Opinion / Columnist
Zanu-PF is the big monster
3 hrs ago | Views
AS recent as last week, Elon Musk's fortune had swelled to a stupendous and eye-watering US$348 billion, making him probably the richest man on the planet.
It is just obscene that one person's worth can be close to a third of the cumulative gross domestic product (GDP) - a measure of economic output of goods and services - of all 16 countries in SADC.
Looked at differently, his wealth is more or less equivalent to his motherland South Africa's GDP. Kikikiki.
This is quite a stunning and remarkable turn of fortune, especially for the 53-year-old South Africa-born nerd, who reportedly began working illegally in the United States in the 1990s.
They say most of his wealth comes from his stake in Tesla, an American electric vehicle manufacturer, which means his wealth can only grow bigger as the world transitions to clean energy. Musk also controls Space X, an aerospace company that designs, builds and launches space rockets and spacecraft.
And, hell, he now has Starlink, whose impact is already being felt in our own neighbourhoods here in the teapot-shaped Republic.
These are highly lucrative ventures that allow the billionaire to continue printing money.
He has grown so filthy rich that in October 2022, he bought Twitter from Jack Dorsey on a whim. To push through the transaction, he had to sell US$40 billion worth of Tesla shares.
However, under a new leadership, Twitter's worth has dropped precipitously to around US$19 billion.
But, notwithstanding its failure to generate a return on investment, Twitter, or X, as it is now known, might prove to be Musk's most strategic acquisition as it has given him awesome and unimaginably huge power and influence to shape communication, conversations, perception, opinion, agendas and the world view of more than half a billion people.
He now has the witchcraft and sorcery to control people's minds in many countries in the world, which is what politicians generally envy and crave.
This is why he was such invaluable company for Donald Trump the candidate, helping him reclaim the White House against extraordinary odds.
What wananchi in this part of the world fail to realise and reflect on is the fact that our lives are now being shaped daily by these Big Tech behemoths like X and Meta (which owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp).
Daily, they harvest our personal information and sell it to companies and intelligence agencies, among other third parties, some of whom use it to manipulate what we see and our decision-making.
You might have forgotten about the Cambridge Analytica scandal around 2010, where personal data belonging to millions of Facebook users was collected by the British consulting firm, Cambridge Analytica, and used for political advertising.
Some of this content finds its way to intelligence and security agents in the West, who use it for obvious reasons.
You see, the content that we consume daily, particularly on social media platforms, is not random. The longer you spend engaging with a particular type of content, the more the platforms gauge your preferences and funnel similar content for your eyeballs.
This has the impact of conditioning and grooming the consumer.
Ironically, the same countries that used to counsel us about the virtues of net neutrality - a nonsensical concept premised on unfettered internet access - and such-like gibberish are beginning to push back against these quixotic ideals and clamping down on social media.
Just last week, Australia took the radical but commonsensical step to ban children under 16 from using social media, such as Snapchat, TikTok, Facebook, Instagram and X, because of the harm being caused by these platforms.
Last year, France similarly introduced legislation to block social media access for children under 15.
Also, on October 26 last year, the United Kingdom passed the Online Safety Act, which, among other far-reaching interventions, enjoins social media companies and search services to guarantee and ensure users' safety on their platforms.
It criminalises practices such as encouraging or assisting serious self-harm, sending false information intended to cause non-trivial harm, threatening communications, intimate image abuse, racially or religiously aggravated public order offences, inciting violence and abusive or hateful content.
The list is endless.
The UK is not done yet.
Another law, the Safer Phones Bill, which purportedly proposes to “protect children from the harms that can be caused by excessive screen time and the use of social media”, is already in the works.
The Bill goes so far as proposing to review phone sales to teenagers and for ministers to review whether technological safeguards would be required to automatically implement on phones sold to those under 16.
Police in the UK have already expressed concerns over the speed at which harmful and malicious content online can spread to millions of people and potentially cause civil unrest. So, this makes Big Tech companies, and the men and women who control them, like Musk, the world's most powerful and influential institutions and figures today.
What Musk has lost financially through investing in X he has more than made up for through the political capital and clout that comes with these pervasive platforms.
Who is controlling us?
And this raises a fundamental question: Who is controlling the content and narrative that we are consuming in this part of the world? Or, better still, who is shaping that narrative?
