Opinion / Columnist
The binding African spirit in challenging the Zimbabwean crisis
10 Sep 2020 at 01:51hrs | Views
The Zimbabwe African Nationalist Union Patriotic Front is indebted to the steeped bona fide pan-Africanist spirit which facilitated the convening of the interparty dialogue with our sister revolutionary party the African National Congress (ANC).
This opportune turn to dialogue is a response to the generously misrepresented Zimbabwean crisis following the Zimbabwean Lives Matter social media trend which has become the cyber rallying point to project our country in terms of a deep-seated socio-economic and political crisis. This heightens the urgency to expose the concealed architecture of the dedicated attacks on ZANU-PF through a misnamed national crisis.
It is no coincidence that we find ourselves grappling with a densely media pronounced crisis which does not dovetail the lived reality of the majority of our people. We know this charade is a counter-hegemonic attack to the dismally flopped July 31, 2020 pro-opposition protests aimed at sustaining the agenda of discrediting the outcome of the 2018 elections.
There is certainly nothing novel about the resurgence of the Zimbabwean crisis narrative, especially at this point. The protracted legitimacy anecdote propagated by the Nelson Chamisa-led MDC Alliance, its affiliate Civil Society Organisation (CSO) proxies forms the bedrock of the unrelenting endeavours to deconstruct the two-year milestone of the Second Republic under His Excellency the President of the Republic of Zimbabwe, Cde Emmerson Dambudzo Mnangagwa.
At a broader historical and structural level, this represents the perennial retribution framework to the ZANU-PF agrarian revolution by hostile diplomatic missions representing our erstwhile colonisers here in Zimbabwe. Due to the paradigm shift to address the unresolved alignment of property rights at the turn into millennium, Zimbabwe has been subjected to pro-imperialist annihilations spanning from the formation of a neoliberal opposition, imposition of illegal sanctions and massive propaganda surge to dissuade internal and external confidence in the ruling ZANU-PF.
Our quest to bring justice to the uneven post-colonial distribution of the means of production has involuntarily solicited neo-colonial machinations to create despondency to our people. Against this background, what is being emphasised as the Zimbabwean crisis is nothing more than a long neo-imperialist rhetoric to decapitate the decolonial clout we have asserted in our economy over the years.
This is part of the global hegemony designed to denigrate a political consciousness which remains remarkably anti-colonial. The; dialogue offers a welcome opportunity for a candid party to party commitment to unpack the current onslaught on ZANU-PF through falsified articulations of the Zimbabwean crisis by global powers and their proxies who have no moral standing to interfere with issues pertaining to our sovereignty. The cosmetic social media outcry about the deteriorating rule of law in Zimbabwe is evident of the magnitude of a long neo-colonial custom-made narrative of human-rights abuses to justify international pressure for regime-change in Zimbabwe.
Reclaiming our Anti-colonial DNA
ZANU-PF and the ANC's proximity to the anti-imperialist agenda is as old as Africa's quest for liberation from colonisation. This shared revolutionary fraternal link underscores the common history we share as Former Liberation Movements (FLMs). At the most basic level, this collective feature of our organic points of convergence makes our banking on memory more binding.
The role of Chris Hani, Joe Matthews, Walter Mavuso Msimang, and Archie Sibeko among others who dedicated their loyalty to the cause of Zimbabwe's freedom through the extensive military operations of the Zimbabwe People's Revolutionary Army (ZPRA) in the mid-60s can never be forgotten. The military diplomacy which ZPRA shared with Umkhonto weSizwe was assertive of a broad-based decolonisation against the grotesque imperialist system.
The depth of our shared ideological leanings rooted commitment to fight imperialism serves as the moral campus to the direction we must take to successfully confront how colonialism has reproduced itself to undermine the gains of our freedom.
Today as we seek to find a way out of neo-imperialist entanglement, we must be reminded of the great need to set the agenda for our national and regional aspirations outside the dictates of those committed to preserving the legacies of their centuries of plunder, looting, murder and other attacks to the dignity of Africans.
