The Sunday Mail
Part 2
As part of the Ministry of Information, Publicity and Broadcasting Services’ month-long Heroes and Defence Forces commemorations under the auspices of Zimbabwe’s Heroic Friends and Defence Allies, Richard Runyararo Mahomva (RM) sat down with Ambassador Christopher Mutsvangwa (CM) to discuss how Zimbabwe’s journey to independence was supported by African liberation movements. Cde Mutsvangwa is a seasoned pioneer Zimbabwean diplomat, ZANU PF Secretary for Information and Publicity, and chairperson of the Zimbabwe National Liberation War Veterans Association (ZNLWVA).
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RM: Many neoliberal-inclined proponents have labelled Zimbabwe as a crisis-ridden nation or failed state. What is your take on that?
CM: This week (last week) saw the death of Mikhail Gorbachev, the last President of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR).
His rule saw the hastened, if haphazard, collapse of the former Soviet Union in 1989.
The victorious West celebrated this epochal event with gleeful triumphalism.
President George Bush seized the moment to revive a post-imperial hegemony to bring back erstwhile colonies and resource countries into their fold.
Iraq was invaded by America.
As a trade-off, Tony Blair of Britain expected his ally George Bush to support him in the British invasion of Zimbabwe.
The impending spectre of war even spawned a new jingoism among some local white citizens.
Professor Tony Hawkins took a sabbatical from teaching at the University of Zimbabwe.
He headed for Iraq so he could take part in the ongoing invasion and gain first-hand experience.
Indeed, a deeds rehearsal for military action in a Zimbabwe much coveted by Britain.
In the event, the evil desire of Tony Blair turned out to be a bridge too far.
London had not gambled with the new sub-regions and geopolitical realities ushered in by the seminal victory of the national liberation movement of Southern Africa.
Years of struggles against settler minority rule, apartheid and racism had bonded peoples of the region.
Beyond neighbourly links were a brand-new “political soul” acquired in shared battlefield trenches since the 1960s resurgent African nationalism of post-World War II.
George Bush would fly into South Africa in 2004 banging the drums of war.
President Mbeki of South Africa pushed back as a sub-regional power, a stance unthinkable had the Pretoria apartheid minority rule fascists sustained their rule.
Other SADC nations equally rejected this diabolic enterprise against a founding fellow member.
This notwithstanding the glaring asymmetry in military means that could be marshalled by the foremost NATO alliance powers of global Anglo-Saxonia.
Labelled an imminent threat to American foreign policy, Zimbabwe was henceforth roasted and roiled by onerous sanctions.
Their impact aggravated by the historical economic alignment to the former imperial nations of the West.
The European Union joined America’s Zimbabwe Democratic and Economic Recovery Act of 2002.
Chester Crocker (former Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs in the Reagan Presidency) infamously implored the American Congress for an onerous sanctions regime that would make Harare’s economy scream.
In the process, a pummelled and cowed population would be forced to reject ZANU PF, the party of the Zimbabwe Revolution.
Lest it be lost, Chester Crocker was married to a Zimbabwean of white colonial stock.
Thus he had a personalised antipathy to the Land Reform that had dispossessed ill-gotten and looted tracts of land since the 1896-7 military conquest by arch-imperialist Cecil John Rhodes.
Undeterred, Tony Blair resorted to seeking a Chapter Seven mandate from United Nations so he could lead to an invasion of Zimbabwe.
This time around, South Africa masterminded a veto from Russia and China, the like-minded and long-time allies and supporters of national liberation movements of Southern Africa.
Zimbabwe thus escaped the calamity of a war that would have turned it to toast by ferocious bombing led by the NATO military kingpins of London and Washington.
The bedrock of resistance to war was a united and steadfast SADC, that successor to the former Frontline States of the National Liberation Movement.
Indeed, a friendly neighbourhood that acquired a political soul as the shared struggle tempered them in cogent unity.
The attempts at divide-and-rule have yet to be abandoned even as they hit a stone wall of repeated failure.
