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of the African Union (AU) Assembly, held in Addis Ababa on January 30, 2007; George Soros’ Open Society Institute prepared for the African Union something the organisation called The African Charter on Democracy, Elections and Governance (ACDEG).
The document submitted to the AU was a modified version of a peer document submitted to the Organisation of American States (OAS), the Inter-American Democratic Charter (IADC) at Lima, Peru on September 11, 2001 — again by OSI. In a report prepared by Edward R McMahon in May 2007, the AU 8th Ordinary Session adopted the OSI document and the hope then was that the document would be ratified by at least 15 African countries before it became law.
It has taken five years of campaigning and arm-twisting of governments to get the first 15 countries to ratify George Soros’ Charter (ACDEG). First to ratify the imposed Charter was Mauritania, the poorest country on the African continent, and that happened on 28 July, 2008, a year after the document had been adopted by the AU, and of course the ratification was more out of enticement and less to do with values.
To follow suit was Melesi Zenawi’s Ethiopia in January 2009, followed by Ernest Bai Koroma’s Sierra Leone in December the same year, with Burkina Faso, Lesotho, Rwanda and Ghana joining in 2010.
Jacob Zuma’s South Africa followed suit in 2011, together with Zambia under Rupiah Banda, Guinea, Niger and Chad. In January 2012 we saw Guinea Bissau, Nigeria and finally Cameroon depositing their instruments of ratification. This effectively means the Charter can be considered to have come into force in February 2012. Just like colonialism before it, the Charter is expanding its tentacles from South America to the jungles of Africa, with OSI boasting of the progress of this project so far.
Wrote Edward R McMahon: “In recent decades the OAS has devoted considerable attention to the question of how it can help promote democratic governance in member states. Its policies in this regard have evolved considerably, especially as the number of democracies in the OAS has increased over the past three decades. As such, it can be instructive to the African Union, which could be said to be at an earlier stage of a potentially similar trajectory.”
The assumption here is that democracy by its very nature is extraneous to the African culture, and as such must be imported from the enlightened civilisations of Europe. The slow pace at which African countries have been ratifying the OSI document speaks volumes about the political status of the African Union at the moment. Essentially the body simply allowed a document to be smuggled in for adoption, without really bothering to debate about it, let alone develop it to suit the context of Africa, only to chicken out of ratifying the same document. The adoption was more to avoid disappointing the donor community than it was about the document itself. For a year there was zero commitment to identify with this Western initiative brought to the table of unthinking African leaders seen as incapable of defining democracy and developing a road map leading to credible elections and good governance.
The Charter has the usual fawned clauses on democracy itself, defining the concept for Africa the Western way, and prescribing how Africa must strive to do what the South American States are praised for doing by the West, of course praised in the name of the nobility of democracy. The democracy in question here is not the rule of the people, by the people and for the people, as defined by the founding fathers of this nobility we all are keen to embrace. Rather it is the rule of Soros’ Charter for the Africans, by African puppet leaders pliant to the Western cause, for the unsuspecting African masses. So this democracy does not and cannot redistribute the stolen farmlands in South Africa, especially when Zuma signs the Soros document while at the same time he committedly cracks down on Julius Malema for advocating land reclamation without compensation. Reclamation and compensation are of course terms in contradiction, and must not logically be used in the same sentence.
Soros’ Charter is not about Africans gaining full control of their vast natural resources and developing themselves into an industrialised community. Neither is it about Africans having sovereign control of their economies. It is a Charter about well written newspapers, many radio stations, independent electoral commissions, and such other paramount issues like respect for homosexuality — issues we are told are the cornerstones of the West’s brand of exported democracy.
There is nothing in Soros’ Charter about the right to education, food, shelter, water, clothing, and land for every African person. These are trivial rights not very consistent with the simple lives of uncivilised Africans, who ostensibly would rather have many well-written newspapers than food on the table, or more homosexuals than clean water sources for the ever-perishing populations.
There is a lot of emphasis on the rule of law doctrine in the document. But such law must be law for the protection of the foreign investor and powerful corporations, together with their surrogates occupying political offices in Africa, not exactly for the interests of the poverty-stricken African — the kind of property rights laws like those that protected colonially settled farmers in Zimbabwe.
It is the kind of law that criminalises anti-imperialism resistance as hate politics or terrorism, while legitimising Western-executed genocides as “Responsibility to Protect interventions,” the way the murderous NATO bombings in Libya have been heroically portrayed as “protecting civilians”. Only the West can invade a country and protect it from itself by killing 50 000 of the country’s civilians — arrogantly demanding to be applauded for it all.