And to what end?
Lord, help us.
We had a foretaste of the malign power posed by Big Tech on our sovereignty when, on October 25, as the region was commemorating Anti-Sanctions Day, the US flooded local websites with online digital platforms pushing their narrative that Zimbabwe's economic circumstances were not caused by sanctions but corruption.
As specious as this argument might be, sadly, it appeals to the confirmation bias of the impressionable anti-Government brigade.
This shows that the battleground on which the new war is being fought has shifted to digital and online platforms.
And the new narrative which is being deployed against Zimbabwe that has been insidiously planted on social media platforms, and has percolated to the mainstream media in various regional jurisdictions, is the purported and alleged interference by the ruling ZANU-PF in regional elections to ostensibly rig them - whatever that means.
It started with the Mozambican elections, then Botswana and now Namibia.
Again, this was a specious claim.
Yes, ZANU-PF actively supported FRELIMO and supports SWAPO, as it was wont to do, according to the pact that was agreed by the Former Liberation Movements of Southern Africa - South Africa's ANC, Tanzania's Chama Cha Mapinduzi, Mozambique's FRELIMO, People's Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA), Namibia's South West Africa People's Organisation (SWAPO) - at the meeting held in Victoria Falls in March this year.
South Africa's ANC also supported ZANU-PF at its star rallies last year.
What, however, the sponsors of the narrative on Mozambique did not tell you is the fact that there were more polling stations set up in South Africa (359) for the October 9 plebiscite than in Zimbabwe, which only had 60 polling stations.
In any case, Mozambique's National Electoral Commission approved the setting up of 602 polling stations in seven African and two European countries for a total of 331 939 voters that were registered abroad and eligible to
vote.
Even assuming that all these voters had voted for the now-troublesome opposition presidential candidate Venâncio Mondlane, he still would not have won.
Remember that FRELIMO's Daniel Chapo got 4 912 762 votes - 3,5 million more than Mondlane's 1 412 517 votes.
Claiming the vote was rigged is obviously preposterous.
The real monster
We begin to understand those who are behind this claim and plot to besmirch both ZANU-PF and President ED, as the regional chairperson, when we look at the recent Botswana elections, where former President Ian Khama alleged that Zimbabwe was actively trying to rig elections to keep the Botswana Democratic Party in power. His claim was dutifully given wings and made viral by SABC's Sophie Mokoena, whose allegiances to the self-exiled G40 group and Zimbabwe's self-declared adversaries is a public secret.
But the secret lies with Khama.
This is the same man who is still sulking after our men and women in the shadows, the CIO, foiled the handover of a US$5 million kitty in Victoria Falls on April 6, 2019 from South African nationals who wanted to assist him to dethrone Masisi as head of BDP in favour of Venson-Moitoi. Most importantly, this is the same man who is a member of the advisory board of The Brenthurst Foundation, which has a sworn mandate to dislodge liberation movements from power.
Part of its modus operandi includes conscripting former Heads of State, such as Olusegun Obasanjo, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, among others.
Even our own celebrity Nevers Mumba has been linked to this notorious foundation.
Bishop Lazi believes that not many folks actually know the character of this creature called Brenthurst (named after an English country house built by Ernest Oppenheimer in Johannesburg), which was founded by the Oppenheimer family in 2004.
The Oppenheimers, as owners of the Anglo-American Corporation and De Beers Consolidated Mines, are the face of white extractive capital and black exploitation.
By the 1960s, their empire had become the world's largest producer of gold, while De Beers commanded 90 percent of the world's diamond trade.
In the 80s, it accounted for 25 percent of South Africa's GDP and an estimated 60 percent (or more) of the Johannesburg Stock Exchange. And this is what makes Nicky Oppenheimer, grandson of the patriarch of this empire Harry, the third richest person on the continent today.
This is the real monster - not ZANU-PF- that liberation movements face today.
Conversely, for Brenthurst, ZANU-PF is the real big monster and the ultimate prize, as it has demonstrated, both as a liberation movement fighting colonialism and a ruling party targeted by the world's powerful nations, that is has the grit, tact and capacity to withstand and push back against counter-revolutionary forces. But we need to be watchful of the ever-evolving frontiers of our struggle.
