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Poor Pamela Tremont and Triple C: Politics without lawful issue

18 Mar 2023 at 02:32hrs | Views
I have watched Pamela Tremont's hearing in preparation for her posting to Zimbabwe as US' next ambassador.

Both the line of questioning by US Senators, as well as her responses, were, to say the least, hilarious. Zimbabwe the country, with all its own internal politics, was not that much of an issue.

This looks like some progress of sorts.

What was is Zimbabwe's bilateral relations with the People's Republic of China, PRC, itself America's perceived biggest enemy and challenge on the global stage.

From the line of questioning, America expects us to join her in hating China, even signing the trilateral AUKUS, to create some ZAUKUS!

Mission to kill Zim-China relations

America also expects Pamela Tremont to do something to end this Zim-China relationship which, by the ambassador-designator's admission, and to her own credit, is long ordained by history, dating back as it does, to our War of Independence!

It was noteworthy that Russia did not feature in the interview, much as US is at war with it via Ukraine, and much as at the United Nations, Zimbabwe has either voted with Russia or has abstained from condemning Russia, much to the chagrin of the American Administration, as one of America's presidential hopefuls recently revealed.

Foreign policy tabula rasa

Poor girl!

The sending State Party expects her to do the Herculean, that is, to change Zimbabwe's bilateral course and friendship with China, so Zimbabwe ingratiates herself with, and pleases, mighty America!

On her part, Zimbabwe is construed as having no legitimate grounds or interest — historical, current or futuristic — to mind or protect, thus justifying closeness to China.

Only loose whims, completely inorganic and thus easily vaporised for some solidarity with faraway America, with all its little hates, whims and its caprices.

Good luck Pamela; there will be a lot going for you when you arrive.

After all, your country stands greatest in our estimation, what with ZDERA which your President has just renewed.

Zimbabwe is ready to kowtow, as your Establishment thinks and dreams!

We have no opinion, no interests of our own, which is why tabula rasa-like, we await America's imprint!

China under Western eye

Why not?

China, after all, is the bad guy!

It is a Communist State of the deepest dye.

Some unreconstructed autocratic State, in the eyes of mother, democratic America, itself the universal touchstone.

Little wonder President Xi has just been given another term, a third one at that, against all American-drawn tenets of democracy!

China pillages our resources, which America, with her long-standing exploitation of our Chrome from Rhodesian days, never did, will not do!

Instead America seeks to build a highway for us to Kanyemba, gratis, only in modest return for all rights for minerals found within a kilometre of either side of the highway they themselves will peg!

America's racial protege

Red China, too, did us great injury and harm by arming terrorists who dismantled white settler colonial Rhodesia, itself America's racial protégé by force of arms, mercenaries and mining interests!

Those mercenaries grown in Vietnam and Korea, killed us kindly!

Worse, China, alongside Russia, in 2008 treacherously blocked a resolution in the Security Council which would have presaged some kind invasion of our country, all under the high-minded ethical principle called responsibility to protect!

All this and much more, certainly should enthuse Madame Pamela Tremont to terminate this bilateral, diplomatic outrage joining Zimbabwe and China!

Saving starving natives

I found something else rather amusing.

The poor lady deeply believes America has funded Zimbabwe to the tune of more than USD4bn since Independence, which translates to some USD90m or so a year.

From that stupendous aid, America claims to have saved upward of 700 000 Zimbabwean lives which, otherwise, would have perished of hunger!

She swore by her honest mother, and by the long line of her forbears – both maternal and paternal — that this great American act of high-minded benevolent diplomacy and unsurpassed altruism, deserved single-minded requiting!

Thanks us for our FOGOs

But she forgot to close her flanks: through her admission that the more than USD4bn disbursed over 43 years, went to her so-called NGOs, FOGOs in local parlance!

Not a dime passed through the Government of Zimbabwe, which is still expected to be deeply grateful and indebted! For money laundered to her FOGOs which kindly America invented to meddle in our politics here.

Through this vicarious gift, Zimbabwe's foreign policy must change to run in step with that of America and her ever mercurial interests!

A lie we have allowed to fester

For far too long, we have allowed America to repeat this enormous lie, so Nazi-like, the lie gains credence and traction through countless, incremental repetition.

It has since assumed the halo of some beatitude. The time has now come to dismantle it by brutally telling Americans we do not owe them a single dime, and that claims to their self-vaunted generosity is spacious.

That we expect nothing from them, now and in future.

That the best favour they can do us is to leave us alone to starve.

It would, after all, assist in their design to take over our sovereignty and all our resources they so covet!

