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Tichaona Zindoga
There is something rather pitiful happening across a swathe of the civil society sector in Zimbabwe these days, almost like a pall hanging over the dead.
Over the last decade and a bit an incredible number of civil-political groupings were formed and found a home with, or even in, the MDC-T party, which dismally lost elections on July 31.
A phalanx of these groupings was created at the turn of the century and enjoyed an incestuous relationship with the MDC through their mutual funding from the likes of USAid and the National Endowment for Democracy.
NED is an institution funded by the Republican and Democratic parties with the aim of influencing policies in foreign countries, specifically to cause change of regimes that the US establishment dislike, while propping up its proxies, especially in the developing world.
It is like the Westminster Foundation in Britain, which, too, has been seeking regime change in Zimbabwe and is often touted as the hatchery for the MDC.
George Soros, a US billionaire, also sponsored these groups through his Foundation and the so-called Open Society Initiatives.
Thus in Zimbabwe were created scores of organisations self-labelled as “democracy” and “human rights” and owing parentage and sustenance to the likes of NED and George Soros, among others.
After July 31, these western donor-driven organisations face a bleak future, at least for a couple of years to come, as funding is said to be starting to dry up.
It has been happening at Morgan Tsvangirai’s MDC, as retrenchments have been coming thick and fast, with some people going home empty-handed.
It can only be worse for the tributary and appendage NGOs.
They will be living very miserable lives in the years to come simply because the laws of economics will not allow their broke western benefactors to fork a cent more than they can afford.
Already, last June, USAid announced it would be cutting down on democracy-related funding in Southern Africa.
This is bad news for those who earned their living by setting up yet another network whose sole reason for existence was to supply a decent salary, office and car to the inventor and his relatives.
The temptation will be to laugh out loud at these miserable fellows – call it schadenfraude – especially after their sell-out politics of the last decade and more.
They daily provided reasons, sounds and sights why Zimbabwe had to be punished by the West for daring to redistribute land to the black majority.
They campaigned for sanctions, and when they got them, their maintenance.
They ate of the misery of the people and drank and made merry and this is their dark hour.
Yet there is something far more important than the schadenfraude: there is an urgent and pressing need for authorities to fill the likely void with patriotic civil society and think tanks that will also be able to stand up to the sellout organisations crunch-time.
John C Goodman of the US National Centre for Policy Analysis defines as “idea factories” which sponsor research on specific problems, encourages the discovery of solutions to those problems, and facilitates interaction among scientists and intellectuals in pursuit of these goals.
He says a public policy think tank explicitly focuses on government policies, usually for the purpose of improving those policies or creating viable alternatives.
He marks the origins of think-tanks to Englishman Thomas Clarkson, who founded the Society for the Abolition of The African Slave Trade in 1782, noting that think tanks figured prominently in the 20th Century.
There has been a yawning gap of the same in Zimbabwe and the country lost an opportunity in creating a real civil society that counter-weighed the externally funded fake groups.
There was a need to situate the problems in Zimbabwe as historical, social and economic, rather than civil and political, as we were made to understand, because Zimbabwe enjoyed the same having attained political Independence in 1980.
When the hired NGO mobs thronged international forums with the hired message, the idea would simply have been to provide the alternative and patriotic voice.
Zimbabwe suffered a lot of bad publicity regarding the sale of its diamonds as campaigners like Farai Maguwu and his Centre for Natural Resources Governance.
Just recently, he notoriously sought to discredit a soccer tournament trophy sponsored by Mbada Diamonds as a “cup of shame”.
It would be useful for Mbada and other diamond miners in Chiadzwa, to invest in a relevant and sustained think tank that will be responsible for research and bona fide lobbying.
(Far more effective, isn’t it, than holding intermittent facility tours – and they come far and wide in between – and an annual sports competition.)
The think tank will also provide jobs for our graduates and things to pore over for academics.
It should be acknowledged that some of the people manning the lobby of shame, are generally not unpleasant people but trying to make ends meet.
The same could go for Zanu-PF, which in the past years would be crowded out by opposition voices.
The trick will be to offer alternative voices in civil society that tells the true story of Zimbabwe and that should be taken seriously.
Online Reporter