Britain walking in Zim’s footsteps?

Prof Jonathan Moyo, MP

What the hell is going on in the disintegrating MDC-T whose hypocrisy against Zanu-PF on issues of corruption and leadership wrangles is now being exposed on a daily basis and what on earth are the MDC-T’s neo-colonial founders and funders in Britain up to following last Thursday’s inconclusive British general election whose conduct and outcome has all the derided trappings of Zimbabwe’s March 2008 elections to the embarrassment of the British political establishment that has been behind the MDC-T in a hopelessly single-minded way? While the answer to this question may be out there in the politically polluted air, and because time does not hide anything, those in our midst who believe that only time will tell can take heart.

The confused and confusing aftermath of the British election and the senseless wrangling in the MDC-T are God-sent events.
Some fundamental truths about the treachery of the MDC-T and the hypocrisy of its British creators are beginning to speak for themselves as told by the passage of time, not only since Zimbabwe’s March 2008 general election but particularly after the emergence of the MDC in 1999 as an undisguised front for Rhodie and British interests in Zimbabwe.
The good news about our country from the passage of time is that most Zimbabweans are Zanu-PF at heart, a common truth there for all to see.
There are now some compelling developments in our body politic which point to the real possibility that even God may also be Zanu-PF mainly if not only because of the party’s unflinching pursuit of higher principles and enduring policies whatever the circumstances of the day.
It is very tempting, in fact irresistible, to interpret the latest electoral stalemate in Britain and its explanations and justifications from the British political establishment as God’s way of exposing British colonial folly over things Zimbabwean with reference to Zanu-PF in particular.
Zimbabwe’s electoral problem in 2008 is exactly Britain’s electoral problem today.
Put differently, President Robert Mugabe’s and Zanu-PF’s post-election quandary in March 2008 after the inconclusive election in which no political party won the parliamentary plebiscite is precisely the post-election quandary that Prime Minister Gordon Brown and his embattled labour party are suffering in Britain today after the British held an election which did not produce an outright winner.
That can only be as a result of God’s intervention to teach the Brits an historical lesson about the wages of neo-colonialism in pursuit of regime change. And the moral of the lesson is that former colonial powers like Britain should be careful about what they say about or wish upon their former colonies.
For the avoidance of doubt, there is of course no shortage of Zanu-PF actions that may leave a lot to be desired as policy deviations or as betrayal of the party’s enduring principles but those deviations and betrayals are inherent to the human condition and are therefore inevitable as a matter of human nature. What is relevant and significant and what explains why most Zimbabweans are Zanu-PF and why even God himself seems to have a soft spot for Zanu-PF is that the party’s principles and policies on the big and revolutionary issues of self-determination, indigenisation and local empowerment always speak to a just and higher human good typically sought by any sovereign people under similar circumstances around the world.
In this vein, Zimbabweans understand only too well that the shortcomings of their political leaders and the weaknesses of their political system are matters for Zimbabweans to deal with and not an excuse for neo-colonial intrusion. It is instructive that the election mess in Britain has not attracted international intervention and yet it is indeed a mess which the international community expects the British to resolve on their own because it is, after all, their business.
Zanu-PF has always maintained as a matter of principle and policy that Zimbabwean issues must always be resolved by Zimbabweans without being manipulated by external interests with their own agenda. This principle and policy is not about performance, which is a technical or action-based matter, but about belief embedded in the heart and spirit of the nation.
As such, where Zanu-PF may fail here or there on some specifics of detail, its failures are never an act of deliberate malice or ideological confusion as a matter of principle or policy but a necessary political expression of correctable human weaknesses that are commonplace.
This is the infectious thought that comes to mind when one considers the political ramifications of what is going on in the now irreconcilably divided MDC-T along with the geopolitical consequences of last week’s telling British general election which ended with a hung Parliament amid serious allegations of vote rigging as Prime Minister Gordon Brown and his labour party cronies vigorously make unmistakably Zanu-PF arguments to justify clinging on to power.
Let us further probe the latter before the former.
Since 1997 the British Labour party has pursued a racist and gratuitous foreign policy on Zimbabwe reminiscent of how the same party facilitated Ian Smith’s illegal Unilateral Declaration of Independence (UDI) in 1965 which triggered Zimbabwe’s Second Chimurenga.
The cornerstone of the British Labour party’s mindless approach to Zimbabwe since 1997 has been its refusal to either understand or accept the just and unapologetic implementation of land reform in the country to remedy colonial injustice.
In that refusal, the British Labour party turned the necessary and therefore unavoidable land reform in Zimbabwe into a governance matter in general and an electoral issue in particular. The fairness and freeness of elections in Zimbabwe was made to be dependent on whether and how Zimbabwe pursued land reform.
In defence of its untenable and, in fact, ridiculous 1997 position on Zimbabwe, the Labour party used electoral propaganda about alleged bad governance in Zimbabwe which in 1999 was swallowed by the British Conservative party and Liberal Democrats who joined the Labour party to found and fund the MDC through the Westminster Foundation.