Today we are confronted by the philosophical trivialisation of our anti-imperialist existence as liberation movements. The upscaling of neoliberalism has the fabricated mainstreaming of human rights abuse discourses to erode numerous milestones of our post-colonial nation-building endeavours. The quest to liberate our economies has become the very basis of the protracted demonisation of the integrity of our democracy and undermining of the legitimacy we derive from the people.
However, we are complicit to this externally constructed crisis as we have allowed agenda settings of fellow African states' demonisation to be the defining characteristics of African problems. In the process, our reactionary impetus has always worked in favour of neoliberal machinations. Could this be a sign of our convenient detachment from our ideological foregrounding as initiated by the founding fathers?
In the search for our ideological birth right, this dialogue offers a timely significance to the precedent path of African Solutions for African Problems as prescribed by the Former President of South-Africa and the ANC. In as much as the issues drawing us to this discussion table are predominantly imagined problems and some are real issues, what is important is our commitment to reaffirming fraternity of ideological ontology.
What is important is the resolution we are all going to make guided by our common desire to enhance our existence as liberation powerhouses of Southern-Africa. A destabilised Zimbabwe has the effect of destabilising the entire region. In the same vein, any attack on the ANC and South Africa by the common enemy is two times the attack to the entire body of Former Liberation Movements. It will be recalled that at the height of the 2008 political instability in Zimbabwe, the ANC extended its diplomatic input in resolving our electoral stalemate leading to the formation of the Government of National Unity (GNU) which was endorsed through the Global Political Agreement (GPA).
Therefore, this is yet another welcome input to understanding issues affecting us a nation. Likewise, this platform also offers a unique input to mapping the way forward against the ongoing political defamation of ZANU-PF by our detractors. We are aware that this is part of the mechanisms to discredit the legitimacy of the 2018 election, whose outcome has mandated ZANU-PF to take a leading position in the governance of Zimbabwe and securing her territorial integrity.
Exaggerations of the
Zimbabwean crisis
The bottom line remains, there is no crisis in Zimbabwe. Needless, to discuss what constitutes a crisis, we must be clear from the outset that the inherent transitional metamorphosis, which Zimbabwe is going through does not constitute what could raise alarm as an acute economic crisis. Surely, even the arrest of two activists who have been at the centre of inciting despondency through scandalous Western support cannot amount to any close to a gross violation of human rights in Zimbabwe as implied and amplified in the media.
Likewise, the claimed cases of abductions cannot substantiate the absence of the rule of law in Zimbabwe. The real economic crisis facing Zimbabwe is our failure to access international credit lines, capital flight and the entrenched impact of corruption across the political divide in Zimbabwe. The illegal sanctions imposed on Zimbabwe by Western countries depicts a monumental super power domination and that is the bedrock of a political life-threatening crisis.
The real crisis which Zimbabwe is facing like any other African state is that of the ever-changing complexion and complexity of neo-colonialism. It is through neo-colonialism that we find most of our present domestic problems rooted in the structural construct of our post-colonial political-economies. The long-term functional architecture of imperialism is the major reason why we continue to benchmark our morality with the governance dictates of those who continue to subjugate our freedom to the captivity self-effacing hegemony.
Going forward
We have noted in our countries how neo-colonialism has repackaged itself through narrow Western anchored democracy and human-rights discourse in African politics. The prescriptive inclination of this democracy and human-rights ignores the existence of our regional protocols and municipal institutions which are predicated on the preservation of constitutionalism and good governance in Africa. We have also seen how sanctions have been used as a diplomatic missile to injure our self-confidence and subjecting us to unilateral terms of dictated democracy aimed at impelling regime-change and the consequent obliteration of the Former Liberation Movements.
Neo-colonial propaganda masked through the ambit of foreign-backed opposition which crudely instigates a clear agenda for change-politics in Africa. Not that there is any evil about political transitions, but there is everything wrong when the change sought is influenced by external forces with clear vendettas linked to decimating African nationalism.
Validating any change which disparages the aspirations of our shared struggle is tantamount to washing away the sacrifice of African revolutionaries.
