30 Jun 2008 |
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The Real Trouble with Zimbabwe By Emmanuel Franklyne Ogbunwezeh Fiat Justitia! Ruat caelum. This adage of ancient provenance is a heart-rending plea for justice to pour like the rain! It supplicated justice to deluge our world like the Noachian deluge of old did in the fertile minds of the ancient Jewish Yawhist-tradition writers; even if the pillars of heaven are to collapse in the process. And time has proven over and over again, that Truth is the grand essential for justice. Without truth, justice is eviscerated of meaning and significance. This piece is the contribution of our feeble voice to course of truth and justice. This is an inscription in time, recording for all eternity that we did not keep mum when the armada of international hypocrisy seduced global timidity to hawk cant and lies in place of truth. What is the truth many would ask? Jesus the Christ, who laid claims to the godhead, proffered the immensity of his silence as the only veritable answer, when hypocrisy and political correctness personified in Pontius Pilate, threw that question at him in mockery of decency. We would have chosen to go the Christic way, proffering our silence to the immensity of political iniquity being committed in and with Zimbabwe, at the full glare of an emasculated global audience. We don’t blame the audience, we blame the malevolence of the imperial establishment resident in the capitals of the Industrial West, who shamelessly manufacture illusions, cook up lies and dissimulations to discredit whoever in obedience to his beliefs, try to better the lot of his people, against western exploitative manipulations. Why are the Western establishment, and the Western media so interested in Zimbabwe? History has proven that these guys are never good Samaritans on a voyage of charity to help Africa get out of the predicament, which her contact with the West for the past 800 years imposed on her. So, do they love Zimbabwe so much that they are ready to do anything to save that country from political tyranny? History recorded with accuracy that these guys supported a White-tyranny that lasted for donkey years, until the guerrillas led by people like Nkomo, Mugabe and others made further occupation economically inefficient. History equally showed imperialism as a metaphysic of diametrical exploitation, which rolled over peoples, sacked cultures and plundered civilizations to compel rivers of wealth to flow in the metropole. British wealth was constructed upon the dead bodies and defunct souls of many cultures in Africa and Asia. Britain like every other imperial power turns virtue on its head canonizing her pirates and plunders. Spain, though a retired imperialist rented Pizzaro and her bunch of buccaneers to vaporize cultures and great civilizations like that of the Incas in Mesoamerica. Is the West not a cradle of democracy, and are they not democrats who want to help Zimbabwe on the path to democracy, which has allegedly been destroyed by Mugabe? Democracy was never a Western invention. My ancestors in the Igbo heartland lived and breathed a democratic and egalitarian society, which was superlatively functional and attendant to the needs of the society, when ancient Greece was slumbering in primitivity torn by tribal wars between Athenians and Spartans. Igboukwu bronze discoveries dating back to much earlier as 450 BC are footnotes to this. Democracy like all other allegations imposed on Greece as its origin is an impious accusation and a capital lie peddled by a racist tradition bent on painting everything bad as black and everything good as white. Greek democracy was a pale imitation of the organized societies transported to Egypt from the heartland of Africa through Nubian trading roots, which the Greeks copied like they copied African philosophy, which they encountered in Egypt. They west never invented democracy and they are never democrats. They are hypocrites. The West is not a cradle of democracy. Democracy is a pan-humanic achievement with seeds and fruits in and across the spectrum of so many human societies. It is the logical conclusion of the human desire to preserve himself in being; in a functional society free from let and fear. I wonder how these guys can presume to give what they do not possess in its ontology. In America today, fundamental freedoms are circumscribed to a degree that makes mockery of democracy. A citizen could be arrested and kept in a cage at the will of the state in invocation of anti-terror laws, which is a gimmick designed to fashion and consolidate a culture of fear in the citizenry, while the elite go about their normal business of exploiting the rest of us for the benefit of a few. The man that signed some of these obnoxious laws into effect has his father trading and doing business with the Saudis as a prominent member of the Carlyle group; an elitist corporation of war-mongers, who peddle weapons and foment wars in other to sell them. And this state- Saudi Arabia -is supposed to be the birthplace of many enemy combatants who plunged planes and peoples life into the WTC to mock Western hypocrisies. Why would Zimbabwe attract such an accusation that it is not democratic; and the West is doing everything including financing insurrections in an independent country, to achieve that inglorious aim? By the last check, Saudi Arabia is not a democracy, and does not pretend to be. And the Western media are not falling over each other to paint the house of Saud as the great Satan. In spite of the fact that 19 Saudi citizens took part in hijacking planes and ramming them into the world trade centre like a huge phallus fucking America up, this country was never classified in the axis of evil, which is this establishment’s