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There is this banality from the African intellectual community that produces base analysts that claim they cannot stand the corruption and greed of African politicians; and yet they urge all of us to be real and learn to live with the evils of imperialism and Western hegemony. These are people who are so bamboozled by the glitters ofWestern lifestyle that they get this mirage that makes them embrace the looting of a whole continent’s resources by foreign imperialists at a time they proclaim they cannot stand the petty thieves in the largely hopeless African governments across the continent.

If one cannot stand the looting by some corrupt African leadership, the more that person should be appalled by the ravenous looting of African resources by imperial agents.

There is a clique of African intellectuals that find it fashionable to treat imperial aggression nonchalantly, or even to sanitise it. What these educated simpletons admire most about Western interventionism is the idea of democracy, a concept whose declared nobilities include the defending of human rights, promotion of free and fair elections, property rights, foreign direct investment and privatisation of the economic sector.

The democracy preached to Africa and to other developing countries by the West is a counterfeit democracy that does not meet the Aristotelian definition. It is a democracy that can easily be described as the rule of western values, by western influence and for western interests — not the popularly hailed rule of the people, by the people and for the people.

For something to be counterfeit it must closely resemble the authentic. Those in the business of making counterfeit money would not try printing out US$30 bills for the simple reason that there is no such thing as a US$30 bill. For counterfeit democracy to fool people it must carry the image of true democracy. One sure way to do this is to put a lot of emphasis on the imperativeness of elections in matters of democracy. This is how electoral democracy has been elevated to a level of Bible truth.

It is not every election that breeds democracy, freely and fairly carried or not; and certainly an election that does not allow people independent ownership of their country’s resources and means of production is not and cannot be a democratic election. A democratic election offers democratic options, not options shaped by imperialistic influences from foreign countries.

Counterfeit democracy is premised on high sounding declarations and nobilities. The first Gulf War was waged under the thunderous rhetoric of defending democracy and the declared intentions included the high sounding moral obligation to defend Kuwait from a murderous invasion by a monstrous Saddam Hussein.The lie was wrapped in an indisputable semblance of truth.

The whole world was flooded with ear-piercing news bytes proclaiming the fabulous readiness by the West to punish human rights violators who had ostensibly descended on peace loving Kuwait. We had the all too familiar script for human rights violations — starting from summary executions, torture, degradation of individuals, to blatant brutalisation of innocent civilians like women and children.

Those who might have not been too persuaded by the need to secure rights for people in faraway Kuwait were reminded that Iraq was this evil-intended state that was busy manufacturing for itself chemical and biological weapons specifically meant to terrorise Planet Earth, and if anyone did not take this seriously, they needed to be sternly warned that in fact Iraq was developing a lethal atomic bomb – purely motivated by Saddam Hussein’s hatred for humanity.

The 1988 Halabja attack of the Kurds by Hussein was extensively used to prove that Iraq had the capacity to nuke this planet without any measure of remorse — just like we are constantly told today that the Kim something kid from North Korea is crazy enough to play boyhood fantasy games with nuclear weapons.

We were also told that the West needed to send military forces to Kuwait because economic sanctions had failed to keep Saddam Hussein from developing Weapons of Mass Destruction.

The 2003 Bush invasion of Iraq was firmly pretexted on these sensationalised claims — an outrageous pack of unprecedented lies, as it later emerged.

The undeclared intentions were simply unsellable to the rest world. The West could not tell the world that they feared that Saddam Hussein could eventually attack Saudi Arabia, the strategic US ally in the region. Very few people would care.

Equally, it would be hard to tell the world that if Saddam ended up with Kuwait oil added to that of Iraq, he would indisputably be holding the majority of the world’s oil reserves — an unthinkable prospect for the West.

So counterfeit democracy comes in the name of the people; and never in the name of oil or diamonds, and precisely this is what was seen in Libya in 2011. The undeclared intention was the West’s resolve to remove Muammar Gaddafi from power, and of course to have full control of his country’s oil resource. But what sane person would ever support such an evil goal?

So the declared intention became the now infamous Responsibility to Protect (R2P) principle — the pretext endorsed by the UN Security Council through Resolution 1973. Western media shamelessly and baselessly lamented that Gaddafi was about to carry out a genocide in Benghazi. The mainstream Western media even portrayed the Western-armed and Al-Qaeda affiliated Benghazi rebels as “peaceful protesters,” — sometimescalling them “unarmed civilians.”

The West has generally struggled to come up with a credible pretext for Syria since early 2012. From a clamour for human rights reforms to exaggerated calls for democratic reforms, all the way to outrageous claims that the country was on the brink of falling into the arms of Al-Qaeda militants. It appears the world has no appetite to swallow any of this too familiar rhetoric any more.

