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Perspective Stephen Mpofu
It boggles the mind, what the twosome above earlier this week pumped into the ears of their worldwide audience among whom the more discerning were no doubt smitten with incredulity or repulsed by utter repugnance at what they heard.
The Voice of America, a mouth piece of the United States government, broadcast an interview by its Zimbabwean correspondent in Harare in which the MDC-T through its spokesman Obert Gutu loosed probably the harshest condemnation yet of land reform in this country as well as the Zanu-PF government for introducing the programme under which land — a source of the protracted armed struggle against racist white rulers who seized it in the first place during the colonial occupation of this country — was repossessed from a minority of white farmers for redistribution to the black majority who needed that asset the most.
Gutu, obviously articulating the position of his party, spoke against the government’s reported plan to import 700,000 tonnes of maize this year to avert hunger stalking millions of Zimbabweans in some provinces where maize, Zimbabwe’s staple diet, failed due to erratic rains or pronounced drought.
[Manicaland, Masvingo, Southern parts of the Midlands and Matabeleland South provinces face a serious food deficit as a result of failed rains.]
In the interview — and speaking in tones that appeared to confirm the Zimbabwean opposition party as a proxy of the US government which along with its allies in Europe imposed sanctions on Zimbabwe in opposition to land reform — blamed the food deficit on the land reform programme by blaming the government for repossessing land from those more capable of using it more productively (whites) and giving it to blacks whom he said failed to utilise that national asset.
Incredibly, the MDC-T spokesman made no mention whatsoever of global warming and climate change, the twin phenomena that have been responsible for poor harvests in several other countries in Southern Africa that include South Africa also affected by the drought and will have to import maize to replenish its lean stocks, as will Malawi and Mozambique where floods spawned by climate change destroyed food crops.
[Recurrent droughts and floods are signature tunes of climate change globally.]
MDC-T’s Gutu indicted beneficiaries of land reform in Zimbabwe over the food shortages this year. But on what does he blame the equally poor harvests in Malawi, Mozambique and South Africa where no known land reform programme has taken place?
In the circumstances, is it not correct to suggest that the MDC-T continues to speak to the gallery of the West, a West that appears still hell-bent on effecting regime change to remove the Zanu-PF government from power in order to install a regime that will reverse land reform, a task that the illegal economic embargo which the MDC-T invited on this country was intended to achieve?
If that is not so, how does one explain a situation whereby a party that yesterday was ruling this country in an inclusive government with Zanu-PF, and claims to have a huge following, oppose through its spokesperson the importation of food to feed the masses who need it and among whom are the opposition party’s own followers?
It becomes clearly obvious that the interview with the Voice of America was meant to impress the MDC-T’s financiers, including a European Union court which adamantly refuses to remove President Mugabe and his wife, Prosecutor General Johannes Tomana along with the Zimbabwe Defence Industries from the West’s backlist something that no doubt keeps the MDC-T on cloud nine.
But surely did not Gutu or his boss realise that opposing food imports was tantamount to decampaigning the party that has high ambitions of governing this country in the future? In fact, does Morgan Tsvangirai surely believe that his supporters will applaud a statement which says no food should be imported with the result that those supporters and their families and other Zimbweans should starve to death should the worst come to the worst?
This pen suspects that Gutu spoke the way he did apparently under a mistaken belief that Zimbabweans, or at least many of them, did not tune in to the Voice of America to listen to his remarks — an unmitigated fallacy.
Surprisingly enough, the broadcast in question bore no background information telling the readers about global warming and climate change as being the devils behind depleted food harvests in southern Africa.
The countries that illegally imposed sanctions on Zimbabwe have also deliberately not said the exact reason for doing so, preferring instead to abuse concepts by telling the world that the embargo was “targeted” and that the Zanu-PF government “rigged” elections and was guilty of “human rights violations”.
Of course, measures affecting an entire population of just over 14 million people cannot by any stretch of the imagination be said to be “targeted”.
As for the alleged rigging, were those who imposed the sanctions omnipresent, like God, at the July 31 elections in particular, where their favourite party, the MDC-T, was defeated, to adjudge the polls rigged as they claim? Those countries find it difficult to accept that MDC-T was trounced and so they choose conveniently to blame a party that won the elections hands down.
Similarly, the West chose to describe the repossession of land from white farmers, a legitimate move by the Zimbabwean government as a “violation of human rights”.
But how do these same people describe the seizure of the same land by Europeans during the scramble for Africa?
Is it only the rights of white people or humans that are violated, while blacks are not humans so that their rights were not violated in the first place when their land was taken away from them?
The truth of the matter above is that, not being Davids themselves, countries in the West fighting Zimbabwe find truth a fearsome invincible Goliath to look in the face and so choose to be escapist instead.
Online Reporter