They have been on our back needlessly; they have burdened us with their illegal sanctions and their searing do-good narrative they shove down our throats.

They have meddled in our politics for far too long, as if we are their backyard.

That must now stop.

We have nothing to gain from bilateral relations with them, at least as matters stand.

All we have are their insufferable sanctions, their intrusive politics and endless sanctimony, repeated endlessly like a proverbial tale told by an idiot.

Brittle and refractory

This is the mindset which dear Pamela will find here.

For as long as she is reckless enough to behave as her predecessors did, to handle relations with us as incautiously as she is sworn to, her stay in our country will be most unpleasant.

She will find us brittle, refractory. China is a great friend and partner of Zimbabwe; it has been and has much to show for it.

How we relate to China, or any other country for that matter; what concessions we make to it or any other country, is none of America's business.

US' policy of containment towards China is its own; it does not beckon or oblige us. It is that simple and straightforward. Let the lady grasp on her flight here.

Terrible Triple Heritage

Chamisa bristles under a terrible triple heritage.

The heritage of ancestry, one.

The heritage of illegitimacy, two.

The heritage of undergraduate politics, three!

All three so close to the next poll, predictably his last, with no prospect of a third political comeback.

Let's take each of these three baneful heritage, one by one. First, ancestry.

Birthed by Caucasian imperialism

It matters little to nothing that Chamisa sought to re-invent, re-brand himself and his formation through name-change.

Like the proverbial rotten rose, the stench still remains the same.

It is the stench of foreignness: a compound stench of Britishness, Europeanness, and Americanness.

That compound stench forever suffuses all he names, touches, does or suggests.

At core, he remains a foreign project he inherited from Morgan Tsvangirai, and bungled.

Some very bad, obnoxious politics hatched and bred by Caucasian imperialism, which are anti-African, anti-heritage.

Which is why the trope of baboon flows so easily through his lips.

No amount of name-change and political perfumery escapes that ancestry.

Worse, no force or passage of time induces enough amnesia in our collective psyche to make us forget this accursed ancestry.

So, election in, election out, we will continue to remind ourselves whence comes the white smell that stalks this black civet cat.

Revalorising Liberation Ethos

Just this retained politics automatically re-valorises our liberation ethos, making it timeless.

One thing the late President Mugabe was dead right on, was maintaining that the national question remains that of defending our sovereignty, a mission renewed and turned inter-generational by the West's continued challenge to our sovereignty, both directly and through quisling opposition formations such as that led by Chamisa.

So, even after Zimbabwe bids adieu to its last President from the generation of the Liberation Struggle, the narrative of anti-imperialism will continue to shape our politics quite deeply.

Most assured by Zanu-PF's amazing capacity to coin and affix new slogans to old, wartime ones.

Such as Nyika Inovakwa Nevene Vayo!

Which generation dares drop, let alone challenge, such a slogan which is a timeless truism in fact; and whose beguiling simplicity disguises its profound anti-imperialist and neo-colonialist foundations from the Struggle?

Langley connection

With the likes of blunderous Biti, Sikhala, Ndiweni and young Ostallos around him, Chamisa and Triple C's Langley connections will continue to show and get renewed, in the process raising permanent nationalistic angst.

The current anti-Russian and anti-Chinese rhetoric from Chamisa's funding West hardly helps either.

The polarised global order continues to throw up challenges which daily remind us of Chamisa and Triple C's parentage, long after Tsvangirai's bones have turned to dust.

What an unlawful issue both are! Much like the lingering, everlasting taint of illegitimacy in the village.

An unlawful issue

Talking about illegitimacy, Chamisa's aforementioned ancestry, and his unpardonable power-grab, make him an unlawful issue, both by history and by contemporary politics of leadership transition.

However much he tries, the debility of well-founded rearguard politics haunts him.

He is always looking over his shoulders.

Gweru Congress did not resolve anything; if anything, it highlighted this congenital blight which morphed into a largely writ-driven and shaped splinter that MDC-Dougie became and remains.

Zanu-PF did not need to throw a single stone; the sundered and ever splitting formation pelted itself so well that Zanu-PF went fishing!

Equally, the return of the more-sinned-against-than-sinning Khupe hardly helped.

Beaten by Mwonzora, and driven by sheer desperation into the arms of her power-usurping bete noire, Khupe simply became a defeated alter ego of Chamisa in copious, female form.

This fulfilled the adage that injured like flies back to equally injured like.

Both badly mauled by Mwonzora, they found warmth in each other's teary sob-tales.