Of course OSI has leveraged so much on the doctrine of human rights to make noble its illicit intentions wrapped in the niceties of ACDEG. The young African has been made to wail for rights to do with everything on this planet except the right to decide the destiny of his own continent. So you have young Zimbabweans preferring to fight for the right to carry out protest marches aimed at protesting against the new farmers occupying land formerly occupied by colonial settlers. How ironic! Puppetry is quite ferocious when targeted at poor people.
Now some of these corrupted young minds vilify the indigenisation of the Zimbabwe economy, voraciously denouncing the few indigenous people that have ventured into controlling industry ahead of the traditional masters from the West. These are daily condemned as the corrupt cronies of political elites, not pioneers of African economic empowerment.
A Charter that promotes a democracy that will perpetuate Africa’s economic dependency on the West pushes for a corrupted democracy, and those ratifying such a Charter are simply trading birth right for aid.
No amount of aid will ever create a democracy, just like no amount of civil liberties will ever create a democracy for a people deprived of their natural resources and source of livelihood. The much preached about secondary rights cannot in themselves create a democracy, not unless such rights are enjoyed by people in control of their own economic, social and political destiny. The culture of democracy and peace has to be manufactured in the African context, and those trying to import democracy from Western capitals are as delusional as those who believe that supremacy is ancestral to white people, while poverty is the same to Africans.
Democratic institutions are not and cannot be a creation of George Soros and his organisations. They have to be initiated in Africa by Africans, not those hired to work for Soros’ organisations, but those with a political calling to develop Africa into an economic rival of its former colonial masters. Democratic elections as envisaged in the Charter ratified so far by 15 African countries are not exactly about electing peoples’ governments, but about electing governments that are pliant to Western powers. The Charter advocates for economic sanctions “in cases of unconstitutional changes of government,” limited in this case to acts of armed rebels, coup plotters, and losers who refuse to vacate office; expectedly silent on illegal military interventions by foreign powers, as we recently saw NATO doing in Libya.
The democracy advocated by OSI is a canon that has already become a dead hand on creativity and initiative, relegating our people to peddling the ideas of Western funders and other Western charlatans brought to our continent via the noble route of philanthropy, like George Soros himself.
The Western-initiated democratisation process does not allow African creativity, innovation, fresh thinking, independent thought, or a critical mind. A Zimbabwean friend and homeboy of this writer was pushed out of an organisation styling itself as the Media Institute of Southern Africa for daring to take an African initiative, a personal ideological stance, and to disagree with some of the tenets of those that funded the organisation that employed him. He is a Thomas Sankara addict and that is a contradiction to the goals and objectives of MISA — a 100 percent imperialist media charity.
Those who fought and brought Zimbabwe’s independence have in their own way corrupted democracy, just like the imperialists have done, only differently. There has to be oxygen in any culture, not just dust-laden stale air. Breathing is present-continuous and not past. There is no logic whatsoever in the reasoning that says the past cannot be consistent with what is both new and good. A liberation history adulterated to create entitlement for those with past achievements is a corrupted history, and as such its product is corrupt by extrapolation.
Those who kill initiative and creativity within the liberation movement in order to thwart political competition from the young generation must be reminded that whenever canons lie too heavily across the path of endeavour, it is always the canon that faces the real danger of being dynamited wholesale out of the way, sometimes to general loss.
This writer has engaged both the bitter and deprived youth denied the opportunity for creativity, initiative, innovation and fresh thinking; and also the overconfident and power-blinded veteran politician, obliviously misguided by an overrated glamour of past heroics in the revolution.
There is nothing revolutionary or educative about stale conformism to the past, but everything inimical to celebration of the best of the past while facing the worst of the future. Patriotism is an important aspect of any revolution, but patriotism is not a mere addiction to the past. The veteran politician’s eloquent restatement of the familiar but valid point of patriotism must merit notice, just like the zeal of the young revolutionary must be merited with respect and support.
By every means this writer is a political activist, and as such he has suffered greatly for the revolution he defends, many times going through the fangs and claws of imperialism — itself a renowned force at fighting back. It is these continuing revolutionary battles in the belly of the beast that have helped this writer to identify how corrupted the Zimbabwean revolution has become. When enemies outnumber comrades within a revolution there is need to be concerned.
A revolution must not fell its own cadres. It must not abandon its own fighters. That is the cry of the young revolutionaries who today stand as the only hope to save Africa from the corrupted democracy as promoted by Western powers today, elevated to fashionability among some of our emerging youths, but also corrupted by our own political elites.
Zimbabwe we are one and together we will overcome. It is homeland or death!
l Reason Wafawarova is a political writer based in SYDNEY, Australia.