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BILATERAL FRIENDS . . . Then British prime minister David Cameron and Chinese President Xi Jinping during a visit by the Chinese leader to No. 10 Downing Street. Just in 2014 the UK exported goods worth £18,7 billion to China and imported goods worth £38,3 billion from China

Nick Mangwana View From the Diaspora—

At the recent Zanu-PF people’s conference, some ministers made presentations. Most if not all of them sounded very positive. The interesting thing was the delegates appeared quite disinterested or simply indifferent.Reading the papers, the following day it gave the impression that the press was also not paying attention.

There are varied explanations to this. One of these could be that we were being fed untruths and everyone knew it and were just too polite to say it.

One person who did not make a presentation and did not lead or participate in any thematic committee was the party Secretary for External Relations who also doubles as the Minister of Foreign Affairs.

It’s either the party believes that its membership should have no say in the foreign policy of the country or the subject is considered too technical for the comprehension by Cde Johnny Member or not important enough. But with such a large Diaspora body, Zimbabwe’s foreign policy has a massive bearing on the state of both the country and the economy.

There is a case of this issue being one of the issues the party should give to the Executive. At the present moment the average party member has no clue what the main thrust of our foreign policy is.

All they know is that our rhetoric (should) attack the West and eulogise the East. They know there are certain countries you can’t praise no matter what else is happening in reality. But what really should be entailed in our foreign policy?

We have to creatively align ourselves to countries in a way that maximises our own leverage. The politics of hate or taking advantage of a polarised world worked well during the Cold War era where we stood to benefit from surrogacy.

These days, countries can be friends with two countries who are at war. Each relationship is easily compartmentalised. Nations get that.

This is because for a country like Zimbabwe, it has no known defence alliance with anyone. This would be where one would say an enemy of a friend is my enemy. But relationships now have a lot more to do with particular national and strategic interests.

Defence and intelligence links are not the only relationships we need to cultivate. Trade interests would be more important than some of these. An example is Brexit! To Zimbabwe, Brexit should be an opportunity.

Britain needs to open new channels of trade including sources for raw materials and markets for its products. We should not adopt the attitude that with desperation, Britain will come to us cap in hand. That is a convenient lie.

We are not the only country with these raw materials. We should be able to snatch this opportunity and forget about our petty ideological differences and look at the bigger picture – in the national interest.

Our foreign policy should not be based on archaic “mutually exclusive relationships”.

This is to say, a close relationship with China is great, but that relationship is not predicated upon a premise where Zimbabwe should have a broken relationship with, say, Great Britain and all the other Western countries to which Britain franchised its diplomatic tiff with Zimbabwe.

After all, just in 2014 the UK exported goods worth £18,7 billion to China and imported goods worth £38,3 billion from China.

China is the UK’s sixth biggest export market. When it comes to tourism, Chinese visitors contribute half a billion pounds to the UK economy.

What do these figures tell us? They clearly tell us that China has a serious economic relationship with the United Kingdom and the now thawing bilateral tiff between Zimbabwe and the UK is not and has never been a factor. It shows that China always compartmentalised its bilateral relationship with Zimbabwe as well as its bilateral relationship with the United Kingdom.

What seems to be the problem is that we appear to have still held to the discredited notion that an advance in one relationship is at the expense of another. No, this is not polygamy.

Geopolitics and diplomacy moved from that position a while back. It is time to expand the scope and the depth of our relationship with the United Kingdom to take advantage of Brexit.

We cannot as a nation base our foreign policy on sentimentality and artificial emotional tensions, no matter how advantageous it is to our local politics. Rhetorically it might have a lot of resonance in our local constituencies, but substantially there is a price to pay.

How good a leadership is, should be judged not on its capacity to enthuse a crowd. It is about its ability to maximise the advantages available to it for the benefit of its people. At the heart of all this is a friendship with all countries based on mutual respect and, of course, respect of each other’s sovereignty.

Rapprochement with the UK is not a contradiction to this principle.

And, one thing we need now is a way of growing our middle class. The world is fast changing and becoming complex. There is a new foreign policy paradigm, one which does not include playing the East against the West.

It is only anchored on doing that which makes your country secure as well as uplift the quality of life of the people at home.

Yes, there are moral positions such as always aligning with fellow African states and cultivating such pan-Africanist linkages. But, serving national interests is best done by keeping the local population happy.

This is what makes the people and the other non-state stakeholders play their part and work with the State for the common good.

We cannot talk of sovereignty and national security whilst ignoring the security of the individual. Now the security of the individual is not just about free from physical harm or threats. It is about financial security and an assurance that the next generation has a hope and future.

So, when we build our interconnectedness and linkages with other nations, it should not be based on some high sounding moral grandstanding, but on how the common person stands to gain from such relationships.

Right now, some of the most important nations to Zimbabwe are the ones where most of its citizens are based.

Whilst conflict and the fortress mentality rallies people together and is an advantage to short-term political goals, we cannot put the nation in a state of perpetual emotional conflict with nations that are important to us.

That does not appear to be serving our national interests.

Zimbabwe has played a key role on global issues. It has performed exceptionally well at that level. But when its population is afflicted by hunger and poverty, it does not seem to be doing a lot of good.

When every year thousands of our young people enter an ever disappearing job market and our young women appear to be choosing a meal over love in their options for a spouse, we should stop and revisit our policies.

But only this time let us focus on that foreign policy. Today is not 15 years ago. As much as 1980 was not 1965, so 2016 is not 2001.

Foreign policies of then are no longer fit for purpose now. The pace at which the world is changing is breathtaking. Our view of the world and plan to make ourselves relevant in it should also be equally dynamic.

One of the most dynamic and pragmatic ways of formulating a foreign policy is to link it to our Diaspora.

Relationships with those countries which play a host to large numbers of our nationalities should be emphasised. Failure to that is not only missing a serious opportunity but having a foreign policy out of a generational context. And that does not serve the nation’

Serving the nation is not trying to force the people to believe that they are doing well when, in actual fact, they don’t feel it, see it and are certainly not experiencing it.

Serving the nation well is to have tangible results evident in the day-to-day lives of the people. So, Zimbabweans must feel, witness and experience all those positives the President was told of at the conference.

Of course, there are a lot of positives that are happening in the economy. The decent supply of electricity is a starting point. But these positives are overwhelmed by the scandals that also happen at the same time.

Instead of the Zimbabwe Electricity Transmission and Distribution Company (ZETDC) being eulogised for the good it has done, there are way too many scandals including tender rigging, which of course is more headline grabbing news.

It does not make complete sense to come and report that this power station has an output of so many megawatts without telling us whether you are or how you are plugging the holes that I am reading about in the paper I am holding.

It is these scandals that investors and media watchers, as well as foreign policy makers, feed on and shape their attitudes on.

The only foreign policy Zimbabweans care about is the one that positively transforms local lives.