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Western funders and foreign interests.
They have been pawns in the west’s grand scheme to justify regime change, used to manipulate the desperation of our sanctioned condition while feeding off the propaganda of helpless victims brutalised by the Zanu-PF government. Given their tainted colonial history in Zimbabwe, the west have furthered their exploitative interests of a puppet, the hand of civil society organisations.
So the west created a conducive environment within which civil society organisations could operate, able to manipulate the masses into delivering the head of Zanu-PF upon a platter. Western sanctions were the catalyst to make our indigenous majority desperate enough to “scream”, with well-funded civil society organisations capacitated to amplify such screams to fracture a Zanu-PF government.
Then US Assistant Secretary of State for Africa Chester Crocker advocated such a sanctions design, through which economic pain was to be inflicted. He made his plea to America’s lawmakers, that “to separate the Zimbabwean people from Zanu-PF, we are going to have to make their economy scream, and I hope you, senators, have the stomach for what you have to do.”
Indeed ours was made a “screaming” economy designed to ensure Government was unable to guarantee its people’s socio-economic welfare, while bleeding its pro-majority empowerment policies on land reform and indigenisation. Sanctions would not only make the people starve but deprive them an economic empowerment remedy to the West’s scorched earth campaign against our national economy. The West sought to author a Shakespearean tragedy, that of a government whose heart was in and with the people, but which people were severed from the embrace of its government. They sought to make their own heroes in the form of NGOs and human rights defenders, such as Zimbabwe Lawyers for Human Rights, Zimbabwe Peace Project, Crisis in Zimbabwe Coalition, Women of Zimbabwe Arise and Zimbabwe Electoral Support Network.
These new heroes for the people would be made to rewrite Zimbabwe’s path, divert it from pursuit of economic emancipation set by a Zanu-PF government tested in the fires of liberation struggle. But these so-called heroes of human rights and democracy were from the onset flawed, their sacrifice being for western funders and their civil and political rights strategy to effect regime change.
All our so-called human rights defenders and NGOs have demanded and advocated for loudest and most passionately is that an economically deprived and hungry people be guaranteed their freedoms of expression, association and assembly. One wonders if such rights can remedy our sanctioned state. Their assignment has been to have a hungry and screaming majority loosed upon the street in the name of the right to demonstrate. They have nurtured anarchy and mayhem in the name of human rights, to overthrow a Zanu-PF government framed for all things evil that western sanctions had visited upon us.
Civil society organisations have been conditioned by the terms of western funding to see and speak not of the evil of our socio-economic dehumanisation by the west’s self-serving economic sanctions. They have forsaken an entire people. Watched as we have been dehumanised by sanctions because our government has been non-compliant to a western economic agenda and remained adamant upon economic emancipation from western economic subjugation. Civil society’s silence in the face of sanctions against indigenisation policies now lies exposed, ironically by western academics beginning to publish the success of land reform. They write of land reform bearing fruit, benefiting 240 000 productive ordinary Zimbabweans, the same people our so-called human rights defenders prefer to portray as impoverished by a corrupt and elitist Zanu-PF government.
We must be made to understand how an organisation calling itself Crisis in Zimbabwe Coalition can be clueless of the real crisis Zimbabwe has faced over the past decade; that of socio-economic deprivation authored and escalated by western sanctions set on provoking civil and political unrest. Yet this NGO chooses only to see the trees of civil and political unrest from a forest that is western sanctions. Zimbabwe Lawyers for Human Rights, learned officers of the law, have seen no evil, no gross violations perpetrated by sanctions against socio-economic human rights? Millions have been denied their right to education, health and livelihoods while ZLHR receives international accolades.
What of those bound by the Hippocratic Oath, within Zimbabwe Doctors for Human Rights and Counselling Services Unit. Doctors who turned their backs on such sacred oath when sanctions ravaged the right to access to health, and ultimately the right to life when thousands could not be saved from the cholera of 2008 due to a sanctions-crippled health delivery system?
Even humanitarian organisations operated with dirty hands, distributing food aid to manipulate a preferred political outcome within starved communities enticed by a few bags of maize. They have cultivated a dependency syndrome so they remain our gods whose deity thrives upon our sanctioned being, never committed to teach us to catch our own fish and find self reliance.
Men of the cloth too have forsaken biblical tenets, one being of a people’s God-given right to their land. They pursued Save Zimbabwe Campaigns and prayer meetings claiming to cleanse an alleged speck in Robert Mugabe and Zanu-PF’s eye. Yet they have remained blind to the burning log of sanctions’ evils cast within Zimbabwe’s vision for economic prosperity.
They have been wolves in sheep’s skin set upon the people by their western handlers. How can they, with all their professed expertise and academia, have neglected to investigate and speak the truth on the importance of land reform and indigenisation to a historically deprived indigenous majority seeking economic democracy?
Rangu Nyamurundira is a lawyer and an indigenisation/empowerment consultant based in Harare, Zimbabwe.
Online Reporter