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Sam Matema–Correspondent 

The family of nations globally works within the United Nations (UN) framework and targets as captured in the 17 Sustainable Development goals (SDGs) and the 169 targets of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development which was launched in September 2015 at a UN Summit in New York with the express objective of ending poverty in all its forms and manifestations. 

It envisages “a world of universal respect for human rights and human dignity, the rule of law, justice, equality and non-discrimination”.

Goal number 17 speaks to partnerships to achieve the other 16 Sustainable Development Goals. With respect to Partnerships, the state can work with the corporate world, individuals and non-state actors. From the foregoing, it is the role of the non-state actors that needs some interrogation. 

What is their expected roles and how have they carried themselves and fared in different jurisdictions over the years? While their intentions and prescriptions on paper sit well, what obtains on the ground for some NGOs is very worrying, looking at both the intended and unintended consequences. 

Development should be interrogated in the context of all the different capitals — economic, social, political and natural capital.

How have these Non Governmental Organisations (NGOs) carried themselves over the years with respect to their involvement in economic, social, ecological and political matters? 

It is my humble submission that, by and large, they have created more problems than they have provided solutions in their host countries in the Third World and the global south. 

I will use Buhera District as a case in point to hammer home my point. Since the 1980, the different NGOs that have operated in the district have between them, brought in more than US$500 million, but there is nothing on the ground to show for such a huge “investment”. Something is not adding up. The model is wrong. 

Dependency syndrome 

More than anything else, one of the worst problems that NGOs brought to our communities, is the dependency syndrome.

They have not come to build capacity and resilience among communities. In food insecure areas, the thrust should have been to capacitate those areas to adapt to the challenges of the day by investing in building adaptive capacities and resilience in ways that sustain and climate-proof them from the shocks and vagaries of climate change in a manner that is both planned and anticipatory with respect to adaptation. 

Alas, the majority of them want to keep the population trapped in the poverty cycle, and they will appear as the messiah(s) with their food relief efforts. In the process, they build and propagate false narratives meant to project their donor countries as citadels of things democracy and human rights, the human rights abuses in Gaza, Syria, Yemen, the Sudan etc notwithstanding. They destroy with one hand and try to rebuild with another via NGOs that they fund and support. 

Regime change agents 

The principles of neutrality, impartiality and independence are rapidly becoming unrealistic goals in the conduct and operations of many non-state actors. This is a blind spot. Their policies are primarily influenced and driven by the foreign policies of the donor countries and the uni-polar world order championed by the US. 

Tied together with the food relief efforts as a response to food insecurity, NGOs have dabbled into national politics of their hosts. To the extent that there have been cases of campaign messages being packaged together with food packs that are distributed to targeted communities and political markets. 

There are those who have been pushing the human rights ticket, and their funding comes through foreign outlets like USAID, which principally do the bidding of the US and her allies. 

There is serious interference in the internal affairs of many countries in the global South who do not subscribe to the neo-colonial agenda of the global North which is being pushed through the back door via NGOs and foreign funded opposition formations. 

This is done under the guise of democracy, human rights, reforms, etc, and non-state actors are used to champion that cause. 

Social erosion 

The end result and target is to create a group of people that will revolt against the government in defence of some foreign “rights”. 

Stories abound of our youths who are being offered fully funded scholarships through the Gays and Lesbians Association of Zimbabwe (GALZ) if they convert and subscribe to LGBTQ issues and programmes as well as promote the same. How did we get to register such an association in the first place? Gay rights are foreign to our way of life and we need to disinfect our communities of such ills. Square peg in a round hole! 

The foreign funded NGOs, through their human rights forums and other such engagements, are pushing for the legislation of same, and it is in light if such developments that we must stand firm to make sure that these machinations will not see the light of day. 

