We  have once again come to the unbearable times when global politics imposes on us the ghastly experience of having to put up with the posturing of Washington and London. Barrack Obama and David Cameron feign humanity whenever they are forced by the imperial system to stand in the way of anti-imperial progressive forces of this world, and it has become traditional for the West to label its opponents abroad inhumane while always covering the murderous meddling of Western imperial forces in the velvety glamour of humanitarianism. It is a wonder why Obama seems to believe that it makes sense for him to appear on television preaching sympathy for Syrians or soberly hankering for the freedom of Zimbabweans.
He used to mock George W. Bush when he did it for the Iraqis.

We hear it is humanity that makes the West arm murderous insurgents in Syria, that it is humanitarianism that got Libya destroyed to rubble by NATO aerial bombings, and that it is humanitarianism that led the West to impose ruinous illegal sanctions on Zimbabwe.

All these rancorous interventions are decorated as messianic attempts at freeing us the lesser people from our own selves.
Even the utterances of an evidently nescient man like Morgan Tsvangirai can be elevated to serious matters of concern when the West is determined to frame its political opponents, especially when the perceived enemy poses a threat to Western capitalist interests, like Robert Mugabe indisputably does.

Purely on the basis of Tsvangirai describing the Zimbabwean elections as “a huge farce” we have seen the White House and Number 10 Downing Street making lurid pronouncements that are crudely judgmental about an election they know next to nothing about.

US critics are forced to pass for malice what clearly passes for stupidity, and the compliant will elevate the stolidity to matters of pure logic, thanks to the ruthless prowess of Western media houses.

Cherry picking Tsvangirai’s forlorn utterances and spicing them up with the contents of a contrived report from a Western-funded observer group styling itself as the Zimbabwe Election Support Network might sound sycophantic to anyone half informed about puppet politics in Zimbabwe, but the West will stick to whatever pretext will promote their objective, and that objective has absolutely nothing to do with the will of Zimbabweans.
There is no second-guessing about that.

A White House official was quoted this week justifying the Obama-Cameron war intention in Syria.
He said: “We are going to act very deliberately so that we’re making decisions consistent with our national interest as well as our assessment of what can advance our objectives in Syria.”

The position of the West on Zimbabwe’s just ended election is not based on what obtained during those elections but on the unfavourable outcome of that election. Democracy as advocated by Western leaders is defined not by its processes or credibility but by its outcome.

Once democracy elects into government characters that are not compliant with Western interests it cease to be democracy.
It becomes fallacious whatever the people who participated in such a democracy might think. Democracy has a Western-prescribed political correctness without which it cannot be democracy.

An election is considered to have democratically gone wrong if it produces electoral outcomes like the Hamas victory of 2006 in Palestine, Mohamed Morsi’s 2012 electoral triumph in Egypt, or Mugabe’s 2013 landslide win in Zimbabwe.

When people vote “wrongly’’ like they did in Zimbabwe the election loses its democratic legitimacy — all because a true democracy respects the expectations of the Western founders of the concept, not the will of unthinking lesser peoples that happen to call themselves citizens of the many lesser countries found dotted around this planet. We are simply beneficiaries of an exported system and our role is to appease the exporters of the concept we all so much cherish, not to do as we may wish.

An election outcome that does not recognise the objectives of Western powers must by definition be fraudulent.
All things remaining equal for the Zimbabwean election, with Tsvangirai coming out victorious, there is no doubt that the whole electoral process would be lauded as the best thing ever to happen to Africa — a super-shining arbiter of civilised conduct. Even Tsvangirai would never raise anything about the voters’ roll or Nikuv.

The absence of a Tsvangirai victory brings into question the legitimacy of the electoral process itself, regardless of the known fact that Tsvangirai would not make it even as an election agent for the most junior of Western politicians.

Westerners know that when Tsvangirai wears his sun hat to go out campaigning there is nothing meaningful he does with his head, apart from giving the hat a free ride; but they expect us Africans to see a genius in the man — even to vote for him.

We are told the West will keep illegally sanctioning our country “until the will of the people of Zimbabwe is realised,” and that will can only be realised with a Western-preferred electoral outcome. We have an international system that congratulates itself as capable of bringing freedom to us all — a freedom we are supposed to want willingly or not because it is the only thing good for us.

It is a system that always comes in the name of happiness but in the end it will always attain its oppressive goals.
We have a Western system that preaches freedom and liberty and simultaneously takes away the very means of fully realising them.

