Cde Trump, remove those damn evil sanctions!

PHEW! What a week!

We had barely recovered from tremors of the political earthquake in neighbouring Botswana, where the ruling Botswana Democratic Party lost its 58-year grip on power, when we witnessed yet another remarkable political story — this time in the United States.

Last week, Donald Trump etched his name in gold in the annals of US political history by becoming the second American president since Grover Cleveland — who served as the 22nd president after the 1884 election and the 24th president after his re-election in 1894 — to make a sensational political comeback after initially facing the ignominious prospect of being a one-term president.

Trump’s defeat to Joe Biden in 2020, especially after an eventful term of office from 2017, led many to believe the maverick and controversial tycoon had been condemned and consigned to the dustbin of political history.

By hook and crook, the political establishment threw everything but the kitchen sink to ensure that he would never find his way back to the White House.

The US political establishment threw everything but the kitchen sink to ensure that Donald Trump would never find his way back to the White House

Instead, they wanted his path to lead to either jail or hell. Kikikiki.

In the years leading up to last week’s watershed elections, they showered Trump with bad press and all manner of trumped-up charges (no pun intended), which were carefully crafted to cast him as an abominable pervert, misogynist, racist, criminal and thoroughly inept individual that the world could do without.

It all climaxed on May 30 this year, when he was convicted of 34 felony counts of falsifying business records to conceal a US$130 000 payment made to buy the silence of a porn star, Stormy Daniels, whom he reportedly once had a roll in the hay with.

To compound his woes, he faced three other felony indictments, which, however, would naturally fade away as he assumes office.

But the trials and tribulations he has faced, endured and survived are many, including two impeachments and allegations of sexual abuse, as well as investigations into potential ties to Russia and plotting to overturn an election.

In all this, he earned himself the dubious distinction of being the first American president to be charged and convicted of felony charges, the first American president to be perp-walked and the first American president to have a mug shot taken for a criminal case.

Suffice to say, the list of his supposed transgressions was as long as the Mississippi or Zambezi River.

And then there were attempts on his life, including that famous July 13 bid to kill him in Butler, Pennsylvania, where a bullet fortuitously whizzed past his head, taking a chunk of his right ear with it.

Had he not turned his head at the exact moment the bullet was supposed to hit, it would have been catastrophic.

They say Trump was saved by divine providence, which, with current developments, now seems plausible.

The dodgy circumstances around the shooting still stink to high heaven.

Now, imagine what would have been the world’s reaction if a main opposition challenger in general elections in Africa was subjected to the same treatment.

The government would have been condemned as a rogue regime, while the polls would definitely have been declared not free and fair. Or worse.

All this was happening to a country that prides itself as a paragon of democracy and virtue.

Paragons my foot! Hypocrites!

Matthew 23:27-28 says: “Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You are like whitewashed tombs, which look beautiful on the outside but on the inside are full of the bones of the dead and everything unclean.

“In the same way, on the outside you appear to people as righteous but on the inside you are full of hypocrisy and wickedness.”

A new world order

Notwithstanding the seemingly insurmountable odds staked against him, Trump staged a momentous political comeback by first clinching the nomination of the Republican Party, which was no mean feat considering the potential fallout after the 2020 electoral loss.

To counter the bad press in the mainstream media, he had to wield the witchcraft of innovative new media technologies to get his message across.

He now holds an overwhelming mandate, especially after outpolling Kamala Harris by close to four million votes.

Well, this shows that people are not interested in being led by saints, or those who pretend to be saints, but by fallible human beings who have the same frailties as themselves.

But this heralds the beginning of a new epoch for the world; hopefully, one where the world hastily backtracks from the precipice of World War III, which was becoming increasingly imminent.

There has to be an end to the slaughter in Gaza, where Israel has killed more than 43 000 people, most of them women and children.

There has to be an end to the Russia-Ukraine conflict.

The guns must also be silenced in Sudan, Ethiopia and across the world.

Nothing good can ever come from the sabre-rattling and current bloodshed, which Washington at times implicitly and explicitly encourages.

During the next Trump administration, we are likely to see an America that is more inward looking and not obsessed with lighting up little fires around the world, as is currently the case.

In fact, the cornerstone or plinth of the incoming administration’s foreign policy was recently summarised by J.D. Vance, the vice president-elect, when he said: “We have built a foreign policy of hectoring and moralising and lecturing countries that don’t want anything to do with it.

“The Chinese have a foreign policy of building roads and bridges and feeding poor people.

“I think we should pursue a foreign policy, a diplomacy of respect and a foreign policy that is not rooted in moralising; is rooted in the national interest of this country . . .”

This will definitely be welcomed by the world.

In his first term in the White House, Trump announced a 22 percent cut to some diplomacy and foreign assistance programmes, which in most cases were nothing more than covert and subversive extraterritorial activities in targeted countries, particularly those that are considered adversaries.

Here, in our teapot-shaped Republic, we still bear scars of Washington’s 23-year-old sanctions, which, due to time and circumstances, are now untenable.

A little bird once told Bishop Lazi how we nearly made a diplomatic breakthrough to have sanctions lifted under the Trump administration, only for the lobby to be scuttled by bureaucrats at the US State Department.

In the US, differences in policy between the White House and State Department are usually common.

For your information, some of these bureaucrats include neoconservative apparatchiks such as Jendayi Frazer and those diplomats who dismally failed in their previous assignments to effect regime change in Zimbabwe.

They still feel they have unfinished business with Zimbabwe.

Momentum

But we must double down our engagement with Washington, taking advantage of the propitious new developments on the political front.

The International Conference on Sanctions, Business and Human Rights that will be convened in Geneva, Switzerland, next week at the behest of the UN Special Rapporteur on the negative impact of unilateral coercive measures on the enjoyment of human rights, Alena Douhan, should provide the platform to build the much-needed momentum for the anti-sanctions lobby.

Through his foreign policy that is premised on economic diplomacy, President ED has made tremendous headway.

On March 4 this year, Biden terminated the US Zimbabwe sanctions programme by unblocking all individuals, entities and property that had been blocked under that authority.

He, however, imposed Global Magnitsky sanctions on 11 individuals and three entities.

But the sanctions have to be removed in toto as they are illegal.

Removing sanctions on Zimbabwe, whose economy is already performing above regional averages despite current encumbrances, will make it fly, adding impetus to the ongoing industrialisation and modernisation drive, as well as lifting millions out of poverty.

So, Cde Trump, remove those damn evil sanctions.

Bishop out!