The Sunday Mail
THE gates of hell have been swung open in Haiti — a country that is part of a scattering of islands in the Caribbean — and the devil and his acolytes are well and truly on the prowl.
Warlords have now overrun the capital, Port-au-Prince.
To say that Haiti has become a banana republic is an understatement; it is now anything but a republic.
It is a failed state.
After the assassination of President Jovenel Moïse, the 43rd president of Haiti, on July 7, 2021 by a group of 28 highly trained foreign mercenaries, the presidency remains vacant. Worse, the terms of lawmakers have since expired.
As if this is not enough, cholera, a medieval disease, has returned.
The centre cannot hold.
In all this political melee and intrigue, a gang leader, Jimmy “Barbecue” Chérizier, who is a police officer turned gang banger, has seemingly usurped power.
And this chap, who is under sanctions from the United Nations and other countries, is called “Barbecue” for a reason.
They say he sadistically derives pleasure from braaiing his victims.
He is really a piece of work.
You might have seen a grossly disturbing video last week of a Haitian gang member who was happily munching pieces of human flesh he was plucking from a sizzling corpse that had been set on fire.
It made Bishop Lazi sick to the stomach.
While fact-checkers established that it was an old video, believed to have been recorded during clashes between rival gangs a couple of years ago, it still showed the depraved, debased, evil and gratuitous violence that now stains Haiti’s political and social culture.
Where priests fear to tread
For well over a century, this dirt-poor Caribbean nation, which is regarded as the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, has been convulsed by periodic episodes of violence and instability precisely because of its indigence.
Yet, as Bob Marley once sang, the world simply stands aside and looks.
Who cares?
For starters, its people — predominantly descendants of Africans shipped from our continent by Spain and France to be enslaved on plantations on the island — are blacks who are disdainfully viewed by the Western world as the scum of the earth, who innately neither have the agency nor sophistication to run an ordered and productive life.
You see, the Western world, through its far-reaching polished media arsenal, has mastered the witchcraft of spinning the narrative and blaming the victims for the wretched circumstances that they themselves would have created.
The endless cycles of violence in Haiti, just like elsewhere around the world, are due to one thing, and one thing only — poverty.
In their desperation for a saviour, Haitians elected a Catholic priest, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, in 1990, but he was ousted in a military coup on September 30, 1991 and fled to exile.
The Americans subsequently invaded the island and returned Aristide to power on October 15, 1994. Two years later, in 1996, he stepped down from the presidency. He was re-elected again in 2000.
But on February 29, 2004, the man of the cloth fled Haiti again amid anti-government protests that morphed into a rebellion over the country’s parlous economic state. Kikikiki.
For the next seven years, Aristide lived in neighbouring South Africa before returning to his home country in 2011.
The colour of poverty
But what caused Haiti’s stubborn poverty?
What the X, Facebook and Instagram generation might not know is the fact that when the country officially declared its independence from France in 1804 after a rebellion, the then-French King, Charles X, issued a decree on April 17, 1825 ordering the fledgling administration to pay a humongous fee of 150 million francs — about US$150 million at the time — to “compensate” it for lost property, including slaves.
On July 11, 1825, Haiti grudgingly signed the agreement, which meant they literally paid for their freedom.
And here is the catch: They were forced to borrow from French banks to pay their “debt”.
All in all, they ended up paying twice the value of the claim to their former colonisers, which is absurd. As early as 2020, even one of their own, French economist Thomas Piketty, acknowledged that France should repay at least US$28 billion to Haiti in restitution for this egregious injustice, which continues to condemn the island nation to this day.
How insulting that as Haiti, which is just a little over 3 000 kilometres from the US, teeters on the brink, the best that Washington can do is to pledge US$300 million towards a United Nations-backed multi-national police force to quell the current violence and a pitiable US$33 million in humanitarian aid!
This is the same US that has supplied more than US$253 million — more than a quarter of a billion dollars — worth of lethal aid that has been used to slaughter innocent Palestinian women and children in the Gaza Strip in the past five months.
