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Herald Reporter

WESTERN multinationals have been sabotaging the development of Sub-Saharan Africa with the aim of perpetuating poverty on the continent and ensuring that Africa is a source of cheap raw materials in perpetuity, a leading Zimbabwean independent commentator has said.

In an interview with South African television news channel, Newsroom Afrika, in Johannesburg, which has shockingly been pulled down, Mr Rutendo Matinyarare laid bare how Western monopoly capital has bled companies like Ziscosteel in Zimbabwe and Eskom in South Africa, to deflate the continent’s industrialisation.

He said the world orbits in an endless race for resources with the dominant capitalist countries going all out to stifle development in developing nations, or those countries that would rather chart an independent path.

“Ziscosteel is in many ways similar to Eskom, it was the biggest iron and steel manufacturer in the southern hemisphere. When we got Independence, the Western countries were not happy to bestow an African nation with the ability to produce iron and the ability to sophisticate iron into military hardware and industrial hardware,” Mr Matinyarare said in an interview that has set the region ablaze.

Drawing parallels between post-independence Zimbabwe, Germany, and Japan post World War 11, Mr Matinyarare said the West has always tried to cripple divergent countries and perpetuate its dominance.

For instance, Mr Matinyarare said, the United States in 1944 proposed the Morgenthau Plan, a plan to weaken Germany following World War II by eliminating its arms industry and removing or destroying other key industries basic to military strength. This included the removal or destruction of all industrial plants and equipment in that country.

Although the Morgenthau Plan was later abandoned, Mr Matinyarare said it was exported to Africa with the objective of making the continent remain under the Western thumb, exploitable and backward.

“This is exactly what is happening at Eskom. Eskom itself was formed by a private monopoly led by Cecil Rhodes’ company, the British South African Company. It created Eskom as a private entity initially where they were providing electricity to a lot of mining industries and with the biggest mining industry in the world, you quickly developed the biggest electricity supplier in the world”.

He said Eskom started consolidating all the smaller electricity suppliers creating one electricity supplier, which was eventually controlled by Anglo-America, a company that Mr Matinyarare alleged became an agent of sabotaging Africa.

Mr Matinyarare dismissed assertions that the current power crisis in South Africa can be traced to the alleged South African state capture in the last 12 years, saying real state capture in that country took place for 130 years under white rule.

“Anglo-America was central to the destruction of Ziscosteel to maintain white monopoly and capture. Whenever a society has a crime against humanity occurring…people are brought to book, people are taken to court and out of society. 

“In South Africa you have a problem in that we have the very same people who perpetuated crimes against humanity still running society, running the media, running banking and perpetuating the apartheid crimes in a modern-day democracy through lies and doing the same things that were done during apartheid. We will never know the truth as long as we have the criminals of apartheid running the economy for the same ends and same purposes, which was the exploitation of resources of this country,” he said.

Mr Matinyarare said in South Africa, Eskom was profitable inasmuch as it enriched the mine owners, who were living for the moment, to the extent that the company is now teetering on the brink of collapse because of a lack of investment.

“What we have now, is we have an Eskom that did not save enough from the services it gave those companies, those profits went to the mining companies that are outside South Africa. Some of them are leaving because the gold is finished, they have taken the profits that should have been channelled to Eskom, that should have been part and parcel of the replacement cost,” he said.

At the end of the day, Mr Matinyarare added, when it became apparent that Eskom was in the doldrums, lenders withdrew their support to State owned enterprises, in a gloved regime change agenda that also seeks to deindustrialise South Africa, with similar intentions on the continent.