Uncle Sam lacks moral authority to lecture on democracy

ON Thursday 29 June, President Mnangagwa addressed a gathering of small scale miners where he emphasised his Government's support to the most productive sectors of the economy.

He told the miners that the main thrust of his Government was to ensure self-sufficiency through utilisation of local resources.

In his own words, President Mnangagwa identified mining as the low hanging economic fruit that has the capacity to positively impact on other economic sectors.

President Mnangagwa was to repeat the same message when he addressed thousands of ZANU-PF supporters at Nyele Primary School in Matabeland South last Saturday.

Speaking directly to journalists in front of his podium, President Mnangagwa said: "To all the journalists who are here, representing their white masters, go back and tell them that ZANU-PF is unstoppable. No one can stop us. We brought peace, we shall maintain peace. No one can teach us democracy, because we, ourselves, fought for that democracy."

The President was not done yet as he challenged countries in Europe to come and learn about democracy in Zimbabwe because there was no democracy "under oppression, (and) under colonialism."

"We are democrats and we are masters of democracy, so don't be cheated and don't be misled. We brought freedom, which they did not want us to have and we had to fight for that and we defeated the pretenders, the detractors, the retrogressive elements among us."

The President's words came in the wake of reports of some Western countries already pouring some funds into the coffers of some online publications, civic groups, non-governmental organisations and opposition political parties for regime change purposes.

It has now become almost a standard practice by the same Western countries to condescendingly dictate how elections should be conducted in the country including brazenly publishing campaign material routing for the opposition.

So ironic is the fact that while the same countries talk a lot about democracy, they brazenly interfere in internal affairs of sovereign countries including funding some dubious polls that predict a victory for the opposition.

Their main target are former liberation movements like ZANU-PF, largely viewed as emotionally and ideologically attached to the liberation struggle that brought universal suffrage now enjoyed by all citizens.

It is within this context and awareness that President Mnangagwa derided the same Western nations that were once at the forefront of abetting the minority colonial Rhodesian regime but now want to lecture Zimbabwe of what constitutes democracy.

The attitude of these Western nations are still rooted in colonial stereotypes that still depict African nations as being burdened by primordial existence.

This is the same observation made by Damola Adejumo-Ayibiowu when she was writing for opendemocracy.com way back on November 6, 2019.

Adejumo- Ayebiowu observed that Western style of "democracy" in Africa is just a way of pushing the neoliberal agenda that has become dictum and mantra for most post-colonial opposition political parties.

Her assertion is that "democracy is an intrinsic part of African culture" and Europeans who invaded Africa met democratic kingdoms which they had to first destroy before their colonisation project could be successful.

"However, eurocentrism denies Africa's democratic political history and projects Africa's culture as totally autocratic and anti-development. The impositions of Western ethos, including Western-style democracy, on Africa, have produced distortions because the culture, history, and values of the local setting are important in any development and governance framework," writes Adejumo- Ayibiowu, an African scholar whose research focuses on generating African solutions for African problems as well as the global inequality created by the unequal international system.

Indeed, in the context of Zimbabwe, the country has been under siege from some Western nations keen to promote their brand of democracy through institutions like the World Bank and other Western donors. Their insistence on neoliberal reforms (like ESAP) have actually contributed to impoverishing the ordinary people.

Western liberal democracy in the African context are mere political arrangements that guarantee the interests of the imperial capitalist countries, especially their open access to African resources and markets.

This is what Zimbabwe is being punished for after it embarked on the land reform exercise meant to correct a historical injustice where the majority of indigenes lived on barren infertile lands.

Western countries have over the years sought to universalise the imposition of their mode of democracy by subjugating other forms of knowing, especially African indigenous knowledge. Their insistence on multiparty democracy falls flat when their own countries are put to test.

An example is that of Britain, which still has a monarchy and has had their Governments being dominated by the Labour and Conservative parties. The same is America where Democrats and Liberals alternate.

What the West fails to acknowledge is the fact that institutional arrangements that achieve representativeness and responsiveness, vary across societies in accordance with the cultural milieu or norms in respective countries.

The fact that Zimbabwe's democratic environment is different from the West's does not in any way make it inappropriate or invalid. Being different should not imply inferiority.

It is not surprising that in most rural communities where the social structures are regulated by local leadership, most people have more trust in African indigenous institutions of herdsmen and chief because they are more compatible with their upbringing and their culture.

As highlighted by Adejumo-Ayibiowu, "these indigenous institutions ensure responsiveness, participation and accountability among the people in that they promote decentralisation of governance with autonomous subunits, people's involvement, family representations, consultations, high moral standards of leadership, non-monetisation of political positions, the supremacy of the culture, leadership training, traditional oath-taking, easy provision for the deposition of unresponsive leadership, communal effort to achieve development, low cost administrative structure, hard work and equal access to resources."

Instead of replicating Western liberal democracies and their neoliberal reforms, Zimbabwe already has a rich reservoir to tap from its historical cultural heritage of being self-governing people.

The danger of a borrowed democracy or any ideology is that it contains other non-cultural elements which may be harmful to the society.

As we head for the harmonised elections on August 23, let it not be forgotten that the fight is between those that refuse and continue to refuse to be hewers of wood and drawers of water and those that collaborate with former colonisers to undermine the country's independence and sovereignty.