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Only five of the aspiring presidential candidates successfully presented their nomination papers, with the rest being turned down by the court for one reason or another.

Leading the way to register for nomination was Morgan Tsvangirai — the notorious political crybaby that never stops his pertinacious whimsicalities over the alleged unevenness of the political playing field.

On June 13, Tsvangirai was widely reported by the media saying the proclamation of the July 31 election date by President Mugabe was “unlawful and unconstitutional,” and the man approached his comrade in confusion Jacob Zuma of South Africa to lobby for regional intervention on this “illegality.”

Zuma pushed for what ended up as an inconsequential Sadc Summit in Maputo; if one was to be guided by the unfolding events in Zimbabwe.
For five long years Tsvangirai was in a government whose term of office he knew would expire by June 29 2013, after which there would be a constitutional requirement for a new administration to be voted into power.

He spent the first year trying in vain to push Zimbabwe’s Central Bank Governor Dr Gideon Gono out of his job, after which he vigorously resisted the call for an election after 18 months of his party’s coalition with Zanu-PF and the other formation of the MDC. The period was what was prescribed as the initial lifespan of the ill-fated coalition.

In the third and fourth year Tsvangirai was indisputably preoccupied with philandering and leisure hunting, and he most certainly never saw the prospect of an election drawing any nearer.

This year’s proclamation of an election date on June 13 instilled untold fear and panic in the Prime Minister, especially after he had vaingloriously bragged 24 hours earlier, pompously telling civil society members that he alone held “the keys to any election” in Zimbabwe.

It is quite ironic that Tsvangirai was the first one to file his nomination papers for participation in this “illegality” of an election that he described as “unlawful and unconstitutional,” with members of his party oversubscribing for the limited nominations for local government, Parliament and Senate — even engaging in fierce fist fights for the right to be nominated for a part in this “illegality” of an election.

Tendai Biti justified it all by saying: “When you are faced with illegality you have to make two decisions: To ignore the illegality or to reserve our right. We reserved our right because we are aware millions of Zimbabweans want change and so we have to balance those interests.”

The only illegality Zimbabwe is facing at the moment is Morgan Tsvangirai’s mobilisation of foreign opposition to the ruling by the country’s Constitutional Court — a ruling that clearly stipulates that Zimbabweans must vote in a new government on or before the 31st of July, notwithstanding the unpreparedness of over-indulging politicians like our leisure-intoxicated Prime Minister.

Morgan Tsvangirai has been calling for hegemonic reforms he believes could aid his prospects of becoming Zimbabwe’s head of state, and he particularly wants the country’s media fraternity to hail and respect his political conduct regardless of his glaring shortcomings.

He also has been calling for the derevolutionising of country’s security sector — demanding for the army’s departure from the liberation legacy to the embracing of political leadership driven by the diktats of Western hegemony.

Barack Obama allowed himself to be a megaphone of Tsvangirai’s “reform” rhetoric, of course flanked by an out of sorts South African president, that blundering man who unwittingly voted for the blatant cold-blooded murdering of Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi in 2011.

Obama baselessly demanded for reforms before an election can be held in Zimbabwe, as he discourteously abused his recent state visit to South Africa to do the bidding of puppet politician Tsvangirai.

This is what Barack Obama said: “Harassment of citizens and groups needs to stop and reform needs to move forward so that people can cast their votes in elections that are fair and free and credible.”

It is a common imperial tradition to have elections in enemy states portrayed as lacking credibility. When one compares the treatment of Zimbabwe’s election by Western media to that of elections in countries regarded as client states of the West, the bias cannot be missed.

It is ironic that the West calls for media reforms in Zimbabwe when the media coverage of world events by Western media is the most biased of all time.
Noam Chomsky and Ed Herman carried out a study in 1988 and they established that events in what the West regards as enemy states are “subjected to more intense and indignant coverage” than those in countries regarded by the West as client states or allies.

Obama did not call for reforms in Afghanistan before Hamid Karzai blatantly stole that country’s election in 2009, and the Western media had a deafening reticence on the pre-election irregularities that bedevilled the country at the time.

Chomsky and Herman proved that the 1984 death of Priest Jerzy Popieluszko at the hands of Polish Communists did not only receive more coverage than that of Bishop Oscar Romerio, who was murdered in Western favoured El-Salvador in 1980, but the former was in fact given “more coverage than the aggregate of one hundred religious victims killed in US client states,” and this was despite the fact that eight of these victims were actually US citizens.

There is no second-guessing that this kind of media bias is politically advantageous to Western policymakers, and to the grand strategy of imperial hegemony. It is very important to have Obama making utterances that focus on portraying Zanu-PF and President Robert Mugabe as masters of “harassment,” and it is essentially strategic to show the rivals of the Western-sponsored MDC-T as wicked and deserving of Western hostilities.