All these three British parties claimed that the MDC-T won the March 2008 parliamentary election and demanded that Morgan Tsvangirai, whose party had gotten one seat more than Zanu-PF, should form an MDC-T government not only when the fact was, as it is in Britain after that country’s May 6 general election, that no single party won an absolute majority of at least 106 seats out of 210 but also when Tsvangirai himself had not won the presidential election despite mustering the most votes in a presidential election whose inconclusive outcome required a run-off on the back of a parliamentary popular vote resoundingly won by Zanu-PF.
Obviously the three main British parties demanded that the MDC-T should form a government after the inconclusive March 2008 general election not because the MDC-T had won the election but only and only because the three parties had, in fact, formed the MDC as their front and were supporting it for that reason alone.
Now, after last Thursday’s general election in Britain, the three British parties behind the MDC-T are in exactly the same situation in which their MDC-T was in 2008 with none of them commanding an absolute majority in Parliament to be able to form a government. All of them are in political misery. With the Zimbabwean situation in mind, it would be surprising if God is not repeatedly telling poor Gordon Brown, who made the most useless noise against President Mugabe in 2008, that what is good for the goose is good for the gander.
In the true biblical style in which God is said He reveals His will or way, Gordon Brown has not only had to deal with the compelling fact that a sitting head of government must remain in office until a new head is sworn in, something which he tried in vain to deny President Mugabe after the inconclusive March 2008 elections in Zimbabwe, Brown’s defeated and outgoing government is also facing mounting voter anger after many would-be British voters, like some Zimbabwean voters in 2008, were turned away before voting in places like Sheffield, Manchester, Birmingham, Liverpool, Newcastle, parts of London and Surrey, among many others.
Legal challenges are now pending across Britain. Similar situations in Zimbabwe after the March 2008 elections were demonised as vote rigging not only by the three main British political parties that are now suffering the same fate but also by the gullible so-called private media in and about Zimbabwe whose silence over the British electoral mess, chaos and hypocrisy is deafening.
The timing of Britain’s electoral mess which proves British hypocrisy on free and fair elections could not be worse for the MDC-T which is literally disintegrating on the weight of its treachery as a sellout party with no national agenda beyond the neo-colonial interests behind it.
One of the very good outcomes of having the MDC-T in the coalition government since February 2009 is that its officials have used the opportunity to show the party’s true essence and colours. By every measure the MDC-T has proved that it is not what its duplicitous British founders and funders cracked it to be in 1999.
Whatever the MDC-T is, we now can say with certainty that it is not a movement for democracy. The best that can be said about it is that it is a Movement for Delinquent Confusion. After joining the government last year, the MDC-T leadership has displayed a shocking penchant for corruption, greed and power for its own sake on the back of breathtaking incompetence.
While Zanu-PF continues to address the critical issues of removing the illegal Western economic sanctions, consolidating land reform and ensuring indigenisation and empowerment for all Zimbabweans, the MDC-T has nothing to say or offer on the national scale for the benefit of Zimbabweans regardless of their political affiliation.
The MDC-T confusion is very serious and Zimbabweans better beware. One day the MDC-T makes noise about an endless list of alleged outstanding GPA issues. When they run out of steam about that, as they have, they make a lot of negative noise against indigenisation and empowerment and when that does not work they make more negative noise about freezing and not freezing salaries for civil servants.
What is important to note in this saga is that while the earlier MDC-T noises were against Zanu-PF, now it's the MDC-T fighting itself as evidenced by the clashes between Tsvangirai and Biti or between Biti and Eliphas Mukonoweshuro over the salaries for civil servants.
Clearly this saga demonstrates that the MDC-T is all about negative energy. If you want to hear about something that either will not happen or work, listen to the MDC-T. Tsvangirai has become an expert at promising pies in the sky.
When he assumed office as Prime Minister he sought to score cheap points against Zanu-PF by falsely promising civil servants real salaries in forex, but that remains a pie in the sky.
Now he is seeking to score equally cheap points against his own secretary-general, Tendai Biti, by falsely promising that civil servant salaries will not be frozen when the practical position is that these salaries have indeed been frozen all along and they will continue to be frozen until the illegal sanctions are removed and the Zimbabwean economy can make money again.
The reality is that, while the MDC-T loses its way in the trenches of corruption, especially among its councils, but also in the ranks of its national leadership, Zimbabwe is going through a severe liquidity crunch made worse by MDC-T-inspired economic sanctions with no solution in sight.
As for Mukonoweshuro, a well-known member of Tsvangirai’s so-called kitchen cabinet who has been shedding crocodile tears about the low salaries of civil servants given his party’s parallel structures that are awash with donor top-ups, while it is understandable that he should seek to please his master against Biti, it is totally absurd for him to suggest that alternative sources for civil servants’ salaries might come from Cabinet committees, including one chaired by Deputy Prime Minister Thokozani Khupe, who these days seems to be concerned more about what she is wearing than what Zimbabwe needs to survive.
The fact of the matter is that Zimbabwe needs real national and revolutionary leadership with an indigenous focus which can only come from Zanu-PF to find ways of strategically utilising our God-given national resources to revive our economy for the benefit of all Zimbabweans. Anything else coming from the MDC-T and its embattled British founders and funders whose hypocrisy on elections knows no bounds is a pie in the sky.