Again, the lineaments of illegitimacy were thrown into sharper relief.

Mercurial Trevor got it

I don't like Trevor Ncube, let alone his opportunistic politics.

He is like the Elizabethan demos so ably depicted in Shakespeare's Roman Play, Coriolanus.

He is mercurial, indeed some ugly political changeling. But his recent thread on Chamisa was on point.

Not that it revealed any genius on his part; only his capacity to assemble opinion so deep and prevalent in Chamisa's Triple C, and to then re-issue it into the public domain with such journalistic precocity and accuracy.

This masterly descriptive thread raised profound issues of democratic legitimacy in respect of Chamisa, principally how he runs the remnant formation.

That alone, deepens Chamisa's already doubly tainted legitimacy.

Shaped by Rearguard politics

Much worse, it creates a presentiment of a looming split once Zanu-PF does what it is destined to do, namely to fulfil its historic mission of defeating imperialism by beating Chamisa this August.

Again, rearguard politics will loom larger inside Triple C, larger, sharper than they currently do.

If I was neutral in Zimbabwean politics, I would pity Chamisa for the engulfing dramatic irony around his person.

Actors in his party, and Zanu-PF gods, know what he either knows but won't acknowledge, or does not know at all and will eat him.

Either way, all this makes him a sample tragic figure in some vintage Shakespearean tragedy.

I bet my bottom dollar, there won't be political Chamisa after 2023 polls.

Maybe Pastor Chamisa only, assuming AFM chooses to offer some charitable or compassionate destiny!

How undergraduate politics?

Do not get me wrong; when I speak of undergraduate politics, I am not referring to student politics, much as those are a factor that preponderate in Triple C.

I am referring to that type of politics – part childish, part delinquent and part impulsively militant, all to disguise deep-seated fear of, and aversion for, risks.

That rouble-rousing kind of politics driven by momentary foolhardiness that lands the haver into deep trouble, the kind of which we see Job Sikhala personifying, and wallowing in presently.

Being foolhardy is not being foolish zvine chihard mukati; rather it is becoming so foolish to the reckless point of snorting at evident, obvious danger.

Like offering your naked hinds to a flying arrow in the hope of breaking it, and for a paean! You fling at discretion, which is the better part of valour.

The Shona have a lovely saying: ever since the hyena was timid, how many have seen its ashen bones in the dry veld?

Deus ex Machina

Lately I have watched Chamisa's politics graduate from somnambulistic biblical verses to some reckless false militancy born out of deep frustration and a consuming sense of political futility.

This in part is triggered by unsavoury goings-on behind the scenes in his party, and by a growing realisation so late in the game that Zanu-PF has fortified its electoral position to the point of unassailability.

Far from evolving his old-new MDC-T he inherited from Tsvangirai, he has simply infantilised it to irredeemable levels of idiocy.

Like dismantling everything he inherited from Tsvangirai: the old guard, tested processes, established structures, in favour of hair-brained experiments which even his gratuitously tolerant benefactors have found baffling.

Not helped by his blind followers who superstitiously think he is in communion with the God above, believing that in unison, he and this never-never Deity of his imagination, will spring up an electoral miracle.

The Greeks had a name for it: deus ex machina, or a god from the machine! It is only now, so late into the calendar, that they realise he has nothing but Dutch-inspire experimental valour!

A place in the sun

Which bears out Trevor Ncube's theory: that Chamisa aims to single-handedly show ED and Zanu-PF his worth by way of his personal supporters.

This is why he abhors any structures, any minions. Atlas-like, he wants to carry the whole globe!

Should he pull such an impossible feat, he can then turn to ED and Zanu-PF all to negotiate for himself "a place in the sun".

For all his elaborate pretensions, Chamisa does not aim to wrestle the powers to govern; rather he aims to secure numbers large enough to flaunt to Zanu-PF, in order to make a plausible case for co-governing, him assuming whatever capacity Zanu-PF is generous enough to grant him.

Praying that Mwonzora prevails

This is why, beneath the false fulminations, Chamisa pleads and prays that Mwonzora's present legal challenge finds favour with the courts, so elections are stayed.

Indeed, had he had his way, the looming elections should have been set aside, in favour of a pact with Zanu-PF.

This, he intimated to a very close associate, would make Zanu-PF and himself rule this country "until donkeys grow horns"!

His current frustrations, slowly morphing into romancing suicidal post-electoral violence, stem from this unmet wish. But then, I am a mere donkey; I watch from under a muhacha tree, chewing its smelly fruit.


Source - The Herald
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