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October 25 is upon us; a mere three days to go. On the day, the whole of SADC and Africa will express themselves against America’s punitive, illegal sanctions against Zimbabwe, and will do so in whatever form and by whatever means they deem necessary.

Against what happened at the just-ended UN General Assembly, where these illegal sanctions were roundly condemned, it is clear America is finally getting the message, however obdurate the State Department and Congress might pretend to be. 

The beast is stirring; they should not be any let up. On its part, Zimbabwe must take decisive decisions which makes it plain to corporate America that there is much to be lost, little to be got, when their Government continues to be senselessly hostile to our small, great and rich country. America must continue to count the costs of its ill-advised policies here, including by way of foregone opportunities and preferences.

 Whatever happens, we have minerals …

Whatever happens, we have lithium, platinum, uranium, among many other strategic minerals, which America and the rest of the West need and do not have.

These, in combination, become our maximum gun in the current fight against America’s coercive measures.

In any case, the world has gone multipolar: geopolitically, geo-economically and geo-technologically.

Shakespeare’s character, Coriolanus, put it so well, as ingrate Rome — his home — banished him from its gates for life, and did so against its better judgment.

As Coriolanus cursed, walked away and left for self-exile, he execrated:

“You common cry of curs! whose breath I hate

As reek o’ the rotten fens, whose loves I prize

As the dead carcasses of unburied men

That do corrupt my airs, I banish you;

And here remain with your uncertainty!

Despising,

For you, the city, thus I turn my back:

There is a world elsewhere!”

There is a world elsewhere!

Let America “remain with [her] uncertainty!”, while Coriolanus-like, Zimbabwe declares, “I banish you”, “There is a world elsewhere”, as she leaves Uncle Sam’s orbital gate, already besieged by rising China, Russia, the Indians, all of them gunning for an alternative world order and enlightened global leadership. And a vast world elsewhere there is. 

We can only trip ourselves as we trudge away, step into a vast world ahead, well away from America’s extrajudicial sanctions.

Asia beckons; Latina America beckons; Africa beckons; above all, independent-minded Europe is dying for an embrace, as does corporate America, well away from its madding Government, Congress and its State Department.  

Like we saw when the Queen died, even United Kingdom has realised the folly of hidebound policies against Zimbabwe.

In all these hemispheres, subcontinents, countries and sectors, Zimbabwe must find beneficial interstices, within which to snugly relocate and settle advantageously.

 America now admits to sanctions

To deflect what is increasingly untenable, the American Govt for the first time has publicly admitted its illegal sanctions are hurting Zimbabwe.

“We are aware that because of the depth of the problems and the duration of this programme, there probably are a lot of companies who believe that doing business in Zimbabwe is just too difficult.

And that does cost opportunities for the people of Zimbabwe. 

Whether that’s the result of the underlying mismanagement and corruption, or whether our sanctions add to it, that’s something we are willing to talk with companies about, because we do want legitimate businesses to be able to do legitimate business in places.

And that’s true anywhere around the world, including in Zimbabwe.” These are the words of American Ambassador James O’Brien, speaking for the US State Department, only a few days ago.

 

Mukuru haasiye bhachi padare

We have a Shona saying here: mukuru haasiye bhachi padare. Roughly translated, it means: however badly an elder loses a case in court, he should still be allowed the time and dignity of unhooking his jacket, and resuming it as he limbs away! 

I notice Trevor Ncube’s editorially American-dependent publications have been forced to climb down, even then balancing off illegal sanctions they have always denied, against corruption they have always alleged as the sole problem with this country! 

They are not the old man and his jacket I refer to. Mere stooges. As always, vassals are torqued to the master; they know no dignity, particularly as the puppeteer makes a sharp, unexpected U-turn. By all this is small beer; let’s turn to the master.

 Let America find a fig leaf

The Shona saying I quoted above simply recognises that defeat for the high and mighty must not lead to outright humiliation.

They must be afforded some fig leaf, some modicum of dignity as they walk away in defeat.

It is not hard to see the fig leaf, the face-saving verbiage Ambassador O’Brien inserts and by which he couches his response. 