Apart from isolated reports like one recently carried by the UK Guardian, there is virtually no Western coverage over violent brutalities blatantly carried out by Morgan Tsvangirai’s security team on journalist and other peace-loving people.

Most notably the intra-party election violence that was characteristic of recent MDC-T primary elections did not in the least attract any notable admonition from the West.
Even the ever-commenting Harare US Embassy completely ignored the apparent chaos.

A man who condones the beating up of journalists by his own bodyguards cannot be taken seriously when he wants a whole election postponed on the grounds of demands for media reforms.

Tsvangirai needs to understand this.
Obama was supposed to make a plea that Tsvangirai’s handlers must stop harassing journalists in order to help create a free and fair election environment in Zimbabwe.
For that he and his host sidekick Jacob Zuma would have earned a lot of respect from the Zimbabwean public.

Instead the two men decided to make baseless demands for the stopping of harassment of unnamed groups of people in Zimbabwe.
It does not really matter whether Obama was misinformed or plainly being provocative; the utterances remain primitively misplaced.

Of course the journalists beaten up by MDC-T hoodlums are unworthy victims who can only unnecessarily burden the proceeding of US foreign policy. Concern over these politically inconvenient victims is an interference that must rather be avoided, and that is why not many Westerners ever questioned the logic of the West’s illegal imposition of sanctions on six Zimbabwean journalists in the last decade, the likes of Caesar Zvayi, Munyaradzi Huni, Judith Makwanya and Reuben Barwe. They were just an inconvenient interference to the goals of Western policy and, as such, unworthy victims.

President Jacob Zuma’s backroom advisor by the name Lindiwe Zulu is either a hopeless failure in diplomacy or a perfect fool.
The woman is an unamusing flibbertigibbet who must be spared the complexities of diplomacy.

What diplomat with half a brain would call for an unexplained and unwarranted extension of an election whose candidates have all successfully registered with the electoral body of their country?

Would South Africa accept it if some advisor of an unassuming president from a troubled country somewhere in the world just woke up demanding a delay in a South African election when just about all to do with the election was ready to go?

It is surprising that Obama can advocate for Tsvangirai’s idea of security sector reforms when his own military is crude and uncivilised enough to drone-bomb innocent civilians in Afghanistan, or to illegally invade Iraq, or to back up a French-led murderous campaign in Libya. Zimbabwean soldiers are disciplined enough to keep to their side of the border without violating international conventions and committing war crimes in weaker nations.

Obama is hunting down a US citizen for using the media to tell the world that the US administration is on worldwide spying scheme, and the US president has the audacity to call for media reforms in Zimbabwe.

Zimbabwe has not put any bounties on any of its citizens, and that does not mean the country does not have people making up all sorts of bizarre and baseless stories bordering on national security matters.

We are simply civilised enough to put up with the nuisances.
Is it not true that the media in Obama’s country uses terms like “genocide” very selectively? The invidious word is spared for the likes of Saddam Hussein in 1987, Muammar Gaddafi in 2011, and Yugoslavia in 1999; even for President Robert Mugabe in regards to the mid-eighties Midlands-Matabeleland disturbances.

Turkey was killing a lot more than Saddam Hussein during the late eighties, Israel kills more than any other country on this planet, Nato killed more than anyone else in the Kosovo conflict, and certainly more than anyone else did in Libya in 2011, and the US killed at a grand scale in Afghanistan and Iraq in 2001 and 2003 respectively.

In none of these cases has the word “genocide” ever been used by the media in Obama’s homeland, except of course for that massive 2007 genocide of 1 200 people in his East African fatherland — Kenya.

Calling for media reforms in Zimbabwe when one heads a system like the American imperial empire is like a mafia don calling for the arresting of mere drug runners. Whatever the sins of the Zimbabwean media, and they are many; the truth is that they are a like a pea standing next to a mountain when compared to those of the Western mainstream media.

Israel only “uses excessive force,” and Bahrain only “represses” its people while Syria engages in “genocide,” and we are all supposed to applaud this kind of media reporting. If we don’t we come across as rogue supporters of gross brutalities, and the repercussions can be devastating. It is high time Zimbabweans assert themselves and say no to the call for hegemonic reforms meant to promote the political fantasies of imperialistic enthusiasts and their local puppets.

We have a proletariat to empower and we cannot ignore the indigenisation of our economy — itself full of unquestionably great potential.
Zimbabwe we are one and together we will overcome. It is homeland or death!!

Reason Wafawarova is a political writer based in Sydney, Australia.