Psalms 21:11 says, “Though they plan evil against you, though they devise mischief, they will not succeed.”
Bishop out!
It is just obscene that one person's worth can be close to a third of the cumulative gross domestic product (GDP) - a measure of economic output of goods and services - of all 16 countries in SADC.
Looked at differently, his wealth is more or less equivalent to his motherland South Africa's GDP. Kikikiki.
This is quite a stunning and remarkable turn of fortune, especially for the 53-year-old South Africa-born nerd, who reportedly began working illegally in the United States in the 1990s.
They say most of his wealth comes from his stake in Tesla, an American electric vehicle manufacturer, which means his wealth can only grow bigger as the world transitions to clean energy. Musk also controls Space X, an aerospace company that designs, builds and launches space rockets and spacecraft.
And, hell, he now has Starlink, whose impact is already being felt in our own neighbourhoods here in the teapot-shaped Republic.
These are highly lucrative ventures that allow the billionaire to continue printing money.
He has grown so filthy rich that in October 2022, he bought Twitter from Jack Dorsey on a whim. To push through the transaction, he had to sell US$40 billion worth of Tesla shares.
However, under a new leadership, Twitter's worth has dropped precipitously to around US$19 billion.
But, notwithstanding its failure to generate a return on investment, Twitter, or X, as it is now known, might prove to be Musk's most strategic acquisition as it has given him awesome and unimaginably huge power and influence to shape communication, conversations, perception, opinion, agendas and the world view of more than half a billion people.
He now has the witchcraft and sorcery to control people's minds in many countries in the world, which is what politicians generally envy and crave.
This is why he was such invaluable company for Donald Trump the candidate, helping him reclaim the White House against extraordinary odds.
What wananchi in this part of the world fail to realise and reflect on is the fact that our lives are now being shaped daily by these Big Tech behemoths like X and Meta (which owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp).
Daily, they harvest our personal information and sell it to companies and intelligence agencies, among other third parties, some of whom use it to manipulate what we see and our decision-making.
You might have forgotten about the Cambridge Analytica scandal around 2010, where personal data belonging to millions of Facebook users was collected by the British consulting firm, Cambridge Analytica, and used for political advertising.
Some of this content finds its way to intelligence and security agents in the West, who use it for obvious reasons.
You see, the content that we consume daily, particularly on social media platforms, is not random. The longer you spend engaging with a particular type of content, the more the platforms gauge your preferences and funnel similar content for your eyeballs.
This has the impact of conditioning and grooming the consumer.
Ironically, the same countries that used to counsel us about the virtues of net neutrality - a nonsensical concept premised on unfettered internet access - and such-like gibberish are beginning to push back against these quixotic ideals and clamping down on social media.
Just last week, Australia took the radical but commonsensical step to ban children under 16 from using social media, such as Snapchat, TikTok, Facebook, Instagram and X, because of the harm being caused by these platforms.
Last year, France similarly introduced legislation to block social media access for children under 15.
Also, on October 26 last year, the United Kingdom passed the Online Safety Act, which, among other far-reaching interventions, enjoins social media companies and search services to guarantee and ensure users' safety on their platforms.
It criminalises practices such as encouraging or assisting serious self-harm, sending false information intended to cause non-trivial harm, threatening communications, intimate image abuse, racially or religiously aggravated public order offences, inciting violence and abusive or hateful content.
The list is endless.
The UK is not done yet.
Another law, the Safer Phones Bill, which purportedly proposes to “protect children from the harms that can be caused by excessive screen time and the use of social media”, is already in the works.
The Bill goes so far as proposing to review phone sales to teenagers and for ministers to review whether technological safeguards would be required to automatically implement on phones sold to those under 16.
Police in the UK have already expressed concerns over the speed at which harmful and malicious content online can spread to millions of people and potentially cause civil unrest. So, this makes Big Tech companies, and the men and women who control them, like Musk, the world's most powerful and influential institutions and figures today.
What Musk has lost financially through investing in X he has more than made up for through the political capital and clout that comes with these pervasive platforms.
Who is controlling us?
And this raises a fundamental question: Who is controlling the content and narrative that we are consuming in this part of the world? Or, better still, who is shaping that narrative?
And to what end?
Lord, help us.
