Chamisa's MDC getting hot under the collar over UN rapporteur's visit

Since the news of the United Nations (UN) special rapporteur, Ms Alena Douhan's visit to Zimbabwe was broken, the MDC Alliance (MDC-A) and other anti-Government elements like political activist Hopewell Chin'ono have been having sleepless nights.

They are the "running dogs" of the West, which imposed sanctions on innocent Zimbabweans, and they have to be seen spiritedly defending the evil measures or attacking Ms Douhan in order to continue earning the Western dirty dollars.

The tactless MDC-A faction's default political strategy has been the suffering of Zimbabweans through sanctions, which their founding leader, the late Morgan Tsvangirai, fought strenuously for at the turn of the century.

He hoped to use the measures to unseat Zanu-PF through sanctions-induced socio-economic hardship.

 It is, therefore, not surprising that in December 2017, the shaken MDC-A faction leader, Nelson Chamisa and his deputy, Tendai Biti urgently flew to the United States in the wake of Operation Restore Legacy to beg their masters to keep the sanctions in place.

Early the following year, Chamisa also travelled to some European countries on a similar mission.

Many will remember him boasting gleefully at a campaign meeting of how he had gone to Europe to "sunga one, sunga dozen."

He gloated of perpetuating the suffering of innocent Zimbabweans, whom he expected to vote him into power.

Rapporteur Ms Douhan arrived in Zimbabwe on Monday and met President Mnangagwa.

Realising that Ms Douhan's mission will document the suffering that innocent Zimbabweans are going through because of the sanctions and expose the West's evil ways, the MDC-A faction and Chin'ono have taken to fighting her by casting aspersions on her person and mission. Chin'ono accused Government of inviting a bogus and biased person without the requisite credentials to give a truthful assessment on the impact of the sanctions on Zimbabweans.

 He argued that Ms Douhan was self-proclaimed individual who "supposedly funds herself to do the work" and had a history of making reports that ignored the reasons why sanctions were imposed in the first place.

Chin'ono argued that Ms Douhan's previous missions and assessment reports had been in favour of governments of Syria and Venezuela.

He alleged that she had made a statement against US sanctions on the Syrian government and a report that was "praised by the Venezuelan dictatorship".

Her report was said to have been harshly criticised by the Venezuelan civil society, and several non-governmental organisations.

It is now a public secret that the US uses civil society and rogue citizens like Chin'ono in various countries to defend its evil and cruel policies such as the sanctions against unfairly targeted countries like Cuba, Venezuela, Iran and Zimbabwe.

Chin'ono further alleged that Ms Douhan was not a member of the UN staff and had "been used by totalitarian states such as Syria and Venezuela in the last few years to support their propaganda".

Ms Douhan's visit to Zimbabwe did not just happen in a flash. It was planned for and publicised on time.

The UN invited Zimbabwean stakeholders to submit their concerns to her at least a month prior to her visit.

 Chin'ono even tweeted encouraging Zimbabweans to sign a petition initiated by one Driven Chapman to revive the recently acquitted former Minister of Health and Child Care, Dr Obadiah Moyo's case for presentation to Ms Douhan. Surely, if Ms Douhan and her mission were bogus, Chin'ono would not participate in a fake UN mission. For all the MDC-A and Chin'onos of this world's smear campaign against Ms Douhan, the UN has not disowned her.

She uses the Office of the UN Commissioner for Human Rights website address on her Twitter handle. If she and her mission were phoney, as Chin'ono and company desperately wish they were, the UN would have admonished her and barred her from including the address on her handle. Perhaps the most embarrassing moment for Chin'ono and ilk was yesterday when the US Embassy in Zimbabwe Chargé d'Affaires met Ms Douhan, thereby endorsing her mission.  They were left with huge egg on the face when their master met with the UN official that they were telling anyone who cared to listen that she was bogus.

These are some of the occupational hazards of playing foreigners' running dogs against one's own people. MDC-A faction's spokesperson, Fadzai Mahere, questioned the UN rapporteur's objectivity, suggesting that she was biased since Ms Douhan had not requested for her faction's submission in her fact finding quest.

She baselessly suggested that Ms Douhan had already "drawn her conclusion" before even beginning.

 However, local Aljazeera correspondent, Haru Mutasa, pointed out on her Twitter handle that the opposition was never available.