Our weapon of unity against neo-colonialism in pursuing the region's aspirations for collective socio-economic advancement and political freedom should be hinged on the monumental ethos of pan-Africanism and historically grounded nationalism.
Therefore, "by any means necessary" we are mandated to "organise and centralise".
This opportune turn to dialogue is a response to the generously misrepresented Zimbabwean crisis following the Zimbabwean Lives Matter social media trend which has become the cyber rallying point to project our country in terms of a deep-seated socio-economic and political crisis. This heightens the urgency to expose the concealed architecture of the dedicated attacks on ZANU-PF through a misnamed national crisis.
It is no coincidence that we find ourselves grappling with a densely media pronounced crisis which does not dovetail the lived reality of the majority of our people. We know this charade is a counter-hegemonic attack to the dismally flopped July 31, 2020 pro-opposition protests aimed at sustaining the agenda of discrediting the outcome of the 2018 elections.
There is certainly nothing novel about the resurgence of the Zimbabwean crisis narrative, especially at this point. The protracted legitimacy anecdote propagated by the Nelson Chamisa-led MDC Alliance, its affiliate Civil Society Organisation (CSO) proxies forms the bedrock of the unrelenting endeavours to deconstruct the two-year milestone of the Second Republic under His Excellency the President of the Republic of Zimbabwe, Cde Emmerson Dambudzo Mnangagwa.
At a broader historical and structural level, this represents the perennial retribution framework to the ZANU-PF agrarian revolution by hostile diplomatic missions representing our erstwhile colonisers here in Zimbabwe. Due to the paradigm shift to address the unresolved alignment of property rights at the turn into millennium, Zimbabwe has been subjected to pro-imperialist annihilations spanning from the formation of a neoliberal opposition, imposition of illegal sanctions and massive propaganda surge to dissuade internal and external confidence in the ruling ZANU-PF.
Our quest to bring justice to the uneven post-colonial distribution of the means of production has involuntarily solicited neo-colonial machinations to create despondency to our people. Against this background, what is being emphasised as the Zimbabwean crisis is nothing more than a long neo-imperialist rhetoric to decapitate the decolonial clout we have asserted in our economy over the years.
This is part of the global hegemony designed to denigrate a political consciousness which remains remarkably anti-colonial. The; dialogue offers a welcome opportunity for a candid party to party commitment to unpack the current onslaught on ZANU-PF through falsified articulations of the Zimbabwean crisis by global powers and their proxies who have no moral standing to interfere with issues pertaining to our sovereignty. The cosmetic social media outcry about the deteriorating rule of law in Zimbabwe is evident of the magnitude of a long neo-colonial custom-made narrative of human-rights abuses to justify international pressure for regime-change in Zimbabwe.
Reclaiming our Anti-colonial DNA
ZANU-PF and the ANC's proximity to the anti-imperialist agenda is as old as Africa's quest for liberation from colonisation. This shared revolutionary fraternal link underscores the common history we share as Former Liberation Movements (FLMs). At the most basic level, this collective feature of our organic points of convergence makes our banking on memory more binding.
The role of Chris Hani, Joe Matthews, Walter Mavuso Msimang, and Archie Sibeko among others who dedicated their loyalty to the cause of Zimbabwe's freedom through the extensive military operations of the Zimbabwe People's Revolutionary Army (ZPRA) in the mid-60s can never be forgotten. The military diplomacy which ZPRA shared with Umkhonto weSizwe was assertive of a broad-based decolonisation against the grotesque imperialist system.
The depth of our shared ideological leanings rooted commitment to fight imperialism serves as the moral campus to the direction we must take to successfully confront how colonialism has reproduced itself to undermine the gains of our freedom.
Today as we seek to find a way out of neo-imperialist entanglement, we must be reminded of the great need to set the agenda for our national and regional aspirations outside the dictates of those committed to preserving the legacies of their centuries of plunder, looting, murder and other attacks to the dignity of Africans.
