the colonialism matrix in old Africa, is compensating for their lost opportunity to plunder that time, by coming up with ultra-modern plunder mechanisms that are so clandestine and subtle that an ordinary African could never see. Actually the ordinary African will be fooled so much that he or she will turn against those trying to protect them against the vultures that the Americans are turning out to be and lead their countries to prosperity. Zimbabwean President Mugabe is a case in point.
All the good he has done for his people has been rubbished, first, by the British and of late the Americans, who have identified the veteran liberator as an epitome of resistance to the Americanisation of Africa, through his influence in Sadc. To the Americans, Sadc has become somewhat a mustard seed that will spread its influence in Africa and resist American moves to plunder natural resources and that plunder must be protected by Africom’s military might. President Mugabe and his colleagues in Sadc have vehemently said no to the hosting of Africom and that is precisely the reason why they hate him but they will not say it. Instead, they have called him a dictator and violator of human rights.
But to the critical eye, the allegations against President Mugabe are a smokescreen, behind which the Americans hide their hatred for him, for blocking their free-fall on Africa’s resources. They hate President Mugabe for trying to control and put out of reach,
Zimbabwe’s land, minerals and other companies through land reform and indigenisation. African leaders should never be hoodwinked by assertions of democracy, human rights, good governance and accountability: those are high-sounding theories meant to confuse the general populace and swear it against real African issues.
Those high-sounding ideologies do not exist even in Europe itself but always set the general populace in Africa against their political leadership and have become the catch phrases for regime change. Ask Zimbabweans, Somalis, Congolese, Sudanese and Zambians. South Africa will be able to tell the story sooner than later.
These terms have been exported to Africa through money-spinning NGOs and have been used to establish pro-Western political parties, which are actually an affront to African humanism and democracy.
Africa needs practical solutions to contain the surge by the hawks from America and Europe.
Africa needs to come up with a military unit that makes it unnecessary for outsiders to bring their armies in the guise of bringing peace to Africa. Once Africa has regional standby brigades and another brigade for the African Union, no outsider can justify bringing in troops, so there is urgent need to deal with this typical African problem of lack of military cohesion.
The danger is that when you bring in Americans as peacekeepers, you will not be able to tell them when to leave for as long as they do not feel that they have not plundered enough. Ask the Iraqis.
African leaders cannot be stooges and, intelligent as they are, can no longer be fooled or tricked into believing that foreign soldiers are good for controlling troubled spots. By creating regional and even continental military brigades, Africa will have liberated itself and not exposed itself to intervention by foreign troops and hence foreign invasion.
What defies logic is that if African leaders like President Mugabe, Sam Nujoma, Kenneth Kaunda and Samora Machel, among others, managed to put up armies that dismantled colonial settler regimes, what then makes then fail to come up with military brigades to defend the continent from second colonisation?
Professor Mukutwa Aiwa Atiku is a political science lecturer at Lagos University, Nigeria. This article is reproduced from DayAfrica.com
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