Art of manufacturing opinion

essence of democracy.” Essentially this is the art of manufacturing public opinion.
It is people with power and resources that are capable of engineering consent and this is why powerful countries pour billions of dollars into the concept of aid work — ostensibly carried out by powerful political groups masquerading as non-governmental organisations.

They come in various ways and names and most prominent are USAID, NED, Human Rights Watch from the United States, DFID and Westminster Foundation from Britain and many other Western aid agencies far too many to mention. The pre-occupation of donor agencies is to shape the thinking of their beneficiaries, sometimes for noble intentions.

The reality of today’s world is that there is no such thing as a non-governmental organisation, regardless of the noble intentions and goals often outlined in the official modus operandi of the organisations. Most if not all of the Western aid agencies are in cohorts with the imperial foreign policy of their mother countries.

Aid agencies are largely funded by business people and most solicit or accept government funding from different countries, that way compromising whatever is left of their independence.

The United States has a very long history of manufacturing international opinion about the affairs of other countries and the international image of Zimbabwe today has hardly been shaped by Zimbabweans themselves.

Rather it has been shaped around the theory that the country is a non-democracy and is in essential need of Western democratisation. The opinion strangely makes sense even to some Zimbabweans.

So powerful has been this rhetoric that even the so-called revolutionaries in Zanu-PF seem to have suddenly forgotten that they fought to end minority rule and to introduce majority rule — itself the true essence of democracy.

Now it has become common to hear politicians from Zanu-PF parroting the Western sponsored line that the reason for a new constitution in the country is to pave way for the introduction of democracy. Often we are told that the new constitution “will introduce the necessary reforms” needed for the democratisation process, euphemised by the phrase “free and fair elections.”

There is no better gesture of democracy than the popular land reclamation that happened in Zimbabwe at the beginning of the millennium and surely there is no better gesture of democracy than allowing Zimbabweans to own the means of production in their own country. This is what the economic empowerment policy is all about. This is democracy.

It beats sense and logic that a country that is leading the way in reclaiming ownership of African resources by African people can be portrayed as lacking most in democracy.

That should ordinarily be unacceptable. But world affairs are not run in an ordinary manner. They are run by the power of manipulation and that is the reality of the world order of today.

When Guatemala was trying something similar to what Zimbabwe is doing today way back in 1954 the United States moved in to overthrow its capitalist democratic government, putting in its place a murderous death squad regime that thrived of strong funding from Western aid agencies as well as direct funding from the US government itself.

To this day Guatemala is nothing more than a client state of the United States that thrives largely on constant infusions of Western aid. Zimbabwe could be like this if the people of Zimbabwe did not resolutely deny the Western sponsored MDC-T a chance to win elections over the last decade.
There is no reason why the people of Zimbabwe should support the control of their resources by foreign nationals and there is no reason why the people of Zimbabwe should accept a political party that is a mere puppet of other countries. Simply put there is no reason why the Zimbabwean public must be in favour of policies that are harmful to them.

It takes extensive propaganda on the part of imperial elites to make a people view the looting of their resources as development — to view the foreign exploitation of their resources as investment, to view the exploitation of their cheap labour as employment creation, and to believe that it is impossible to capitalise industrialisation without begging for capital from Western countries.
It takes breathtaking propaganda to make a huge chunk of the population accept a puppet political party like Zimbabwe’s MDC-T — to make a people believe that puppet politics is synonymous with fighting for democratic change.

It takes a mixture of instilling fear in the population, intimidating voters by the power of economic sanctions and isolation and the use of powerful media outlets to manufacture opinion that is contrary to the real feelings of the people.

Western voters have many times voted “in favour” of very unpopular politicians whose policies can only be described as inhumane. Millions of voters recently cast their ballot in favour of losing US presidential candidate Mitt Romney even when he promised a “day one” military attack on Iran.

Right now many people in the West are made to believe that Gaza is being ravaged to the ground by Israel for some sins committed by Hamas — and that is supposed to make sense.

