The Sunday Mail
Nobleman Runyanga
LAST week, both mainstream and social media were awash with “news” of a survey carried out last month by London-based Sabi Strategies Group on behalf of the Oppenheimer family-owned Brenthurst Foundation.
The survey’s claim that 53 percent of a sample of Zimbabwean voters indicated they would vote for Citizens Coalition for Change (CCC) leader Nelson Chamisa in the 2023 harmonised general elections, while 40 percent would vote for President Mnangagwa excited opposition members, who have been dying for positive news.
Deafening silence
What was interesting was the fact that senior members of the CCC were conspicuous by their deafening silence on the matter.
For those who are familiar with the goings-on in the CCC, this was not surprising.
On November 21 last year, an online news website published a story that indicated that Chamisa’s lieutenants were losing faith in his leadership and were not confident they would win.
The senior CCC members, who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of victimisation, were gravely worried about Chamisa’s poor leadership pedigree.
The disjointed opposition currently does not have a constitution, structures and sound ideology. Given this background, political analysts are, therefore, querying the outlandish findings of the survey.
They easily pointed out the glaring anomalies, which included the fact that it was carried out by phone. However, the report claimed it involved field work, which was conducted during the latter part of last month.
And it also relied on a sample of 1 000 respondents in a country with over 15 million people.
Given that Sabi Strategy Group did not disclose how they sourced the respondents’ phone numbers, it would not be surprising that the entity just picked 1 000 Zimbabweans based in the United Kingdom and claimed they were registered voters resident in Zimbabwe.
The credibility of the report was also exposed by the New York-headquartered global ratings agency Fitch Solutions’ 2023 First Quarter Zimbabwe Country Risk Report, which, on page 28, claims that despite the socio-economic challenges and political contestation in Zimbabwe, “we still expect that ZANU PF will win a comfortable majority in the parliamentary elections in July 2023”.
The world knows that President Mnangagwa has used his incumbency to serve people through various ground-breaking and life-changing programmes.
On the other hand, the CCC has been failing to provide basic services.
Given that Fitch Solutions is in the same league as eminent global credit ratings agencies such as Standard and Poor, which are relied on by institutions such as the World Bank and global investors for political and economic counsel, it is foolhardy for Chamisa and his grouping to place any hope in the little-known Sabi Strategy Group’s advice.
What is the Brenthurst Foundation?
But the question that most people might ask is: What is the Brenthurst Foundation, which instigated the report?
Well, it is a Johannesburg-based think tank established in 2004 by the Oppenheimer family ostensibly to support and operationalise the Brenthurst Initiative to fund African development and organise conferences on African competitiveness.
Its foundation is the Brenthurst Initiative, a 2003 policy paper on South Africa’s Black Economic Empowerment (BEE), which pushed for tax incentives to encourage economic growth and black wealth creation.
Although the foundation is publicly known as an Oppenheimer family initiative, its founder and prime driver is Jonathan Oppenheimer.
Its chairperson is former Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo, while Gregory Mills is its director.
It might be worth remembering that in March 2019, CCC interim vice president Tendai Biti and Obasanjo launched the book titled “Democracy Works” in Harare.
The duo co-authored the book with Mills and Jeffrey Herbst.
The book was published by the London-based Hurst Publishers.
It is, therefore, not surprising that Biti has been travelling the continent on Brenthurst Foundation business, advancing Oppenheimer and the foundation’s imperialistic objectives, which are underpinned by the desire to have unfettered access to the continent’s vast mineral resources.
Oppenheimer’s gold and diamonds
A bit of history about Jonathan Oppenheimer is pertinent here. He is a great-grandson of Ernest Oppenheimer, who first set foot in Cape Town in 1902.
He founded the Anglo American Corporation (AAC) in 1917 as a gold mining company.
He joined South African politics in 1908 and became the mayor of Kimberly and later a legislator in 1924.
His son, Harry, who is Jonathan’s grandfather, was regarded as an opponent of South Africa’s abhorred apartheid system, but he never advocated black rule.