They speak non-discrimination and human rights, human dignity and justice in a one-size-fits-all fashion and approach. It’s a straight line. Context is everything. A just society is one that fits the norms and values of that society. In our own setting, we have rights which are not absolute and we also have social norms and values that apply to our own environment which are foreign to the Western world. They cannot therefore prescribe what works in their environments in our own setting in a wholesale and straight line manner. It can’t!

Population growth/control 

The Bill Gates of this world are busy pushing for world population control. The West created and continues to create some viruses in their labs, and bring in some control measures under the guise of controlling sexually transmitted infections (STIs). They introduced various birth control measures to make sure that the population of mother Africa is controlled. 

We should never be lost to the fact that population size matters the most in the economics and security sphere. It speaks to many things, market size and all attendant economies of scale. And with respect to Zimbabwe, this is worrying because our population has remained, by and large, stagnant for the past two censuses.

The growth of China, India and Brazil was and is predicated on population growth and therefore market size. The size of their armies is directly tied to population size. There are NGOs and their agencies who came specifically to manage and control births and population under the guise of controlling STIs and unwanted pregnancies. 

In some extreme cases, we have been used as guinea pigs through the donor-funded non-state actors. It is fact that most of these pandemics are manufactured in Western labs as biological weapons with the primary target being Africa. 

Time to act is now 

In light of the aforementioned pitfalls and blind spots, we need to respond and act with the urgency of the moment via the domestication of interventions to the challenges confronting us as a people.

Let us look inwards for solutions. Home-grown solutions are enduring because they are informed by the burden(s) of the locals and therefore address attendant challenges at micro, meso and macro levels that resonate with the people. 

We are endowed with many natural resources which we should get to sweat for the upliftment of the living standards of the majority of our people. The 26th President of the US, Theodore Roosevelt, was very clear; “Do what you can with what you have where you are”. 

The rural industrialisation target through NDS1 could not have been birthed at a strategic time. This is our zero-hour moment, let’s press restart and recalibrate with respect to how we navigate going into the future. 

There is need to regulate these NGOs so that most of their budgets go towards capacitating communities, and sustainability should be at the centre of their interventions and operations with clear deliverables and outcomes. Endless workshops by NGOs secretariat gobbling, in some cases, in excess of 80 percent of the total budget on administrative and not operational issues is a cause for concern. We are not going anywhere on this matter, and we need to act yesterday, right this wrong and align properly. 

We are on our own. The West does not mean well for Africa. When the vectors are not aligned, speed doesn’t matter. The reason why America and the European bloc frantically oppose a United States of Africa is because they know that we will stand up to them in a very effective way as a united front. 

The real reason why Col Muammar Gaddafi was killed is because he was very clear and resolute in pushing the United States of Africa agenda. He became a serious threat to the dominance and abuse of America and her allies. 

NGOs were used to push the human rights abuses and lack of democratic space narrative in Libya etc, that culminated in the toppling of Col Gaddafi.  

Seeing near and far 

This is critical, we need to be strategic. We should be able, before we take a decision, to dissect, interrogate and ventilate the matter so that our decisions are informed by facts and sustainable as well. We should glean into the future on the back of ability to seek the opinion of history. 

Are the Libyans better off without Gaddafi? A big NO. But it’s already too late. The Libyans were sold a dummy. They fell for it hook line and sinker. Sad! 

We are alone, we are on our own, but awakening from the deep slumber alive now to the indisputable fact that we are our own liberators, and that it takes a collective to take Zimbabwe and Africa on a path to development and prosperity without undue influence and lectures from NGOs whose funders and handlers are largely the US which was largely built by the sweat and blood of slaves, and her allies in Europe whose preoccupation is to export wars, loot from Africa and stifle her own development. 

In unity and peace, we will develop towards the crystallisation and actualisation of Vision 2030 as we celebrate 44 years of independence in Buhera District alive to the fact that there are non-state actors out there who don’t mean well to Zimbabwe. 

Hon Sam Matema is the MP for Buhera Central constituency and ZANU PF Manicaland Province Spokesperson, and writes here in his personal capacity