We had a foretaste of the malign power posed by Big Tech on our sovereignty when, on October 25, as the region was commemorating Anti-Sanctions Day, the US flooded local websites with online digital platforms pushing their narrative that Zimbabwe's economic circumstances were not caused by sanctions but corruption.
As specious as this argument might be, sadly, it appeals to the confirmation bias of the impressionable anti-Government brigade.
This shows that the battleground on which the new war is being fought has shifted to digital and online platforms.
And the new narrative which is being deployed against Zimbabwe that has been insidiously planted on social media platforms, and has percolated to the mainstream media in various regional jurisdictions, is the purported and alleged interference by the ruling ZANU-PF in regional elections to ostensibly rig them - whatever that means.
It started with the Mozambican elections, then Botswana and now Namibia.
Again, this was a specious claim.
Yes, ZANU-PF actively supported FRELIMO and supports SWAPO, as it was wont to do, according to the pact that was agreed by the Former Liberation Movements of Southern Africa - South Africa's ANC, Tanzania's Chama Cha Mapinduzi, Mozambique's FRELIMO, People's Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA), Namibia's South West Africa People's Organisation (SWAPO) - at the meeting held in Victoria Falls in March this year.
South Africa's ANC also supported ZANU-PF at its star rallies last year.
What, however, the sponsors of the narrative on Mozambique did not tell you is the fact that there were more polling stations set up in South Africa (359) for the October 9 plebiscite than in Zimbabwe, which only had 60 polling stations.
In any case, Mozambique's National Electoral Commission approved the setting up of 602 polling stations in seven African and two European countries for a total of 331 939 voters that were registered abroad and eligible to
vote.
Even assuming that all these voters had voted for the now-troublesome opposition presidential candidate Venâncio Mondlane, he still would not have won.
Remember that FRELIMO's Daniel Chapo got 4 912 762 votes - 3,5 million more than Mondlane's 1 412 517 votes.
Claiming the vote was rigged is obviously preposterous.
The real monster
We begin to understand those who are behind this claim and plot to besmirch both ZANU-PF and President ED, as the regional chairperson, when we look at the recent Botswana elections, where former President Ian Khama alleged that Zimbabwe was actively trying to rig elections to keep the Botswana Democratic Party in power. His claim was dutifully given wings and made viral by SABC's Sophie Mokoena, whose allegiances to the self-exiled G40 group and Zimbabwe's self-declared adversaries is a public secret.
But the secret lies with Khama.
This is the same man who is still sulking after our men and women in the shadows, the CIO, foiled the handover of a US$5 million kitty in Victoria Falls on April 6, 2019 from South African nationals who wanted to assist him to dethrone Masisi as head of BDP in favour of Venson-Moitoi. Most importantly, this is the same man who is a member of the advisory board of The Brenthurst Foundation, which has a sworn mandate to dislodge liberation movements from power.
Part of its modus operandi includes conscripting former Heads of State, such as Olusegun Obasanjo, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, among others.
Even our own celebrity Nevers Mumba has been linked to this notorious foundation.
Bishop Lazi believes that not many folks actually know the character of this creature called Brenthurst (named after an English country house built by Ernest Oppenheimer in Johannesburg), which was founded by the Oppenheimer family in 2004.
The Oppenheimers, as owners of the Anglo-American Corporation and De Beers Consolidated Mines, are the face of white extractive capital and black exploitation.
By the 1960s, their empire had become the world's largest producer of gold, while De Beers commanded 90 percent of the world's diamond trade.
In the 80s, it accounted for 25 percent of South Africa's GDP and an estimated 60 percent (or more) of the Johannesburg Stock Exchange. And this is what makes Nicky Oppenheimer, grandson of the patriarch of this empire Harry, the third richest person on the continent today.
This is the real monster - not ZANU-PF- that liberation movements face today.
Conversely, for Brenthurst, ZANU-PF is the real big monster and the ultimate prize, as it has demonstrated, both as a liberation movement fighting colonialism and a ruling party targeted by the world's powerful nations, that is has the grit, tact and capacity to withstand and push back against counter-revolutionary forces. But we need to be watchful of the ever-evolving frontiers of our struggle.
Psalms 21:11 says, “Though they plan evil against you, though they devise mischief, they will not succeed.”
Bishop out!
Source - The Sunday Mail
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