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Dr Qhubani Moyo
I am convinced that the European Union never ever imagined that a day would come when they would have to issue an unsolicited statement indicating that President Mugabe could for “the Africa Union business” visit their countries. This is a serious climb down coming after a spirited attempt and fight to keep him off that position as it meant they would have to climb down and accept the new circumstances and reality that as the AU chairman they would have to interact with him even in their home ground.
The spirited campaign which had been verged by the European Union and their cousin Uncle Sam across the Atlantic just tells how important the position of AU chairperson is. It should then help those who wanted to mislead the nation that the position was just rotational and therefore ceremonial.
Such is the level of desperation by those who were actually speaking highly of the position when machinations were in action to block President Mugabe from ascendancy. When those machinations were being thwarted, the headlines that were telling us of how important that position is and that Africa could not risk its relations with the West by allowing a President under sanctions to be at the helm suddenly changed.
The irony of it is that when Africa resisted these western machinations and went on to elect President Mugabe, the same people who were speaking of how important that position is made a U-turn and suddenly began to tell us of that the position is rotational and therefore ceremonial.
That kind of warped thinking tells of how low some would go in misleading the citizenry just because of their personal hatred of President Mugabe. Just for the record, it is preposterous for anyone to imagine that because a position is rotational it is therefore ceremonial and of no significance.
It can only come from warped minds of people living in denial and have no understating of the operations of interstate organisations and the powers that the chairmen wields in directing the flow of arguments in the meetings and thus driving the agreements towards an acceptable consensus.
The very fact that the position is rotational cannot make it ceremonial; it makes it rotational but still influential. But what also the proponents of the ceremonial doctrine are not saying is that the position is assumed through an election and that if there were any other candidates in the Sadc who did not agree with President Mugabe’s candidature they would have gone to an election.
The rotation is on the regional blocs and not individual member states. This meant that for now it was turn of the Sadc and not necessarily Zimbabwe. It was mere coincidence that the turn for Sadc came when Zimbabwe was its chair.
If Sadc did not have faith and confidence in President Mugabe’s leadership capabilities they would have allowed anyone else interested from the region to put their name and thus allow it to go for an election. But because of their confidence in his capabilities they were able to reach a consensus and all supported his candidature.
President Mugabe himself, through his spokesman George Charamba, made it very clear before the AU elections that they were cautiously optimistic about landing the position and that if President Mugabe’s ascendancy was going to be a heavily contested one, and thus capable of dividing the continent, he was willing to reconsider the position.
What he aspired for and got was to be elected with full support and confirmation of all the countries so that he could drive the continental development in a united fashion. And true to his hope and recognition of his legendary role as Pan Africanist of undisputable magnitude the whole of Africa stood firmly behind him and produced a result that has caused panic in the European Union.
This just tells that while the position is rotational it is very important in driving the continent and the tremors of its importance have been felt as far afield as Europe which responded uninvited by moderating their stance on sanctions against President Mugabe. The European Union never thought or imagined that there would be a day when they would have to find themselves making unsolicited statements indicating that Mugabe would be allowed to visit its continent for whatever reasons.They had wanted him to stay away until his demise so that he would be an example of how ruthless they can be to anyone who dares disturb the neo- imperialism agenda by redistribution the means of production and thus creating a new crop of economically empowered and wealthy Africans who would not dance to the whims and caprices of the former colonial master.
After Africa spoke with thunder in the election of President Mugabe, the European Union found itself in quandary and unenviable position where it had to swallow its pride and tuck its tail between the legs as it moved to reverse the sanctions that they imposed on Zimbabwe on February 18, 2002.The sanctions which were imposed by EU foreign Ministers after hearing an adverse report by Pierre Schori, the head of the EU election monitoring team which wanted to manipulate the country’s systems and processes to suit their interests in the watershed 2002 elections.
The sanctions which were imposed under the guise of putting pressure against the country for failure to respect human rights were in actual fact imposed due to anger and venom at the country’s economic redistributive polices that saw the empowerment of previously marginalised blacks by giving them land which for many years remained under the ownership of a few whites.