The democratisation of lesser nations by the West is an exercise full of contradictions. It is a successor of the colonial system, designed to educate us into dumbness, to teach us how not to think, to addict us to aid welfare systems that keep us in a permanent state of poverty, to promote among us religious establishments which are going to send us all to hell, and to foster on us egalitarian constitutions that maintain inequality among us.
Our urban Zimbabwean population projects this system, and there is no doubt that following Zanu-PF’s landslide victory there have been pockets of despair in Harare and Bulawayo, negative self-perceptions and a deep sense of frustration.

This is mainly because the hegemony system of the West is enshrined into the capitalist socio-economic structure normally prevalent in urban set-ups. Our urban population is trapped mentally and often knows better.

We cannot be forced to accept a system that breeds poverty and dependency, and we cannot allow ourselves to be victims of IMF economic advisors that end up helping themselves to us, rather than helping us — the kind of advisors that wanted Tendai Biti to have Zimbabwe declared a Highly Indebted Poor Country, precisely to allow the system to model us into a fully dependent country whose only contribution to the world economy is labour provision.

Biti could not wait to have Zimbabwe approved a HIPC country at his instigation.
The biggest problem facing both the young defeated MDC politicians and their youthful urban supporters is identity.
We have a people trying to find identity in a democratic system imported from faraway Western capitals, responding by trying to prove to the Western folk that we understand best the idea of democracy. We have a people that believe the country’s success is measured by impressive reports on freedoms and liberties, and they believe economic empowerment of indigenous citizens is a primitive way of practising dangerous populism.
Democratic success measured by things like media reforms and all sorts of freedoms and liberties does not bring satisfaction and peace, and this is for the simple reason that people do not eat media reforms or liberties, and that free and fair elections do not employ people, for all the virtues carried by these concepts.

Instead of our young people falling over each other trying to impress the white folk that we can do it as good as they do in the West, we must be caught up in succeeding as a total way of life. We must not fear unemployment. Rather we must fear failure to create employment for ourselves. We must become obsessive and compulsive about owning what belongs to us, namely our natural resources and all the value that can ever be added to them.

In this post-colonial era we must not see allies in those whose objective is to restore their hegemony over us. Rather we must have a feeling of pressure, a feeling that imminent disaster is pursuing us at all times.

It is not a wise thing to seek acceptance by those whose objective is our subjugation, and precisely this is why the opinion of Westerners over our political affairs must by definition be of no consequence.

We must deal decisively with the troublesome ache of inferiority resulting from our badly hurt sense of pride. We seem to regard acceptance by white people as a measure of legitimacy. It is not.

The West does not accept the independent and if we so desire to be accepted by this folk we may as well be wishing for Western domination. Whoever is giving the Westerners the feeling that their illegal sanctions on Zimbabwe are an arbiter of our international worth must revise such myopic political strategies. It is tragic.

Our political path is not a path of appeasing murderous sanctions imposers. It is a path of legitimising our authority over the affairs of our country — asserting ourselves as the sole custodians of our social, political and economic future.

The white man has for a very long time told us that we are no good and some of us work very hard to prove that he is right. We lose elections because we are clearly unelectable and we discredit the election to confirm the Western thesis that says democracy and African politics are incompatible.

When George W. Bush robbed Al Gore of electoral victory the latter did not seek foreign funding to prove to the world that his country had endorsed a sham election.

It is when our unelectable politicians fail to come to terms with the concept of losing that we want to prove right the white notion that says we are a divided and uncivilised lot.

Zanu-PF must not allow its leadership to be drawn into the temptation of bourgeois nationalism. We cannot emulate the white mentality of perceiving the condition of our people as a result of their moral failings.

It is very easy for well-fed nationalists to think that the most pressing need for our less fortunate people is a lesson in our heroic liberation history, and a lesson in the evils of colonial history, and a lesson in political morality.

When all our people in Zimbabwe realise that we have a heart-rending liberation history, and that we are coming from the ruthless fangs of colonial brutality, and that it is morally wrong to wine and dine with former colonial masters, oh, what a great dream will have come true!

Our condition will only change for the better when we learn ways of restoring our dignity and not necessarily our collective memory, and precisely this is why every election promise on economic empowerment must be fulfilled without excuse or failure, and with no compromises designed to appease those avowed to see our failure. Mere knowledge, values, morality, though of great importance are not going to be enough to extract us from the demon of poverty. We stand possessed by the demon we are fighting, and this is why many among us are scared of the indigenisation programme. We simply find it incomprehensible that an economy of today’s world can be successful under the control of our own people, and we have already started hearing of returning white commercial farmers coming back at the invitation of lazy and lousy land beneficiaries smitten by the age-old ache of inferiority.

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

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

You Might Also Like

Comments

Take our Survey

We value your opinion! Take a moment to complete our survey