The contrived false nationalism as xenophobia in South Africa speaks of insidious efforts to somehow prise South Africa away from the mother Continent.
Another dimension to false nationalistic xenophobia is the intimidating prospect that Zimbabwe may yet succeed to turn around its economy in a spectacular revival of its fortunes.
The conjuring of Zimbabwe as a failed nation-state spawned a sustained campaign of support of domestic quislings and sell-outs of all stripes and hue.
Their purpose being to augment the depredations of onerous Western sanctions.
The Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions (ZCTU) was the first convert to the political economy of self-hate and suicide.
More painful to fathom when one considers that it is the national liberation movement that begot workers trade unions as of 1980.
Prior to majority rule independence, trade unions were proscribed by settler racist minority rule.
Aping the Lech Walesa model of Poland, the ZCTU abandoned the quest for workers’ welfare.
It was not long before it pupated to a full-fledged party that became a tool of post-imperialists. It glaringly overlooked the fact that the headlong and reckless embrace of ZDERA sanctions and other sanctions by the West would shatter factories and eject workers.
Thereafter it would be impossible to organise trade unions once workers are removed by dysfunctional factories.
Today, the ZCTU is a remnant carcass of a workers’ organisation.
Their treacherous calls for an uprising fall on the deaf ears of informal workers, their sanctions folly ejected from structured industry.
If ever there was a curse of the old adage of lifting a big stone to dropping it on one’s feet!!
The Second Republic of President Emmerson D Mnangagwa is reversing the trend through its mantra Zimbabwe Is Open for Business.
He is riding a wave of systemic attraction of both domestic and foreign direct investment.
Sulking capital from the sanctioneering West is foregoing investment and trading opportunities to more intrepid capital from China, India, Eurasia and the Middle East.
The tantalising resources in mining, agriculture and tourism are whetting appetites of global class and even first-tier companies.
We have Tsingshan Holdings Group deepening and widening its investment portfolio of ferrochrome on the Great Dyke, coking coal in Hwange and now multi-million tonne steel plant in Manhize.
A similar story is playing out in the important lithium sector.
None other than Elon Musk, the entrepreneur of Tesla new energy electric vehicles-NEEVs, has dubbed lithium processing as a “licence to print money”.
Three top players have lost no time to snap up lucrative deposits at Goromonzi Prospect by Huayou Lithium, Buhera MxMind by Shengxin Lithium and the age-old Bikita Lithium by Sinomines.
It is only a matter of time before Harare in a twin relationship with Maputo embark on lithium storage battery production, as NEEVs displace fossil fuel diesel and petrol in global transport mobility.
The grapevine says concrete steps to this goal are already afoot.
Quite revealing is the tally of nearly US$700 million transaction of mergers and acquisition in the lithium sector.
They mark a new high watermark in the country’s history of mining mergers and acquisition.
They announce a President EDM who is plying the vaunted mineral riches to world-class capital.
Varun Pepsi, the premier bottler of Pepsi soft drinks, saw the advent of President EDM as a golden chance to ginger their long-stalled push into the Zimbabwe market.
In a short three years, they have gobbled the lion’s market share with ever-increasing production lines.
Zimbabwe is now poised to be their launchpad of the SADC sub-region.
In Muzarabani, fingers are expectantly crossed as Invictus readies its petroleum drilling rigs.
This investment bears a new, if pleasing, hallmark of capital from the West, specifically from London, the arch-proponent of sanctions.
One hears of musings by American electricity power generation companies testing the waters treading into our thermal, hydro, solar and even gas electricity production.
Zimbabwe’s educated, proficient and disciplined labour force has hitherto scoured the globe in search of businessmen in foreign lands so they could make a living.
They have proved that our human resource is as convertible and rewarding as the American dollar. With the slew of inward investments, tables are being turned.
President EDM is the new darling of global class entrepreneurial flair.
Resultantly, jobs are now being created at home so our labour can ply their trade as Zimbabwe strives to produce world-class goods and services destined for the discerning global market.