Let’s grant America the dignity to resume her jacket. The pith of her message is clear enough; this is what matters to us.

Those of us inside, already know overtures which the American Establishment has been frantically making to Zimbabwe, variously.

Far from daft, it sees and reads the writing on the wall: that its political cat’s paw here —Chamisa — is headed for some sound drubbing, come 2023.

Trooping for accommodation

Even America’s tenacious acolyte — Tendai Biti — is reaching out to us for accommodation. He is not alone.

Hwende, too, is making fillers, as does Welshman Ncube, and several other high-ranking Triple C officials so fed up with Chamisa. 

In typical fashion of an organisation in atrophy, officials are quietly cutting deals, hoping to surprise and outflank each other.

They have realised their supposed Goliath, is not just shivering; he has no arms; or armed sling.

All he has are a multitude of emissaries, each carrying his message of peace and re-engagement.

Hark, I risk breaching the oath to which I am sworn! My focus is the American Establishment.

Seamless anti-sanctions campaign

That the State Department found it worth their while to convene a global press conference on Zimbabwe, barely ahead of October 25, shows SADC and Africa’s lobbying has been impactful.

The State Department will forever hate the month of September, for coming before that of October and the date 25th. 

That time series allows Africa to mount a seamless campaign against these illegal sanctions, right from the high lectern of UNGA to the streets of Harare, Dar es Salaam, Lilongwe, Kinshasa, Windhoek, Pretoria, Lusaka and numberless other African capitals.

The press conference was thus both pre-emptive and abortively meant to diffuse this seamless build-up towards a crescendo.

Scrapping for sparse global goodwill

Diplomatic pressure and the pre-election alignment of national political opinion quite apart, America realises it can no longer afford to squander sparse international goodwill through irrational and bigoted attachment to those neo-liberal values it has never itself upheld, whether at home or abroad. 

America has never been a bastion of those liberties in waves, both at home and globally.

It my shout itself hoarse about those same liberties, flaunt or pretend to live by them; but the world has long known this is sheer humbuggery.

America spectacularly falls short, far short of the very standards it claims for itself, and uses to justify persecution of nations which will not kowtow to it, its greed and its caprices. 

With its power definitively challenged on all fronts, forcing it to scurry to the United Nations General Assembly it has traditionally reviled for succour, America now needs more friends than ever before, or, at the very least, less enemies. 

Gentle reader, you should have seen how joyous America was with Zimbabwe when Zimbabwe decided to merely abstain from the latest resolution America brought to the General Assembly.

That such a minimalist position generates such joy, shows how things have changed for the erstwhile sole superpower.

Mischaracterising America’s global power

But America also knows that the quick of its global hegemony is now known, exposed. For far too long, the World — including the then USSR — wrongly thought American might resided in its military complex.

True, the military complex completes the power matrix; but it is not decisive. 

What is decisive is American wealth, through its far-flung economic empire and network of economic interests in carved abroad.

Indeed, its military complex has arisen to defend this foundational level of power, which until now the world had never usefully encompassed. 

For far too long, knowledge of this source of American hegemony has always been used to expose the labyrinth of modern, American-led capitalism, in order to make a case for world revolution which Lenin and Trotsky dreamt about. But all this was a scintillating, erectile Utopian which kept the elderly charged in impotent revolutionary rage, thanks to Karl Marx and Frederick Engels!

Discerning the quick of American power

It took China’s Deng Xioping and those after him to realise that glorifying peasant and working class poverty as raw material and triggers for this delectable Utopian Marxist revolution, to countermand American might, would never happen, least of all change global power relations. 

 

What would, the Chinese correctly reasoned, was building industrial State capitalism, and giving it Chinese characteristics, fully backed by a technological wherewithal! America needed to be beaten at its own game — in the market — before it could be challenged militarily.

And in similar fashion, countervailing American power needed critical global success mass, which is why we now have BRICS and the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, with several subcontinents and countries in tow. 

This is where we are, a new situation in which Zimbabwe has had to forge her innovative foreign policy, in order to create a world elsewhere.

The Rome of global capitalism has rejected her, in spite of so many years of feeding “Rome” with the fat of her minerals.

