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Obi Egbuna Jnr Simunye
When the late pan-Africanist revolutionary leader of Burkina Faso, H.E. Comrade Thomas Sankara, expelled Western-based food NGOs from the nation he boldly stated: “Our country produces enough to feed us all. Alas, for a lack of organisation we are forced to beg for food aid. It’s this aid that instils in our spirits the attitude of beggars.” In this we witnessed the resurrection of the self-determination fervour that defined our anti-colonialist resistance from the 1950s to the 1980s.

Let Mother Africa’s children both on the continent and Diaspora analyse very carefully why Eritrea, Bolivia, Cuba, Ecuador, Venezuela, Dominica, Nicaragua and Russia arrived at the logical conclusion that the United States Agency for International Development must be shown the door.

This despite the obstacles and initial suffering their citizens would be forced to endure on a short-term basis.

We are well aware that each and every neo-colonialist and neo-liberalist government and advocate who define progress itself by the yardstick imposed on them by US-EU imperialism, would consider the decision to show USAID the door as rebel rousing and biting the hand that feeds you.

The government of Eritrea made their decision in 2005, while Bolivia, Cuba, Ecuador, Dominica, Nicaragua, Venezuela – under the banner of the ALBA (Bolivarina Alliance for the Peoples of Our America) – and Russia followed suite seven years later in 2012.

The USAID workers involved in the Zun Zuneo scandal in Cuba, which is slang for a Hummingbird’s tweet, was a project to get Venezuelan, Peruvian and Costa Rican youth to get their peers in Cuba to begin a regime change campaign.

This was in sync with USAID’s Public Safety Campaign that trained other countries’ police and military officers in counter-insurgency at the height of the Cold War.

This diplomatic slap in the face came at a moment when USAID made no secret that Mother Africa had become their primary focus.

“Nowhere in the world is development such an important part of US engagements as it is in Africa.

“The changing tide on the continent requires a new kind of partnership. Today Africans are the architects of their own development not just beneficiaries. Donors support their plans, they do not dictate them. Our joint efforts reap benefits for both Africans and the US,” USAID stated.

While we do not take pride in speaking the colonial languages forced down our throats both on our sacred land and slave plantations throughout the Americas, our former colonisers deserve full credit for ensuring that we have full comprehension of their mother tongues as well as the 5 000 indigenous languages Africans have given to the world.

For this reason, US-EU imperialism makes a cardinal error when attempting to paint the picture that today’s African heads of state have a better ideological framework for development than the fathers of the anti-colonial movement like Osagyefo Kwame Nkrumah, Ahmed Sekou Toure, Patrice Lumumba, Gamal Abdel Nasser, Ahmed Ben Bella, Modibo Keita, Julius Nyerere, Kenneth Kaunda nd Samora Machel, just to name a few.

What severely compromises the narrative USAID spin-doctors are attempting to propagate is first and foremost, when they came into existence.

The exact year was 1961 when US-EU imperialism carried out both the cowardly assassination of Cde Patrice Lumumba and the embarrassing debacle widely known as the Bay of Pigs invasion, which was the first official attempt to use unpatriotic and reactionary Cubans as ill-equipped toy soldiers to overthrow at the time a two-year-old revolutionary government who already was revered all over the entire world.

When former US president John Kennedy created USAID by executive order it was predetermined that even though this organisation would give the appearance of an independent operator, there would be total adherence to foreign policy mandate of the president, Secretary of State and National Security Council.

Because of USAID’S chameleonic nature the organisation can at the blink of an eye generate major dollars from Fortune 500 companies who are always looking to plant their flag like astronauts in other parts of the solar system.

This explains why former US president Barack Obama had a huge smile in 2014 when he announced USAID would invest more than $38 million to the Young African Leaders Initiative for the establishment of four regional centres that will train the youth pen- marked as our new emerging leaders.

The contributing companies are MasterCard Foundation ($10 million), Dow Chemical Company ($3 million), Atlas Mara ($25 million), Microsoft ($12 million), McKinsey & Company ($1,5 million), IBM ($500 000), General Electric and Procter & Gamble.

The Mara Foundation would provide mentoring and the Intel Corporation would provide up to $5 million in training entrepreneurship and basic trends.

Let us collectively make a parallel between this dynamic and when NBA and NFL athletes sign multimillion-dollar endorsement deals with billion-dollar companies like Nike, Adidas and Reebok.

This makes it abundantly clear that YALI members who emerge as presidents of their respective nations will more than likely give these predatory and blood-sucking companies the green light to rape and plunder our sacred land and even worse let it emphatically known this is returning the favour for all their mentoring and goodwill during their formative years.

When USAID boldly claims Africa is their new frontier, they should under any circumstances be accused of false advertising. They have 27 regional and bilateral missions in the following nations:

Angola, Benin, DRC, Ghana, Guinea, Sierra Leone, Kenya, Liberia, Madagascar, Malawi, Mali, Mozambique, Namibia, Nigeria, Rwanda, Senegal, South Africa, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia and Zimbabwe. This includes the four leadership centres for YALI in Ghana, Kenya, Senegal and South Africa.

USAID lists their areas of priority as follows: Agriculture and Food Security, Democracy, Human Rights and Governance, Economic Growth and Assistance, Economic Growth and Trade, Education, Ending Extreme Poverty, Gender Equality and Women’s Empowerment, Global Health, Water and Sanitation, Working in Crisis and Conflict.

Africans are well aware we dwell in the court of public opinion, for that reason when turning attention to Zimbabwe and the SADC region, their disingenuous and nefarious attentions must be exposed at all costs.

When USAID praises Southern Africa for popularising multi-party democracy we must ask is this a back-handed compliment or an indirect attack aimed at President Mugabe and ZANU-PF?

USAID arrogantly states they are building the competencies of electoral officials to support free and transparent elections across the continent and regional institutions in 22 countries perhaps they can explain to Africans – who they deem savage and uncivilised – why the electoral college, not the popular vote, determines who becomes president in the US and why ultra-sexism prevents the so-called caretakers of democracy from making a woman president of the United States.

USAID claims to have given $3 billion to Zimbabwe since independence that has been geared towards health systems, standards of living, supporting democratic institutions and actors and encouraging a free market economy. Does this sound like architecture without external interference?

USAID claims to have provided food to 7,5 million people since 2009, allocated $54,5 million to Zimbabwe for drought relief in 2016, which represented 42,5 percent of the drought relief reserved for Malawi, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Madagascar, Lesotho and Swaziland.

USAID claims their assistance aimed at eradicating HIV-AIDS in Zimbabwe is the main reason the rate has decreased from 26 percent to 14 percent.

USAID boasts about spending $170 million in factories and farms to increase productivity of smallholder farmers.

USAID claims to have sent thousands of Zimbabwean students to universities in the US.

What has Zimbabwe done to deserve USAID’s unlimited empathy and benevolence?

The answer is simple, to cover up the damages that US-EU sanctions on Zimbabwe have done for the past 16 years.

USAID did not reclaim that land for Zimbabwean farmers, did not educate those Zimbabwean students from kindergarten to high school, did not create the world’s first national HIV-AIDS levy to eradicate the deadly pandemic.

USAID adds insult to injury by posing as Mother Africa’s knight in shining armour.

Obi Egbuna Jnr is the US correspondent to The Herald and the External Relations Officer of the Zimbabwe Cuba Friendship Association (ZICUFA). His email is [email protected]