Harry Oppenheimer was credited with preserving and strengthening economic ties between the West and South Africa at the height of apartheid.
It was during this time that United States former Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs, Chester Crocker, was quoted by the “New York Times” stressing the relationship between South Africa and the US
“That country is by its nature a part of the West. It is an integral and important element of the Western global economic system.
“Historically, South Africa is by its nature a part of us,” he said.
In view of the foregoing, it is not surprising that Jonathan Oppenheimer is continuing his grandfather’s legacy of working with the West for his family’s own economic benefit.
His grandparents also worked with colonialist Cecil John Rhodes’ British South Africa Company (BSAC).
Rhodes’ mining company, De Beers, majored in diamonds, while Oppenheimers’ AAC focused on gold.
At some point, AAC owned a third of BSAC.
This explains why, when AAC built its Zimbabwean headquarters in Harare, Charter House, in 1958, the BSAC’s logo was affixed to its façade, which faces the Samora Machel Avenue and Julius Nyerere Way junction.
It also explains why Oppenheimers ended up owning both AAC and De Beers.
So, only fools believe Brenthurst has the advancement of Africans at heart, as it claims.
The foundation uses people like Biti, who think that being used by the Jonathan Oppenheimers of this world against their own people is an achievement.
A regime-change accessory
However, many people would want to know the people behind the Sabi Strategy Group, which carried out the survey.
Its website indicates that “from intelligence and analysis to public opinion polling and stakeholder mapping, SABI’s unique network of sources and experience allows us to deliver first-hand insight that informs powerful, behaviour-changing messages and communication strategies for our clients”.
The entity is headed by communications expert Henry Sands, who leads a team of eight people.
A perusal of profiles of members of Sands’ team lays bare the fact that Sabi Strategy Group is a regime-change outfit, which has been involved in a number of election campaigns to get certain politicians into power in Southern Africa.
The group’s director, Jonathan Moakes, was once a chief strategist of the Democratic Alliance, a South African opposition party.
But ZANU PF is a different kettle of fish.
When one considers Jonathan Oppenheimer’s family history and involvement with Rhodes and the apartheid regime of South Africa, it becomes very clear that he wants ZANU PF replaced by the CCC, which would give him access to Zimbabwe’s vast mineral wealth.
Given his family’s history of working with the West and the South African government’s refusal to be used by the West to unseat ZANU PF, it is evident that his scheme is the West’s alternative regime-change strategy.
While the survey was about local politics and the imminent elections, it was curious that some questions touched on the Russia-Ukraine conflict.
It is clear that the US government is very unhappy that Zimbabwe refused to be forced to take sides in the conflict.
So, the inclusion of the issue was calculated to discredit President Mnangagwa and his Government by giving the impression that ordinary Zimbabweans support the US position.
Anyone who read the survey report picked the desperation in the Sabi Strategy Group to revive Chamisa’s dying political career.
Many in the CCC are agreed that he has failed to provide leadership and strategic direction to the party.
This, coupled with lack of a known election strategy and leadership structures to undergird its campaign ahead of this year’s polls, has caused despondency in the party.
CCC is doomed and facing certain defeat as its constituency remains uninspired.
The claim that 53 percent of Zimbabweans are likely to vote for Chamisa is the West’s desperate attempt to galvanise opposition members around him.
Western leaders could easily have switched their support to Biti, but he is not very close to many people in the party.
Chamisa has isolated himself from his lieutenants and, instead, favours the duo of interim spokesperson Fadzayi Mahere and her deputy, Gift Siziba.
Many mature members of the CCC leadership are reportedly not too excited by the survey because they know that State power is earned through the ballot and not from Western-sponsored phoney surveys.
Elections are not won through entitlement but through serving the people.
Jonathan Oppenheimer, the Brenthurst Foundation and the Sabi Strategic Group’s efforts only serve to expose their desperation of creating and believing their own false propaganda, which was meant to prop up a clueless Chamisa ahead of an election that he has personally worked hard to lose.