favourite designation for many people who aspire to freedom they way the understand it, which violates the conceptual schemes of the metropole. In spite of all that is peddled by the West establishment and media. The problem in Zimbabwe is not Robert Mugabe. The problem in Zimbabwe is Western hypocrisy. The problem is racism that is eugenic as well as economic. Racism has not ended in spite of the lip service paid to it in the Western Media. You can ask FOX about their views on Barack Obama. Geraldine Ferraro is my witness here. Britain and her allies are funding insurrections by financing MDC and other lackeys to be a confrontational opposition to Mugabe. This is not the first time that the Western establishment are financing coups and putsches around the world. The Iran-contra scandal in which the Reagan administration used Oliver North as a fall guy, the murder of Allende in El Salvador, the brutal, cold blooded murder of Patrice Lumumba in Congo; the setting of Sadaam Hussein with non-existing weapons of mass destruction, are all perfect examples of this. If you doubt me, ask the CIA and other Western intelligence agencies. If this attitude of violating a country’s sovereignty is acceptable to the western establishment, why did they promulgate laws trailing and freezing finances suspected of having links with terrorist? But they are financing terrorism and disobedience against constituted authority in Zimbabwe. Since what is good for the goose is equally good for the gander; are we then right to ask Osama bin laden to start funding the Liberals in America or the GOP to topple the government of George Bush, and install his lackey in power? Should we ask him to resurrect Al Zarqawi for him to arrange funding the labour party in Britain and installing a lackey with terrorist sympathies in power? Should we ask Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof to resurrect themselves and reinvent their indiscretions in the Green party in Germany? In justice, same situations should be treated exactly the same way. If the Western establishment deems it fit to terrorise populations, whose governments want to revise an injustice perpetrated on them, what then should be the lot of these establishments and their populations as well? I would not recommend terrorism. No man deserves death at the hands of another under whatever pretext. I would recommend education. Western citizens are like human beings everywhere. They share the pain and agonies of every other human population ruled by elitist leeches, with aristocratic pretences. They should be shown the hypocrisies of their government, which the governments sugar-coats with democratic rhetoric. They should be given an alternative source of information different from those peddled by pseudo-independent establishment media like CNN and BBC, who were ontologically designed to propound and promote American and British propaganda respectively. That is why this piece is written for the E-media; for the internet, which is a technological proof that tyranny will never overshadow human freedom to access and transmit information. That there is hyper galloping inflation in Zimbabwe today is thanks to the sanctions imposed on Zimbabwe because Mugabe took action to revoke centuries of injustice perpetrated on his people by Western imperialism. Children are dying at their mothers breasts in Zimbabwe because milk does not flow anymore from the breasts of their half-starved mothers. The Western establishment sees these and similar human tragedies unfold daily, but skip over it. They do so because the atrocity in Zimbabwe is their trick designed to deal with Zimbabweans for abiding Mugabe a second more, after he fell out of favour with his western masters. They engineered it as a gimmick to bring Mugabe’s government on its knees and force his people to kick him out. But they underestimated the resiliency of a determined man who feels aggrieved at the monumental injustice that British colonialism wrecked on Zimbabwe and wanted to keep profiting from, ad infinitum. No matter what happens in Zimbabwe, it will never revise the fundamental injustice, which British conspiracy admixed with international hypocrisy has inflicted on the people of Zimbabwe. Mugabe may be a tyrant and one of the African dinosaurs who couldn’t make his country fly against the insurmountable odds placed in his path by the colonial legacy, but that does not justify what the west is doing to Zimbabwe. On the scores of justice, this is screaming injustice, and a placard of western political callousness and conceit. Rome peddled such inanities in her heydays as the world capital. But today, ancient Rome exists only in history books, which buried her inglorious imperators like Caligula and Nero as the greatest summaries of wickedness. All the world kings of today, who feel that Africa is the playground of their greed, it would come home to their historical memories that the continent will outlive their inglorious memories. The problems in Zimbabwe and in the Nigerian Niger Delta are footnotes of British imperialism, which has a metaphysic of exploitation. Some Western commentators, opinion mongers, and some prominent Africans have been rented and placed on imperialistic payrolls to launder the neo-imperialistic image and revise colonial history in the light of today. Many of them have been essaying to exonerate Western neo-imperialistic devices from taking their rightful blame for the African predicament. But failure has greeted their enterprise. Their job metaphysic was rooted in falsehood. And since lies can never fly, they would never succeed. These hired guns peddle a version of history which is allergic to the facts. They go about their revisionist charges with the slogans “we cannot blame the west for Africa’s