Editorial Comment: Time to chart  our own paths Joe Biden

NOW that elections in America have come and gone with Joe Biden emerging the winner in a tight poll fraught with irregularities, violence and replete with the unsavoury, it is as clear as daylight that the United States can no longer be defined as the cradle of democracy.

The pretensions to the rule of law dissipated into a miasma as supporters of incumbent President Donald Trump, incited by their candidate’s bullish and nationalistic verve took the law into their own hands threatening to unleash an orgy of violence against opponents simply because Mr Trump had been rejected by majority voters.

While this sounds familiar in these terrains where we have opposition parties that reject elections that do not reflect their fantasies, it is indeed a lesson for the whole of Africa never to look up to America as the prefects of democracy or its disciples.

They are a violent lot who thrive on sanctioning nations that dare stand up to their unilateral approach to geo-global-politics, but often-times sweep, with the aid of the so-called independent media, such ill-practices in their own backgrounds underneath the carpet.

The media in the United States was cautious, it did not overtake due processes in that country and in that way exposed to the world that what matters are American interests and not news as they often prescribe to other nations with less powerful mediums of communication.

It was bemusing that while America was having trouble with its own elections amid rigging claims and violent clashes, the US Embassies had the temerity of condemning polls that were held in Cote d’Ivoire and Tanzania, two African countries that delivered their election results on time.

As we write, Mr Trump still insists that the elections were fraudulent and wishes, like his puppets here in Zimbabwe, to approach the country’s courts to seek annulment of the whole sham election, we really don’t care about the outcome suffice to say we learn from his theatrics that there is no credibility in the US electoral system, for if it ever was why would Mr Trump challenge the outcome.

While this easily passes as a familiar indictment that America often time passes on African nations, it is happening right in the USA, the warmongering, puppet installing nation that unilaterally abuses its super-power status, now we can see them for what there are, a powerful system that pulls the strings from behind the scenes to install favoured candidates.

With the outcome of the US elections still fresh and having been captured on social media platforms and less on the mainstream media which, as aforementioned was cautious and conservative in preserving the US national interests, perhaps it is now time for Africa to have a rethink when it comes to democratic processes, the role of elections observers and the motivation behind their deployment, vis-a-vis the fact that the so-called superpower held its polls unfettered by poll monitors.

Had the delays in the announcement of results of the polls happened in any African state, that country would have been condemned by the western world, the self-appointed global prefects who, however, fail to practice what they preach.

The West, particularly America, has no moral ground to lecture the world on democracy and its tenets when they dismally failed to have free and credible elections in the so-called laboratory of democracy, never mind the complex and confused nature of their voting processes where popular vote does not necessarily result in one clinching the presidency.

One wonders what would happen if that was to be practiced in Africa.

Time has indeed come for us to remove the blinkers that have made us mistakenly believe that we can learn and the parrot Western values as if they are our own, time has come to chart our own ways and determine our own destinies as sovereign states and indeed time has come to develop home-grown solutions to our challenges.

Just as the American powerful media preserves and indeed protects the US national interests, it is also time for our own media to be patriotic and serve national interests rather than pushing narrow and parochial interests of a few individuals who thrive in chaos and who have no social contract with the people they seek to represent, primarily because their agenda is alien to that which defines us as a nation.

When we held elections in 2018, the international community was allowed to observe with the majority of the observers giving a clean bill of health to the credible, free and fair polls, it was the loss of the elections by the Western-sponsored MDC-A that resulted in a volte-face by some of the observers and monitors, whose real national interests are to remove the Zanu PF Government from power.

While we can see the Americans for what they are, we, however, would like to wish president-elect Joe Biden well and take this opportunity to ask him and his Democratic party to remove the illegal sanctions his country has maintained on us for close to two decades.

You Might Also Like

Comments