We are poised to outgrow the curse of trading raw material exports as we scale up to high-value beneficiated products and services.
That way, we do away with yet another collateral damage of sanctions.
The past two decades have witnessed the stasis and decay in urban livelihoods and welfare.
MDC-CCC alacrity saw them harvest the wrath of workers’ dissatisfaction in a sanctions-afflicted economy.
Lost jobs converted to electoral success in favour of MDC, the party initially relying and riding onto the bandwagon of the hijacked workers’ union, ZCTU.
This would deal devastating blows to towns.
Shallow, lacking neither vision nor direction, is the emblematic hallmark of MDC-CCC on mayors and councillors, the raft of cities and towns.
Putrid decay smells to kilometres afar.
It is now beyond two decades of MDC-CCC parties of urban electoral ascendancy.
The slate of their rule is devoid of any serious business investment.
There is thus no global brands of any note emanating from Zimbabwe’s industry.
Labour migration ensued as our city fathers watched factories being rented out as havens of Pentecostal worship.
Uncollected garbage stank as roads were reclaimed by unattended potholes, turning them into flowing streams during heavy summer rains.
Twenty-two years have seen blind councils sit akimbo as rural-to-urban migration stretched unmaintained and outgrown service provision.
All over the world, investment seeks home and incentives of local government authorities.
That is what gives cities and towns their vitality.
This basic rationale of urban existence has never bottomed on the crass ignorance of MDC-CCC elected councillors.
Learning nothing and forgetting nothing, they chorus like crows the blame game against central Government.
Charity should surely begin at home.
Had they run their electoral districts well, the cities would be glimmering.
They would be samples of competence if the party were to be voted to the apex of national executive authority. Like moles that never see daylight, the MDC-CCC town fathers have never realised an opportunity, let alone pursue it.
Nature by its own cause abhors a vacuum.
As the Zimbabwe neo-colonial project dalliance with the sanctions dead end organised labour came to political and governance nought, the West turned to another ruse.
Zimbabwe, a country of 15 million, has the world highest number of non-governmental organisations (NGOs).
They operate under cover of various feigned tasks and causes.
Their purpose being to usurp the role of elected governance.
It is common cause that capital markets that are the venerated stock exchanges of London, New York, Frankfurt, Tokyo, Seoul, Shanghai are the lynchpin of national economic progress.
NGOs are minutely peripheral to economic activities in these developed nations.
For goodness sake, why do they clamour for an invented role in the wellbeing of Zimbabwe’s economic and social welfare when they have no case studies of similar engagement in their countries of financial sponsorship?
Under the guise of charity, they don the garb of political witches.
The PVO Bill must quickly and promptly be passed regardless of any gnashing of teeth by the post-imperial West.
It’s a confounding aberration that those who plundered, enslaved and colonised at the Berlin Conference can teach us about democracy and human rights.
All the more unpalatable as they refuse to atone for a miscreant past of heinous horrors.
They are even yet to broach reparations of restorative justice.
In the meantime, President EDM continues to turn each day into a packed and grinding schedule of hard work.
He has revived hope and pride in our patriotic quest for deserved national prosperity.
He is busy dusting and retooling the machinery of the ZANU PF party of the Revolution.
Soon he will host a newly minted party organ from the crucible of the Veterans of the National Liberation War of the 1960-70s.
Very timely indeed.
These venerable surviving visionaries of a generation of heroic sacrifice.
Their forte lies in how they conscientised our national populace, organised, structured and united them through the epic conduct of a People’s War against a vaunted Rhodesian catspaw of the British Imperial Army.
Thereafter President Mnangagwa will superintend the once-in-five-years Party Congress, a final act of honed preparations for the 2023 National Harmonised Elections.
The opposition that continues to flaunt foreign tutelage has all reasons to cower and shudder as the Nyika Inovakwa neVene Vayo train rolls onto the national electoral stage.
By the way, it may now be just the hour for the perfidious West to rue their two decades of illegal sanctions.
President EDM of ZANU PF and his Second Republic are simply unstoppable.