problems four decades after the ‘official’ end of colonialism’. Or other parts of the world like India and Singapore were equally colonies, but have succeeded in gaining admittance into the halls of the development”. But the major loophole in their enterprise is their convenient forgetfulness of the strategic designs of the version of colonialism inflicted upon Africa and other peoples of colour. These mercenary minstrels embezzle the fact that nowhere in history was the worst mixtures of eugenic and economic exploitation arrantly experimented upon like it was done in Africa. The last vestiges of it last till the late 80s in apartheid South Africa. They sidestepped the fact that the version of colonialism practiced in Africa eviscerated African psyche and culture; kidnapped our gods to grace their museums as artefacts to reward their plundering enterprise and mock our technological inferiority; plucked our meanings and significances out of the sky, desecrated our social relationships and epistemic authorities; and bequeathed an eternal epistemic fluidity, which conferred African cultures with a cultural identity crises that has spelt the end of their relevance to Africans. To that end, Africans cannot define themselves with any aucthotonous guideposts. Africans are not traditional or modern. Colonialism reduced Africans to a conglomeration of complexes; a mixture of a conceptual flux, which has continued to teleguide Africa’s developmental trajectory and destiny till date. That was not all; colonial masters on departing the continent groomed a crop of ideologically deficient houseboys, who like Pavlovian dogs were congenitally engineered to listen to the directives of the master in a neo-colonial arrangement that replaced white colonialists with their black collaborators. And anyone who rises against the grotesque incompetence and rapacious recklessness of these collaborating Sonderkommandos incurs the instant wrath of the colonial masters. This was why Lumumba incurred western wrath for daring to question the status quo in the Congo. Mandela brought the wrath of the global apartheid establishment on his head for refusing to die quietly in an evil system directed against his people. Salvadore Allende has to die because he dared to refuse taking directives from the Western establishment. Aguiyi Ironsi had to die in Nigeria because the British intelligence feared that power had slipped out of the grip of their anointed servants. And the list goes on. Mugabe is not a saint. He is a political dinosaur who has overstayed his welcome. His peers are all politically extinct. He has refused to go; refusing to take a bow when the ovation was at its highest pitch. To that end, he transformed himself from a freedom fighter into a thug. But any roll call of lying, jingoistic tyrants will rank George Bush and Tony Blair first, before Mugabe. Mugabe is today being painted as the very next thing to Lucifer. But those who are hurting and blockading Zimbabwe with violent sanctions, while singing alleluia verses in their churches on Sundays and giving us hoax homiletics on democracy and good government, are seen as great arsenals of democracy! What impudence! What sanctimonious hypocrisy. Mugabe used to be a showcase of a guerrilla turned democrat. He was marketed as such in the Western conceptual scheme. It lasted as long as he did not rock the racial applecart, which was a real albatross to social justice in Zimbabwe; namely the whites-2 percent of the population owning over 85 percent of all arable lands in Zimbabwe; while the blacks over 90 percent of the population making do with only 15 percent. Once Mugabe took unilateral action to redress that injustice after the British government reneged on their 1980 Lancaster agreement, he fell out of favour with the establishment ogre of Great Britain. The problem with Zimbabwe was manufactured in Whitehall. And Britain is manipulating all her allies to join her in isolating Zimbabwe and bringing Mugabe to his knees. The allies did not disappoint. They responded with the promptitude of a herd of unthinking sheep. British allies all banded together and swooped in for the kill with their sanctions. But many Africans are not sold on this round of western hypocrisy. We have been veteran witnesses to such dummies. The other day, Mandela celebrated his 90 year on, 27 of which was spent in incarceration for daring an evil establishment, which was supported by those who wants Mugabe’s head today. Many Western heads of state and governments were falling over themselves to identify with the occasion and legacies of this colossus. These were heirs to the inglorious bastards whose idiocies, active collaboration and hypocritical silence sent Mandela to prison in the first instance. For 27 years, Mandela rotted in a prison fashioned by a white supremacist enclave, which has America, Britain and most other Western nations as trading and diplomatic partners. They did nothing to release an innocent man from suffering for his beliefs and the rights of his people to live in their land with dignity. They allowed him to suffer and rot there. The Western establishment labelled him a terrorist. It was not until this year 2008 that the United States of America removed Mandela’s name from the lists of terrorists forbidden to enter the US; eighteen years after this great son of Africa stepped out of prison to lead his country with courage, dignity and fairness. These hypocrites never leaned on apartheid South Africa to democratize because they fear that in a democracy, which is a game of numbers, the Black Africans will triumph and trump every other race in any election. At this point in history, democracy took the backdoor of Reagan’s and Thatcher’s administrations’ policies. Today, the same Whitehall and