Those with a sense of history know what our chrome did to America, even then at the expense of our freedom struggle, whose core values America pretends to champion worldwide!

Thin Liz is out!

So thin Liz Truss is out, so soon? Left the throne yesterday afternoon, unlamented! The prologue to her departure was Kwasi Kwarteng, the Ghanaian-born British subaltern who made it his mission to fête Britain’s billionaires through tax exemptions, without realising Albion had long drifted into a levelling zeitgeist. Both characters simply detonated British anger, for so long welling and now fully pent-up. It all began with Brexit, further accentuated by an unwanted and unwinnable war in Eastern Europe. 

That stoked a cost-of-living crisis, which finally swept away Mrs Truss and her whole dross. Mrs Truss used a very short statement to announce her resignation, to then walk back into Number 10, dark and powerless, both literally and figuratively. Her 44 days at the helm had been dour, in fact abysmal, something those of us who saw things from afar, felt the British Conservative Party should have detected beforehand. In wry British humour, she never lasted longer than lettuce. Simply, she never had depth, lacked in demeanour, and aggravated it all by turgid communication skills. In sum, she personified plebeian Albion wrongly risen to power.

Two budgets in 44 days!

But to its credit, the British establishment, partly reckoned as Business and its Monetary Authority, stepped in to put in check damage which could have been worse.

With clear support of Corporate Britain, the British Central Bank intervened in the market, to challenge the ill-conceived mini-budget Kwasi had wrought, which Truss for a while embraced.

That terrible budget united friend and foe, the high and low, across class and political divide. 

Even sleepy Joe Biden was unimpressed, dismissing Truss as lacking in depth.

Hoping to salvage her premiership, Liz sacked Kwasi, to replace him with one Hunt.

Hunt moved swiftly to reverse all that Kwasi had done.

But the die had been cast: here was a shallow British Premier who, in 44 short days, had given Albion two budgets, a record truly unmatched in British and human history! Rue Britannia Rue!

Losing power, gaining pound!

Today Liz Truss walks away with a lump sum of £20 000, plus an annual allowance of £115 000 for a short tenure of monumental failure.

You cannot lose the power and the pound at the same time, thanks to Britain’s incorrigible sense of fair play. What comes after her, and how? 

Let me deal with the HOW first! British electoral system is party-based, meaning the party which won general elections retains the right to govern, however fast its incompetent leadership turnover may be.

So the Conservatives which won the General Election under the Turkish-born Boris Johnson, still has to produce Truss’ successor, in order to complete its term. 

 

To do that, the Conservative Party has what it terms the 1922 Committee, which writes the rules for intra-party competition for the top job.

Ordinarily, this is a convoluted process, which is elaborately time-honoured, and which winds up with a plebiscite limited to party members only.

Last time it took more than a couple of months, when the Conservatives could still invent and make time.

When time dies

Not now or anymore! Time is what the Conservatives and the ruined British Economy just do not have.

The governing mandate is fast running out; the Party is at its most misshapen electorally.

It badly needs a leader to reshape and reunite it; to calms its nerves and nerves of the Economy.

Above all, it needs someone to take it to the next general elections which, are already beckoning.

Britannia waives the rules

So, what is the time-saving way out? Simply by editing the rules by which the 1922 Committee sets about scouting for Liz’s successor! Like raising the nomination threshold to circumvent time-wasting shortlisting gradations! The British know when to set aside rules; they, after all, taught us it is the shoes — not the feet — which must fit. And who is running? 

Several, including Boris Johnson, the comeback kid who departed without ever leaving! Pitted against the Indian-born Sunak, his erstwhile Exchequer until his deposition about four months ago. Master at the game, Johnson is already waving Mephistophelian temptations to Sunak, so he turns Sunak into a tag-mate, instead of standing against him. Indians vaunt themselves as the only race to buy from a Scot, sell to a Jew, and still make a profit.

Let’s see how it will have played out by Monday next week. 

In our donkey world, contested mating rights are settled only one way: through vicious bites and kicks. Droit du seigneur — the feudal right of the first night — goes to the jackass which kicks hardest!