Of course the real intention of the West is to effect regime change in Damascus — that being a precursor to stepping up aggression against Iran.

Every international relations student or scholar worth the name knows that the grand agenda in the West’s permanent war for hegemony in the Middle East began with Afghanistan in 2001 — pretexted on the purported search for Osama bin Laden. From Afghanistan the war for hegemony in the Middle East moved to Iraq in 2003, and for sure it will not end with Syria and Iran. The grand plan is to surround economic rivals Russia and China.

Barely has the West concealed the underlying aim of regime change in Damascus, just like there was hardly any such concealment for Libya. However, these are the kind of objectives that cannot be stated in unvarnished terms. It is ordinarily not expected for the West to openly declare its desire for regime change in Zimbabwe in order to try and reverse the land reform program that ousted white commercial farmers in 2000. Equally no sane Western politician can openly say they want regime change in Zimbabwe in order to halt the ongoing economic empowerment of the indigenous entrepreneur. That would incur all sorts of political problems, worst of which would be unprecedented mass wrath against the West. Other related problems could range from illegality to moral unacceptability among the Western masses.

To circumvent provoking populations of targeted countries and appalling their own people Western elites have over the years developed a tradition of brewing up all sorts of pretexts in order to obfuscate what is otherwise blatant imperialism. They relentlessly and profusely wave the flag of democracy in the faces of the public, both at home and abroad.

Any Westerner that solely relies on the media for opinion on international affairs may be forgiven for fully believing that their country is dead concerned about bringing democracy to Zimbabwe, and for believing that Zimbabwe still has to know what it means to have majority rule. African icon Robert Mugabe is portrayed as a minority ruler, and his revolutionary Zanu-PF is painted as the African version of Al-Qaeda despite the fact that Zanu-PF brought down colonial rule by popular support, and that its leader Robert Mugabe is revered as a living legend across the continent of Africa. The overwhelming standing ovation by Kenyans at the recent inauguration of President Uhuru Kenyatta is testimony to this popularity.

Counterfeit democracy can hardly be sustainable without perceived enemies. Against the nice superlatives used to describe the glorious nature of liberties and freedoms that come with the human rights regime there is always this diabolical image of a “brutal regime” to be removed for its monstrous crackdowns on “democratic forces,” the likes of Morgan Tsvangirai’s MDC.

Finian Cunningham titled one of his 2012 essays “Responsibility to Pretext.” He was writing about how the principle of the Responsibility to Protect had been abused in Libya, and how Nato was scared to repeat the same pretext for Syria, most probably because such a move would be risky; given Syria’s formidable military capabilities, especially its aerial firepower.

An outright Western military intervention in Syria could easily trigger explosive repercussions in the Middle East, sucking in the likes of Lebanon and Iran.

The viable option has been to arm the Syrian rebels and to deploy mercenaries from other surrounding Arab countrieslike Saudi Arabia and Qatar.

The declared justification for the open call for regime change in Syria includes the assertion that President Bashar Al Assad is reluctant “to implement political reforms.” This is despite the fact that Syria drafted a new constitution that was passed by a national referendum, followed by parliamentary elections that were held in May 2012. The election result produced something the West called a “democratic deficit,” more or less like the democratic deficit that was recently produced by Uhuru Kenyatta’s electoral victory in Kenya, or by the 2006 Hamas electoral victory in Palestine.

When the wrong candidate wins an election counterfeit democracy will cry “democratic deficit!” When a political system in a country fails the arbiter test of democracy from the West, everyone becomes qualified to condemn. This is why the Arab dictatorships of Saudi Arabia and Qatar could muster the temerity to make shameless public exhortations for Assad to “speed up political reforms.”

It is more or less like the self-imposed and unelected president of Botswana making vacuous calls for President Mugabe to speed up political reforms in Zimbabwe, or his politically insane foreign minister declaring sanctions on Uhuru Kenyatta for daring to win an election in Kenya while facing charges at the Western-controlled ICC.

Internal democracy in Ian Khama’s Botswana Democratic Party is unheard of, and Festus Mogae ruthlessly expelled Australian Professor Kenneth Good from the country in 2005 for pointing out that his handpicking of Ian Khamaas party leader was undemocratic. Ian Khama himself has expelled scores of people for having divergent political views, among them Zimbabweans George Chingarande and journalist Caesar Zvayi.

Khama is hailed in the West as presiding over one of Africa’s shining democracies — in the typical glowing terms by which counterfeit democracy is often elevated.  This writer hopes 2013 will mark the defeat of counterfeit democracy in Zimbabwe. It is time our people participated in an economic ballot. Time for the political ballot is gone. It is time to use the vote to economically empower the African.

Zimbabwe we are one and together we will overcome. It is homeland or death!!