Africa must take cue from Zim

address colonial historical imbalances, Zimbabwe becomes a handy referral point and this explains why the United States of America and its allies in the European Union will never forgive President Robert Mugabe for leading a real black empowerment project by redistributing natural resources.
President Mugabe has single-handedly raised the profile of the Southern African country.
He has raised the stamina of the small country and as I write today, he is no doubt a hero for all rightful thinking Africans and any sound thinking African leader should emulate his leadership style.
Without such levels of political delivery and real black empowerment projects like President Mugabe has done, many African leaders risk being mere political clowns and pawns of the US and its allies.
In Zimbabwe President Mugabe did not stop his black empowerment projects, despite cocktails and buffets of criticism and a sanctions regime from the US and EU.
He continued and he still continues. There was even a bullish attempt to justify a military intervention through a hogwash UN resolution that was quashed by world political fair players, Russia and China, through their veto power, which left the US with an egg splashed on its face.
President Mugabe’s crime is that he dared redistribute the natural resources desperately needed by the US and have been a preserve of whites in Rhodesia and independent Zimbabwe. Morgan Tsvangirai, the Prime Minister in Zimbabwe’s coalition, is a mere stooge of the West, like Raila Odinga of Kenya and is bent on nothing other than preserving white supremacy.
He can best be described as a sellout representing American interests. Being the custodians of vast untapped African natural resources ranging from minerals such as gold to diamonds and uranium, African leaders can befriend the United States of America at their own peril. Confronted with an increasing Chinese presence on the continent, the US is devising methods, some of them dangerous to Africa’s prosperity, in a desperate attempt to amass as much wealth as possible for future generations, ahead of China.
The US military, therefore, becomes a handy tool as manifested through Africom (US Africa Military Command), the superior military command established in 2008 specifically to subtly recolonise Africa.
Unbeknown to most Americans and people around the world, the US has been steadily increasing its military footprint in Africa. They call it the New Spice Route, a homage to the medieval trade network that connected Europe, Africa and Asia, even if today’s “spice road” has nothing to do with cinnamon, cloves, or silks.
Instead, it’s a superpower’s superhighway, on which trucks and ships shuttle fuel, food and military equipment through a growing maritime and ground transportation infrastructure to a network of supply depots, tiny camps and airfields meant to service a fast-growing US military presence in Africa.
Few in the US know about this superhighway, or about the dozens of training missions and joint military exercises being carried out in nations that most Americans couldn’t locate on a map.
Even fewer have any idea that military officials are invoking the names of Marco Polo and the Queen of Sheba as they build a bigger military footprint in Africa.
It’s all happening in the shadows of what in a previous imperial age was known as “the Dark Continent.”
In East African ports, huge metal shipping containers arrive with the everyday necessities for a military on the make. They’re then loaded onto trucks that set off down rutted roads toward dusty bases and distant outposts.
On the highway from Djibouti to Ethiopia, for example, one can see the bare outlines of this shadow war at the truck stops where local drivers take a break from their long-haul routes.
The nodes of the network tell part of the story.
Manda Bay, Garissa, and Mombassa in Kenya; Kampala and Entebbe in Uganda; Bangui and Djema in the Central African Republic; Nzara in South Sudan; Dire Dawa in Ethiopia; and the Pentagon’s showpiece African base, Camp Lemonnier, in Djibouti on the coast of the Gulf of Aden, among others.
According to Pat Barnes, a spokesman for US Africa Command (Africom), Camp Lemonnier serves as the only official US base on the continent.
“There are more than 2 000 US personnel stationed there,” he told TomDispatch recently by email.
“The primary Africom organisation at Camp Lemonnier is Combined Joint Task Force-Horn of Africa (CJTF-HOA). CJTF-HOA’s efforts are focused in East Africa and they work with partner nations to assist them in strengthening their defence capabilities.”
Barnes also noted that Department of Defence personnel are assigned to US embassies across Africa, including 21 individual Offices of Security Co-operation responsible for facilitating military-to-military activities with “partner nations”.
He characterised the forces involved as small teams carrying out pinpoint missions.
Barnes did admit that in “several locations in Africa, Africom has a small and temporary presence of personnel. In all cases, these military personnel are guests within host-nation facilities, and work alongside or co-ordinate with host-nation personnel.”
When the truth will eventually be told to generations to come, Robert Mugabe will be largely viewed as an African hero, who stood by the values and principles of the total liberation of his people, through empowerment projects that protected natural resources from greedy US and EU countries. All and sundry in Africa should be worried about US footprints in Africa.