Washington which abided these monumental hypocrisies have now donned new apparels to advertise themselves as purveyors of democracy; simply because Mugabe took away Black lands from white occupiers and gave it back to the original owners, after the UK reneged on its commitments to the 1980 Lancaster agreement. Some would try to exonerate the heirs to loot from the crimes of their buccaneering fathers. I would love to too. But the issues are that whoever profits by crime is guilty of it. If one inherits the proceeds of his father’s crimes, he should equally inherit the blames accruing thereto. If one fails to restore the legacies of crime bequeathed to him, he should then be ready to battle with the discontent of those wrongfully deprived of their estate. The Germans of my generation are still labouring under the weight of the Nazi legacy. This is to the extent that any German, who criticises Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands, runs the risk of being labelled an anti-Semite. Any German who attempts to coax a positive lesson out of the Nazis’ megalomanic enterprise, runs the risk of not only being kicked out his job, but also making himself a loathsome social figure. Go ask Eva Hermann, who was sacked for trying to praise the Nazi family policies. But the British have paid no reparation to anyone for the rapacious plunder of their countries in the name of colonialism. They have not even apologised for that historical crime and indiscretion. That means they have not seen the wrong in the action of their ancestors as to repudiate it. This is to say that given the opportunity that they would repeat it. And repeat it, they are doing! This is why even after granting independence to many African countries, they never actually left these countries to find their path through the maze of complexities which they inherited from an exploitative colonial master. Britain engineered power in Nigeria into the laps of the conservative elements who never desired independence for the country in the first place. And this power bloc has been the albatross of Nigeria’s development till date. Britain left Nigeria in 1960, but Shell BP, a British multi-national is still the greatest player in the Nigeria oil and gas industry; as well as a British shadow government in Nigeria. Shell has been indicted of fomenting conflicts in the Niger Delta. This is a footnote of what obtains all over Africa. Through channels such as these, the imperial metropole seeks to continue teleguiding Africa’s destiny, like is the case in Zimbabwe today with the MDC. They use these channels to incite and finance the overthrow of government’s unsympathetic to British and other imperial interests. Africans should ensure that instead of Zimbabwean’s voting out Mugabe, the English should pass a vote of no-confidence on their government. Instead of starving Zimbabweans into submission, Americans should be thankful that George Bush would not be on the ballot come December. But one doubts if the policies will change with the change of governments. These prejudices run too deep to be washed away by the change of governments. Africans must continue on the path of self-determination. They must rise up and reject western perfidious arm-twisting. Africa has suffered enough. The roll of our devastation saw stops at the slave trade, the colonization processes, and the neo-colonial recalcitrance in Africa. Ours is a call to all men of goodwill. All we need is a change of attitudes. Africa needs a media outlet, which will compete and neutralise the lies peddled about Africa in western conceptual schemes by Western media conglomerates like CNN and BBC. The Arabs have done that with Al Jazeera. We should educate ourselves to the dangers of swallowing the manufactured consents and opinions peddled as facts in and through these mediums. The Western establishment should leave Zimbabwe alone. Like Bob Marley, the august reggae philosopher said: Only Africans can liberate Zimbabwe! This inheres in the origin of the problem, which is Western hypocrisy in its consolidated and convoluted dimensions. If the West wants to impose democracy on the rest of the world, they should know that they lack the credibility necessary for such undertakings. They have very terrible historical precedents to withdraw from. Democracy has not come to Iraq after all the empty promises and lies of President Bush and his “coalition of the willing” stooges. The West has not equally deemed fit to impose democracy on Saudi Arabia or China. The establishment myth, popularized by Amartya Sen for which he got a Nobel prize-an establishment reward for its faithful servants- that development can only happen in a democracy has be exploded by the rampaging advance of China. The Chinese, subsisting under a very heavy communist autocracy have been able to achieve what western conceptual schemes claim as their exclusivity. So a country can equally development its own standards of governance which must not take its moments about western views of democracy, and still arrive at the harbours of development and social felicity for its citizens. Britain should leave Mugabe alone and stop financing terrorism in Zimbabwe. If an English politician is to take money from Osama bin laden to run for office, believe me, he would be hauled to Old Bailey, where he would be answering to treason charges. If that is to be in George Bush’s America, Guantanamo without trial would be his abode. Enough of this hypocrisy! It is sickening! Zimbabwe today is a testament that BBC, CNN and other media outlets that depend on them for information can never be trusted. They are simply mouthpieces of the western establishment bent on world domination at the expense of the poor.
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