Today we are confronted by the philosophical trivialisation of our anti-imperialist existence as liberation movements. The upscaling of neoliberalism has the fabricated mainstreaming of human rights abuse discourses to erode numerous milestones of our post-colonial nation-building endeavours. The quest to liberate our economies has become the very basis of the protracted demonisation of the integrity of our democracy and undermining of the legitimacy we derive from the people.
However, we are complicit to this externally constructed crisis as we have allowed agenda settings of fellow African states' demonisation to be the defining characteristics of African problems. In the process, our reactionary impetus has always worked in favour of neoliberal machinations. Could this be a sign of our convenient detachment from our ideological foregrounding as initiated by the founding fathers?
What is important is the resolution we are all going to make guided by our common desire to enhance our existence as liberation powerhouses of Southern-Africa. A destabilised Zimbabwe has the effect of destabilising the entire region. In the same vein, any attack on the ANC and South Africa by the common enemy is two times the attack to the entire body of Former Liberation Movements. It will be recalled that at the height of the 2008 political instability in Zimbabwe, the ANC extended its diplomatic input in resolving our electoral stalemate leading to the formation of the Government of National Unity (GNU) which was endorsed through the Global Political Agreement (GPA).
Therefore, this is yet another welcome input to understanding issues affecting us a nation. Likewise, this platform also offers a unique input to mapping the way forward against the ongoing political defamation of ZANU-PF by our detractors. We are aware that this is part of the mechanisms to discredit the legitimacy of the 2018 election, whose outcome has mandated ZANU-PF to take a leading position in the governance of Zimbabwe and securing her territorial integrity.
Exaggerations of the
Zimbabwean crisis
The bottom line remains, there is no crisis in Zimbabwe. Needless, to discuss what constitutes a crisis, we must be clear from the outset that the inherent transitional metamorphosis, which Zimbabwe is going through does not constitute what could raise alarm as an acute economic crisis. Surely, even the arrest of two activists who have been at the centre of inciting despondency through scandalous Western support cannot amount to any close to a gross violation of human rights in Zimbabwe as implied and amplified in the media.
Likewise, the claimed cases of abductions cannot substantiate the absence of the rule of law in Zimbabwe. The real economic crisis facing Zimbabwe is our failure to access international credit lines, capital flight and the entrenched impact of corruption across the political divide in Zimbabwe. The illegal sanctions imposed on Zimbabwe by Western countries depicts a monumental super power domination and that is the bedrock of a political life-threatening crisis.
The real crisis which Zimbabwe is facing like any other African state is that of the ever-changing complexion and complexity of neo-colonialism. It is through neo-colonialism that we find most of our present domestic problems rooted in the structural construct of our post-colonial political-economies. The long-term functional architecture of imperialism is the major reason why we continue to benchmark our morality with the governance dictates of those who continue to subjugate our freedom to the captivity self-effacing hegemony.
Going forward
We have noted in our countries how neo-colonialism has repackaged itself through narrow Western anchored democracy and human-rights discourse in African politics. The prescriptive inclination of this democracy and human-rights ignores the existence of our regional protocols and municipal institutions which are predicated on the preservation of constitutionalism and good governance in Africa. We have also seen how sanctions have been used as a diplomatic missile to injure our self-confidence and subjecting us to unilateral terms of dictated democracy aimed at impelling regime-change and the consequent obliteration of the Former Liberation Movements.
Neo-colonial propaganda masked through the ambit of foreign-backed opposition which crudely instigates a clear agenda for change-politics in Africa. Not that there is any evil about political transitions, but there is everything wrong when the change sought is influenced by external forces with clear vendettas linked to decimating African nationalism.
Validating any change which disparages the aspirations of our shared struggle is tantamount to washing away the sacrifice of African revolutionaries.
Our weapon of unity against neo-colonialism in pursuing the region's aspirations for collective socio-economic advancement and political freedom should be hinged on the monumental ethos of pan-Africanism and historically grounded nationalism.
Therefore, "by any means necessary" we are mandated to "organise and centralise".
Source - chronicle
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