The European Union knew that it would be difficult to control and impose their leadership will on the people of Zimbabwe as long as they were in charge of their economy. It is always easy to manipulate and control hungry people who were relying on the few whites for survival to go with them, but it was always going to be difficult to control and manipulate people who were in charge of their economy.
The imposition of the sanctions which were announced as targeted at individuals yet in reality they were aimed at the inducing pain and suffering so as to instigate an uprising against the government of the day. In their statement after the sanctions announcement, the EU said that “sanctions were designed not to harm ordinary citizens of Zimbabwe and her neighbours”. Yet in reality at the time of the imposition there were indications that between 2002 to 2007 the first five years of the imposition the country was going to lose 128 millon euros in development aid. That figure has obviously trebled to date.
There are reports that the country has lost of $42 billion due to economic failures induced by the sanctions since that time. The effects were also felt by the neighbouring countries like South Africa and Botswana as people sought refugee and thus crowded the social service delivery in those countries.
The whole idea behind the sanctions, far from the public view that the EU wanted projected, was to induce suffering of the masses and thus cause a mass insurrection which would justify military intervention as was later revealed by former South African President Thabo Mbeki that former British Prime Minister Tony Blair wanted to undertake a military intervention in Zimbabwe.
On the other hand, America wanted to complement ZIDERA by formalising the sanctions by going a gear up in drafting a United Nations Security Council resolution for formal imposition of sanctions on the country. This, however, failed due to the intervention of South Africa and the veto power by the country’s all- weather friends China and Russia who have veto powers in the UN Security Council.
However, as time progressed and as the EU realised that their sanctions were not achieving the intended results and that there was condemnation from the Sadc and the rest of Africa, they went on to scale them down after the 2013 constitutional referendum in which they removed some 81 individuals and 8 entities from the list.
They left the President Mugabe and the service chiefs. In February 2014, they removed the service chiefs but left President Mugabe and his wife First Lady Grace Mugabe on the list. They also kept the country’s Zimbabwe Mining Development Corporation on the list in a clear signal that they had no intention of assisting country’s economic revival efforts.
This was despite the fact that President Mugabe won an overwhelming election victory in an election that was largely free, fair and credible and endorsed by the Sadc, African Union and other credible bodies who sought to observe in an objective manner and not accept only a result which favoured their political poodles.
But against all the odds and in recognition of his leadership qualities, President Mugabe has continued to shine on the international grand stage and has become the icon and beacon of hope among many marginalised Africans.
His bold statements against imperialism resonate very well with the aspirations of many downtrodden Africans and has seen him being beacon of hope of many African leaders who remain under the yoke of imperial powers because of the aid that comes with conditions of conformity.
President Mugabe’s rise to Sadc chair was obviously met with suspicion by the EU and its cousin but it is the current position which has left them in sixes and sevens making EU spokesperson Catherine Kay announce that “Visa ban on Mugabe and his wife — could be granted an exception to travel to Europe in exceptional cases for inter-governmental meetings that promoted the EU’s goals of democracy, human rights and rule of law in Zimbabwe”.
The truth of the matter is that the election of President Mugabe to chair the AU has given the EU an opportunity to climb down and avoid an embarrassment. It clearly signals as it argued last week “the new political seasons” that are coming with the ascendancy of President Mugabe to the helm of the AU. It means that the world should revise its stance and face up to the new realities that dictate that in their hatred of Mugabe is not universally acceptable and Africa has led the way.
They should move on do the right thing of unconditional removal of sanctions and not hide behind giving him a visa only for inter-governmental business. After all he derives his intergovernmental status from his position as the President of Zimbabwe. How do you reconcile the contradiction that he would be allowed to represent the intergovernmental interest to which Zimbabwean interests are included and then say he can not engage on Zimbabwean issues.
That to me sound like an ill-conceived foreign policy position .The sooner the EU comes to terms with the reality that the sanctions have fallen and that the recent events in the AU give them the best form of retreat the better.
Meanwhile, all Zimbabweans regardless of political affiliation should unite and celebrate as a collective in the election of the President of Zimbabwe to this important and influential continental position.
Dr Qhubani Moyo is a policy and political analyst from Bulawayo East Constituency. He is contactable on [email protected]
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