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Sacrilege against empire
Mandela became the shibboleth, the standard, against which to measure African rule. After Mandela came little Mandelas in white eyes, by way of Thabo Mbeki and Jacob Zuma. The former was one until he started pecking on white interests, asking irreverent questions. The latter was okay until he began to place the issue of inequities on the governance table. And to suggest both men were beginning to ape Mugabe’s vision is just too much for white liberals to admit. For to say so is to acknowledge Mugabe, itself a sacrilegious act against the empire. Rather, it is safer to pit Mandela’s successors against a myth the whites created and nick-named Mandela. Equally, to avoid ever giving decency to Mugabe’s argument, you exculpate Zuma by pleading apartheid legacy as if Ian Smith and his UDI left no baneful legacy here! The chickens are coming home to roost. Too soon, too. Welcome, Mr Peter Hain.

Conditions never to be met

Barack Obama

Chairman of the American Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, one Bob Corker, has written to the Obama Administration urging it against supporting Zimbabwe’s bid to clear its arrears, and to secure new lines of credit from International Financial Institutions like the IMF, the World Bank and even the African Development Bank. His communication, dated January 28, 2016, and addressed to Jacob Lew, US Secretary of the Treasury, sets conditions to be met by Zimbabwe before the US can reconsider its stance against the country.

Some are nebulous (free press, free speech, free assembly, respect for private property); others downright oppositional and provocative (accounting for allegedly missing diamond revenues and putting in place a “credible” plan for capturing future revenues, acknowledging alleged human rights abuse, including fatalities in the disturbances at early Independence, and the alleged disappearance of Itai Dzamara. It is desiderata which is calculated to ensure the “conditions” are not only not met, but rebuffed.

A calculated provocation. The conditions are highly intrusive; they are coordinated with oppositional elements here; they are calculated to undermine the Unity Accord, and to impute blame on Government for one missing person. Government has since obliged this self-fulfilling prophecy: it has flatly dismissed the conditions.

Retaining goodwill of victim
But a nuanced reading is required. It would be wrong to conflate the views of Corker with those of the Administration. Equally, it would be wrong to read the communication of the Senatorial official outside the thinking that is regnant in the American establishment. Or to overstretch the import and significance of the subsequent delisting of two local banks from sanctions measures. The key thing is to read America’s sophisticated assault on Zimbabwe, an assault designed to cause maximum damage to the country, while retaining the goodwill of the Zimbabwean public, more so as we move closer to the year of elections.

Bob Corker

Hating normalcy
Key to grasping the import of Corker’s communication is correctly highlighting areas of US stress in its buffeted relationship with Zimbabwe. The lodestar of that relationship is land reform: principally for the sake of white former farmers, and for what it says about Zimbabwe’s commitment to private property rights, themselves the cornerstone of American foreign policy and domestic values. Everything else is subordinate and designed towards this key consideration.

In seeking to remove the “extraordinary, unusual and continuing threat” that Zimbabwe allegedly poses to its policy, America fears normalcy in Zimbabwe, normalcy assured by a successful re-engagement with the western world, and by economic recovery. Such an auspicious turn of events would “significantly alter internal political dynamics” inside the country, a reference to a consolidation of Zanu-PF dominance which America does not want or welcome, and a further erosion of oppositional support ahead of 2018 which America finds too painful to accept.

The trouble is that America has become a vicarious opposition in Zimbabwe. The Corker letter is a plea to the Obama administration to support the opposition by not supporting Zimbabwe’s economic recovery which is seen as redounding to Zanu-PF politically. In practical terms, it is a call to enforce ZDERA more forcefully, ahead of 2018 to ensure the economy takes a turn for the worse, hopefully to alienate the voter from Zanu-PF, hopefully towards the opposition. And it is now known which horse America is supporting.

America and opposition
To aid this shift in voter attitude, the electoral shift away from Zanu-PF, the Administration must push for more electoral reforms, and for security sector reforms. If you put aside generic issues routine to the opposition, issues I have dismissed as nebulous, you remain with three key points where American preconditions and calculations, and opposition demands and calculations, coincide. These are:

The economy, which the local opposition gaily echoes through the mantra “Zanu-PF cannot rig the economy”;

Electoral reforms which MDC-T sums up as NERA, and around which a grand coalition must be formed and launched;

Security sector reforms which the Americans and British have pushed, often through collaborative efforts of local oppositional researchers, some in sponsored diaspora.

Reawakening pawns
All the three are not being put forward in the hope for any breakthrough. That must never happen. No settlement is anticipated with Zanu-PF. The conditions are meant to be rejected; they are meant to be failed so as to create an all-time instrument and argument for de-legitimation of the electoral process which the weak opposition will lose.

Turning to internal political processes, it is clear America has upped its intrusive politics in Zimbabwe. Her key pawns like Veritas, Zimbabwe Peace Project, Amani Trust, etc, etc, are hard at work, as in 2008. The urban housing demolitions are in full swing, albeit under an MDC-T council. When this is couched as a human rights story, it is the Zanu-PF Government, not MDC-T council, which gets convicted. Even the cholera story is back, with a resonance familiar to the 2008 scenario.

G-Wikileaks
Politically, the strategy has not changed an iota. Of course Mavambo has been renamed People First, all to play Trojan Horse so the Zanu-PF focus moves away from MDC-T which matters to western calculations. The splintered MDC-T is slowly being re-soldered by the Americans, with the strategy being to exaggerate intra-oppositional differences in the hope of engineering a surprise for Zanu-PF.

But unlike in 2008, the two shards out of Zanu-PF, then playing out as Mavambo and then Zapu, will have to happen now in order to reunite before 2018. Mujuru’s PF is now in place, virtually. A Zapu-like follow-up tear-away will soon pass, in the form of G-Wikileaks, not G-40 as the group prefers to call itself. The idea is to have successive break-aways that would leave Zanu-PF anemic and softened for defeat. Expect more exfoliation.

Team America
But there is a key point which is gradually sipping outside the radar. Let it not be forgotten that what really gets Mujuru kicked out of Zanu-PF in 2014 is her hobnobbing with the Americans, as revealed in Wikileaks. That cardinal sin was never expiated, only harbored. But she was not alone, or only with her late husband. The Americans had forged a broad alliance comprising many actors, including serial ones. Those leaks must not be overlooked. They continue to shape events inside and outside of Zanu-PF, often explaining what look like recondite, baffling alliances seemingly with no common denominator.

Other elements in People First were inducted through corporate nexuses. Yet others from as far back as war time. Today they have either coalesced, or are about to. As we move into the future, pretences will fall and open associations will take centre stage. The froth will vanish and clear liquid will show. In the meantime the key propaganda strategy is to attack Zanu-PF in its name, in its values, in its processes and personages. To wrap the assault as ornate, sonorous defense of the same. Typically American, is it not? So sanctions are called ZDERA, Zimbabwe Democracy and Economic Recovery Act. And ZDERA allows you to oppose Zimbabwe’s economic recovery! An evil hour indeed. Now gentle reader, extend the crocodile metaphor and you get the drift.

Icho!

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