adminThe challenge is an acid test of the astute wisdom and capacity of African and what can be. The current reality is that after the liberation of Africa from colonialism all but dinosaured political imperialism, a new economic imperialism with political nuances in tow has reared up its ugly head, moving in like an octopus and with homosexuality its front.
British Prime Minister David Cameron may have unveiled the spirit of the new imperialism when not so long ago he touted homosexuality as a conditionality for any aid his country would now disburse to those including Zimbabwe asking for British financial assistance.
United Nations Secretary-General Mr Ban Ki-Moon would also obliquely appear to have endorsed the new imperialism when during a recent visit to Zambia he was reported to have urged the government there to embrace homosexuality as part of its governance — touching Zambians on the raw with the remarks that left a foul test in their political mouth.
Mr Ban should not be seen to have directed his own embrace of the unnatural and ungodly behaviour to the Zambian people alone. No, he knew that Zambia is not encapsulated in air-tight boundaries, making it insular to the rest of the world.
Yes, the UN boss knew that Zambia would be the right staging post for whatever declarations he made and that these would cascade down over that country’s borders to other countries in Southern Africa and elsewhere on the continent.
But this pen says to hell with evil pronouncements from the mouths of world leaders who occupy their positions by the grace of God and are therefore supposed to champion the campaign for the elimination of hunger and poverty in less developed states, rather than parade themselves as proponents of moral decadence.
Thus, after the protectionist policies with which the North hedged itself against exports from the South, we now have homosexuality as a sine qua non of business relations between the haves in the developed world and the have-nots of developing countries.
But does the new reality ring a bell as a wake-up call to step up a South-South co-operation and survival plan or does each country pursue a favoured-nation status that makes African states perpetually walk in the shadow of the First World.
Dawn appears to have broken upon Africa to disengage herself from the so-called centre of knowledge and wisdom and instead engage fiercely in intra-and-inter-African business and other trade initiatives in a bid to achieve self-sufficiency or a modicum of it, to foster peace and stability at home.
Indeed Africa is endowed with immense mineral and other natural resources that individual countries may exploit to improve the welfare and living standards of impoverished masses in rural areas in particular.
This pen views a reported burst of enthusiasm by business people in South Africa to invest in Zimbabwe, and Bulawayo in particular, as a welcome positive new point of departure towards intra-African trade.
It is this pen’s contention that when African states cease a perverse dependency syndrome on the West, and instead begin to rely on themselves, a brave new future will begin to unfold ahead of the continent.
But for intra-regional or intra-African investment initiatives to bear much-needed fruit, individual states in dire need of financial infusion into their struggling economies must necessarily clear their deck of any riff-raff for such investment to take off smoothly.
In that regard, while a comedy of errors by which the $40 million allocated to Bulawayo under the Distressed Industries and Marginalised Areas Fund (Dimaf) is riven should not deter potential investors, it is certainly regrettable and must be looked into with speed for all the genuinely affected companies to be thrown a lifeline for their good, the good of their workers, and for the good of Zimbabwe.
To begin with it would appear that individual ministers were given or arrogated to themselves the carte blanche right to decide which distressed industry should, or should not benefit from the fund.
But the power of politicians to decide things does not necessarily compensate for a lack of the requisite business acumen which alone should determine which company deserves a dose of financial revival or which does not deserve an urgent shot in the arm.
In the case in point, who really sits behind CABS, which disburses Dimaf and pulls the strings?
We are talking here about tax-payers’ money, not money proffered from any individual politician’s pocket with conditions for its allocation given by the individual donor.
No small wonder then the hullabaloo about Dimaf being politicised while thousands of workers who lost their jobs when factories shut down, and their families wallow in poverty as the future remains forlorn?
Why, for instance, did not Cabinet see it prudent to set up a panel comprising industrialists and legal experts to oversee the disbursement of Dimaf under a set of criteria that would guarantee transparency and ensure that all industries in dire need, in the country’s manufacturing hub were given a new lease of life?
It does not help Bulawayo much to dissipate a sustained attention that Zimbabwe’s erstwhile industrial colossus deserves by speaking about distressed companies in other cities as though the plight of workers in the country’s second largest city is now water under the bridge.
Party politics should never, never be allowed to take precedence over the politics of the stomach which always has the last laugh after all.
The Government should heed the distress cries of the people of Matabeleland as it should those of people in other regions, and move in to restore hope and security among its people.
Finally, when imperialists realise that African countries have the ability and capacity to help one another politically and economically, they will think twice before imposing sanctions to try to tame those African governments that are deemed to be “stubborn” as Zimbabwe is hence the illegal, Western economic embargo which has ruined the economy causing untold misery across the nation as of the result.
Therefore, the onus falls squarely on African countries to stand shoulder-to-shoulder to keep the enemy at bay or throw open their ranks to be infiltrated, weakened and divided for the enemy to come marching in for political enslavement and economic plunder and with homosexuality raised high as the banner of new “human” rights.
That way, too — and since reality is not a sphinx but is potentially live and dynamic — Africa will serve homo sapiens from becoming extinct as same-sex marriages do not procreate.
Even if gay and lesbian couples were somehow to become a norm after natural families died away, trouble would still haunt the childless couples.
Some natural habits not wanting to perpetually to be boxed in somewhere in the human body would eventually cause the gay “husband” undergo the same operation to try to normalise their conjugal life.
So you (yes, you) see! When futuristic leaders, like President Mugabe and some men of the cloth, speak vehemently against homosexuality they will have gone ahead of other leaders and seen the kind of social turmoil into which society is wont to herd itself by embracing unnatural habits that the devil flaunts using human beings with no moral scruples at all.
Bongani Ndlovu