Ronald Reagan probably had the most overwhelmingly unpopular policies ever in the run up to the 1984 US presidential race. He had the armaments, social spending cut backs and his sabre rattling foreign policy that saw the sponsoring of civil wars across the planet — and yet the election resulted in what was described as the “Reagan landslide.”

What caused the landslide was the marginalisation and distraction of the people. Those in power will make sure that the public has no way to organise itself so that people can articulate their opinions to each other.

Resultantly it becomes almost impossible for the public to know the real opinions of all others — leaving the political elites with the simple task of manufacturing what becomes public opinion through the media and even the intellectual system.

When Copac went out on the so-called public outreach program, presumably to find out the opinion of the public on Zimbabwe’s constitutional framework, what in the end transpired was the prevailing of the opinion of an intellectual elite that turned out to be a mere custodian of Western feeling on constitutionalism for weaker nations.

It is quite easy now for those who committed this egregious crime to use politicians to make the public ratify their treacherous opinion by providing a “landslide victory” for the opinion of a quisling minority. The real opinion of the people has been sidelined and abandoned as has become public knowledge now, and will not be part of the options availed for the referendum ballot.

We saw it in 2000 when the draft that carried the real interests of the public were defeated by a manufactured public opinion that was entirely based on a protest vote against Zanu-PF more than it was on the intent and content of the constitutional draft itself.

People like Alex Magaisa, Paul Mangwana, and Douglas Mwonzora genuinely believe that they carry public opinion on constitutional matters right inside their heads and they have no intention of kidding. That is what elitist power does across the world.
Ruling elites always believe that they are the custodians of public opinion for all other mortals.

When people gather at a political rally they are manipulated to become victims of the rhetoric of the political organisers. The programs are organised in such a way that only the agenda of the political elites is portrayed.

Church leaders are roped in specifically for the opening and closing prayer and nothing else, respected members of the public are only allowed to stand up so that the public can see them and the applauding of the speaker is always engineered from the high table, from where it is made to raucously filter into the audience. They do that in church too.
By the time the public leaves a political rally they find themselves discussing and endorsing only the issue raised by the elites, not necessarily what affects their lives.

The few who question the goings on are quickly made to feel the oddity of thinking outside the box of the elites. There are the hangers-on of the politicians who are always handy in demonising and punishing dissent and their cause is made a lot easier by the fact that not many of us really want to be the oddball around others.

Politicians prevail because people are not paying attention to what is going on — preferring instead to stay on the side of all others.
We are told that the sitting MDC-T MPs are going to be spared the rigorous test of primary elections, unless they are stupid enough to fail to compete against themselves in something Douglas Mwonzora calls a “confirmation” exercise — in reality a parallel primary election featuring only one candidate, the sitting MP.

This is exactly how the public is manipulated by those in power. Whose idea is this confirmation exercise? Mwonzora somehow thinks it is a popular idea.

Zanu-PF has a very long history of preferential treatment for cadres whose relevance and importance is mostly limited to the opinion of the elites within the party and we saw how some of these “cadres” were imposed on the people in the 2008 general election. This time we are told the party is not going to allow itself to be “infiltrated” by people who are only popular with the constituencies and not with those in the leadership of the revolutionary party.

To weed out the infiltrators all manner of new rules are being thrown at the threatening popular young political entries that could realistically cause a huge upset in the party’s status quo. It is very easy to be expelled for being popular with the grassroots and the less said about this the better for now.

Both Zanu-PF and the MDC-T lost about 10 seats each in the 2008 election because of imposition of candidates and that development was telling in more ways than one.

This is good news that shows us that it is impossible to completely destroy the power institution of the people. It is impossible to totally annihilate a people’s solidarity.

This is why there is hope that the revolution of the people of Zimbabwe will prevail regardless of the challenges facing the heartland. Hopefully our people will prevail ahead of their politicians.
Zimbabwe we are one and together we will overcome. It is homeland or death!

Reason Wafawarova is political writer based in SYDNEY, Australia.