They are even planning to provide an additional US$17,6 billion to Israel on top of the US$3,3 billion they provide to Tel Aviv annually. And this is the same Americans who have also spent a staggering US$75 billion to support Ukraine in its war against Russia.
Why Zimbabwe?
In Hosea 4: 6, the Lord says: “My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge.”
Proverbs 18: 15 adds: “An intelligent heart acquires knowledge, and the ear of the wise seeks knowledge.”
As Haiti sinks deeper into the abyss and conflicts rage in other parts of the world, such as Ukraine, Libya, Sudan, the Sahel, eastern DRC and Mozambique, it is Zimbabwe — a peaceful teapot-shaped Republic ensconced deep in Southern Africa — that finds itself on the agenda in Western capitals.
Only last week, old men in the United Kingdom House of Lords were discussing ways of addressing “the reduction of poverty for millions of long-suffering Zimbabweans?”
How preposterous!
And, of late, the US State Department has been indefatigably churning out statement after statement on Zimbabwe.
But why Zimbabwe?
Bishop Lazarus recently told you that to understand the current geopolitical dynamics, insofar as Zimbabwe is concerned, one has to read the article jointly authored by former US Ambassador to Zimbabwe Charles Ray and Michael Walsh, which essentially advises Washington how it can reinvest its relationship with Harare.
“Congress would likely be receptive to innovative approaches for partnering with a country (Zimbabwe) known to have large deposits of rare earth metals that are used in the manufacture of electronics, batteries and magnets. Members do not want these important resources to fall under the control and direction of major-power competitors,” they wrote.
Adding: “The Government of Zimbabwe has strong relationships with major-power competitors of the United States and other authoritarian revisionist states who have expressed a manifest desire to change the world order.
“The ICS (Integrated Country Strategy) Zimbabwe acknowledges that China has ‘expanded its influence’ in Zimbabwe, and this is providing Beijing with ‘near-unfettered access to Zimbabwean natural resources’, including base minerals that are critical to the global clean-energy transition.”
This, folks, is why the country currently finds itself in the crosshairs of resource-thirsty and greedy “rulers of our world”.
With Washington, Brussels and London playing politics, Chinese investors have gained a foothold on local lithium resources.
In a five-month period from November 2021 to April 2022, they swooped on four key local lithium assets — Sabi Star Mine, Arcadia Lithium Mine, Bikita Minerals and Zulu Lithium Mine.
Overall, they spent close to US$700 million in acquisitions, as well as more than US$630 million in their respective expansion projects.
For example, in March 2022, Shenzhen Stock Exchange-listed Suzhou TA&A Ultra Clean Technology Co Ltd — one of the biggest Chinese firms, with a market capitalisation of US$6,7 billion — bought shares worth about US$15,7 million from Premier African Minerals in Matabeleland North.
The firm has a 75 percent holding in lithium hydroxide producer Yibin Tianyi Lithium Industry Co Ltd, as well as China’s largest electric vehicle battery manufacturer Contemporary Amperex Technology.
And in their great-power rivalry with China, the US, as a fading superpower, is losing.
The signs are many.
Recently, China’s electric carmaker BYD outsold US billionaire Elon Musk’s Tesla.
And last week, US political mandarins and hawks were frenetically trying to ban China’s popular social media application TikTok, despite the fact that it is used by about half (170 million) Americans.
Other Chinese social media platforms such as Temu and Shein are also popular in the US.
The fact that Harare is showing convincing signs of revival under the leadership of President ED, what with the demonstrable signs of development that are increasingly being acknowledged by friends and foes alike, puts the Western world in a pickle.
With their quislings and proxies degraded by Zimbabwe’s formidable security apparatus, they are hard-pressed to find reproachment with Zimbabwe under whatever guise just to have their hands on our minerals.
The more they talk about our teapot-shaped Republic, the more we should be satisfied as this intimates that we are in the right direction.
Forget the chatter about democracy; it is a scam.
This land of Mutapa is sacred.
Bishop out!
