adminone of his numerous interviews, the veteran nationalist said Africa remained largely with vast untapped natural resources, which Europe and the US want to exploit using dirty tactics such as regime change.
After the end of slave trade and colonialism, the fight to gain access to Africa’s resources has been a major cold war between mainly the United Sates of America and China.
On a few occasions it has resulted in full-scale wars like in Libya and DRC, in others it has been through regime change, while in others it has been through military intervention disguised as rescue mission.
Africa, which has become the focus of future world economic growth due to its vast natural resources, is under serious threat from militarisation by the US through its superior military outfit named Africom.
The future development, independence and prosperity of Africa should be analysed from a very careful eye, an eye that is able to see American undercurrents, in each new political party that emerges in Africa with the word democracy as part of its nomenclature.
Africom is a counter-revolutionary military outfit, meant to create the right atmosphere for America to control and exploit Africa’s natural resources for the benefit of even unborn Americans, as enshrined in the White House Foreign Policy.
America, which was not part of the colonialism matrix in old Africa, is compensating for their lost opportunity to plunder that time, by coming up with ultra-modern plunder mechanisms that are so clandestine and subtle that an ordinary African could never see.
Actually the ordinary African will be fooled so much that he or she will turn against those trying to protect them against the vultures that the Americans are turning out to be and lead their countries to prosperity.
President Mugabe is a case in point. All the good he has done for his people has been rubbished, first, by the British and of late the Americans, who have identified the veteran liberator as an epitome of resistance to the Americanisation of Africa, through his influence in Sadc.
To the Americans, Sadc has become somewhat a mustard seed that will spread its influence in Africa and resist American moves to plunder natural resources and that plunder must be protected by Africom’s military might.
President Mugabe and his colleagues in Sadc have vehemently said no to the hosting of Africom and that is precisely the reason why they hate him but they will not say it. Instead, they have called him a dictator and violator of human rights.
But to the critical eye, the allegations against President Mugabe are a smokescreen, behind which the Americans hide their hatred for him, for blocking their free-for-all on Africa’s resources.
They hate President Mugabe for controlling and putting out of their reach, Zimbabwe’s land, minerals and other companies through land reform and indigenisation.
African leaders should never be hoodwinked by assertions of democracy, human rights, good governance and accountability: those are high-sounding theories meant to confuse the general populace and swear it against real African issues.
Those high-sounding ideologies do not exist even in Europe itself but always set the general populace in Africa against their political leadership and have become the catch phrases for regime change. Ask Zimbabweans, Somalis, Congolese, Sudanese and Zambians. South Africa will be able to tell the story sooner than later.
These terms have been exported to Africa through money-spinning NGOs and have been used to establish pro-Western political parties, which are actually an affront to African humanism and democracy. Africa needs practical solutions to contain the surge by the hawks from America and Europe, Africa need to come up with a military unit that makes it unnecessary for outsiders to bring their armies in the guise of bringing peace and tranquillity to Africa.
Once Africa has regional standby brigades and another brigade for the African Union, no outsider can justify bringing in troops to Africa, so there is urgent need to deal with this typical African problem of lack of military cohesion.
The danger is that when you bring in Americans as peacekeepers, you will not be able to tell them when to leave as long as they do not feel that they have plundered enough.
Ask the Iraqis. African leaders cannot be stooges and, intelligent as they are, can no longer be fooled or tricked into believing that foreign soldiers are good for controlling troubled spots. By creating regional and even continental military brigades, Africa will have liberated itself and not exposed itself to intervention by foreign troops and hence foreign invasion.
What defies logic is that if African leaders like President Mugabe, Sam Nujoma, Kenneth Kaunda and Samora Machel, among others, managed to put up armies that dismantled colonial settler regimes, what then makes them fail to come up with military brigades to defend the continent from second colonisation?
Professor Mukutwa Aiwa Atiku is a political science lecturer at Lagos University, Nigeria. This article is reproduced from DayAfrica.com
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