 "Don't complain (that) you are not represented when you don't make yourselves available to journalists," Mutasa retorted to Mahere.

It is interesting that the same UN official that her faction's Treasurer, David Coltart dismissed as a non-UN official is the one that she was dying to make submissions to.

 The usual MDC-A faction's contradiction, confusion and double standards were at play once again.

Mahere in her faction's typical entitlement mentality wanted Ms Douhan to comb the thousands of Harare's streets looking for the obscure hovel housing the now-officeless outfit to collect its submission.

In any case, the Minister Justice, Legal and Parliamentary Affairs, Ziyambi Ziyambi, explained that Ms Douhan was not only meeting with Government officials, but anyone who wanted to meet her could be facilitated by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Trade to do so.  Now that the matter has been clarified, one eagerly awaits to see if Mahere's complaint was genuine or it was the faction's attempt at depicting itself as a victim, as usual.

President Mnangagwa is set to attend the United Nations Climate Change Conference of the Parties (COP26) to be hosted by the UK in Glasgow, Scotland, at the end of this month.

 It has become the MDC-A faction's staple food to create drama that besmirches the President and Government ahead of such major global events for cheap political points.

One is, therefore, not surprised by the faction's false claims of attacks by Zanu-PF last week in Masvingo.

This week the faction was at it again.

It allegedly punched a hole on a glass window panel of one of Chamisa's convoy motor vehicles using a blunt object like a screwdriver and claimed an attempt on Chamisa's life by Zanu-PF during a Manicaland Province tour.

Even laymen on social media laughed at the opposition's desperation.

They could tell that the stunt was embarrassingly amateurish as the result was worlds apart from real life bullet holes.

Ms Douhan's mission speaks to the abuse of innocent Zimbabweans' human rights by the West.

 The West normally uses the human rights abuse narrative against Governments that it does not like and Ms Douhan's visit turned that narrative on its head against the West to Chin'ono and company's exasperation and embarrassment.

Ms Douhan's mission gazumped the West, the local opposition, the civil society and anti-Government individuals when they least expected it.

 Despite the desperate smear campaign, it was a political master stroke that Ms Douhan will have first-hand information and the opposition and the West, who have always shamelessly justified the debilitating sanctions, are running scared.

The visit has exposed to Zimbabweans who their real enemy is.

 The opposition and other detractors usually describe people who recognise and respect President Mnangagwa's administration as its enablers.

Ms Douhan's mission laid bare who the West's enablers in Zimbabwe are.

It exposed for the world to see who is aiding and abetting the West's abuse of innocent Zimbabweans' human rights by crippling their Government's ability to provide them with basic necessities such as the right to functional healthcare facilities.

 Ms Douhan duly noted this in a tweet she made while on tour of duty in Zimbabwe on Tuesday when she said, "Unilateral sanctions affect the right to health of the most vulnerable groups including those suffering from a severe and life threatening rare skin condition, epidermolysis bullosa."

Ms Douhan's mission could not have come at a more auspicious time than now when Zimbabwe and the Southern African region are counting down to the SADC Anti-Sanctions Day on October 25.

 Over the past two years, some Western embassies in Zimbabwe, realising that they have no basis for maintaining sanctions, have taken to claiming that Zimbabweans' unenviable socio-economic lot was caused by corruption and not sanctions.

 They have used willing tools like Chin'ono and Bus StopTV to push their #ItsNotSanctionsItsCorruption campaign to divert the world's attention from the effects of the ruinous sanctions on innocent Zimbabweans.

Ms Douhan's mission foregrounds and exposes the effects of the sanctions on innocent citizens and not a targeted few as the West wishes the world to believe.

This spells no good news for the West's enablers and "running dogs", who are acting in anger on behalf of their masters and owners.

This explains why the local supporters of the evil measures are waxing hysterically, when level headed and progressive citizens are celebrating the golden and rare opportunity to let the UN in on their suffering.

As the nation stares at the beckoning 2023 harmonised elections, the electorate should know that the time to separate grain from chaff and patriotic Zimbabweans from the West's running dogs is not while one is staring at the ballot paper in the ballot booth, but is now.

The events of Ms Douhan's visit are instructive on who has Zimbabweans' best interests at heart and who does not.