David Matsanga
London — The sanctions imposed by the West on Zimbabwe, are no longer about inculcating good governance and freedoms but a tactless, miscalculated economic warfare, fashioned to ‘kill’ Zimbabwe.
Curiously, at the centre of this ugly theatre of a blistering neo-colonial attack by western imperialists, are their minions, and house Negros right inside Zimbabwe beguiled as opposition, civil society, and queer diplomats.
Some of these crazed diplomats, like the USA ambassador Brian Nichols, behave as if Zimbabwe is a province, colony, or protectorate of the United States of America.
Instead of promoting good bilateral relations between Washington, and Zimbabwe; loquacious Nichols has been going around verbally torching everywhere; inciting lawlessness, funding anti-government protests, and spreading fake news, and directly meddling in Zimbabwe domestic affairs against laid down protocols embodied in the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations (VCDR), and in multilateral and bilateral treaties.
The paradox of it all is that this unbecoming behaviour of Nichols comes at a time the government of the USA, is warning foreign missions and foreign countries from interfering in its domestic affairs including elections! Whatever happened to the old wisdom; what’s good for the goose, is good for the gander.
Importantly, President Mnangagwa has tried so so much on the issue of institutional reforms to conform with human rights, it’s not like Zimbabwe is the USA where blacks still live like second-class humans under the crushing yokes of subjugation; where racism is enough reason for police to shoot a black man and worse still send him to prison for many years purely on the implicit black bias. In the USA jails are one million African Americans, for deadpan that would not land any white man inside a Zimbabwean in jail.
The kind of lynching, the world was bizarrely treated to in the case of George Floyd are things that don’t happen in Zimbabwe, and Mr Nichols and his fellow Western diplomats should appreciate it.
You don’t punish a man for trying, it’s sinful. President Mnangagwa is doing everything to ensure Zimbabwe becomes great again.
These crippling ever-evolving sanctions imposed in 2001, against President Robert Mugabe and grandees in his government initially was about the timely land resettlement program; but the goal has kept shifting base on every deliberate lie and beer parlour gossip.
President Mnangagwa has even offered to compensate formerly uprooted white settlers, with land and capital; something that would never happen in Western Countries against their minority populations; but still, the sanction screw is being tightened.
Sample the case of the Chagossians in British courts.
The British government vowed in 2019 not to return Chagos to Mauritius, and resettle families it evicted from this island in 1968. The British refusal flies in the face of a UN resolution, an advisory opinion from the International Court of Justice. This is a dark chapter, marked with deceit, tragedy, and above all a colonial land grab. The same rights Britain is demanding for evicted whites in Zimbabwe, it can’t offer for the Chagos Islanders who are refugees in Britain. The shame of a glaring double-standards!
If this punitive economic war is based on the delusion that a red carpet will be rolled for the opposition to walk into government as the new rulers, of Zimbabwe, let these imperialists wake up from their dream.
Zimbabwe’s opposition is under civil war; bloody violence, intimidations, and embezzlement of funds, and cheap blackmail has become their modus operandi.
Despotic tendencies of the late Morgan Tsvangirai and his latter-day puppy, Nelson Chamisa, is causing serious upheavals. The damning findings of political scientist Dr Alex Magaisa hired to diagnose MDC-T ailments are all there for everyone to read.
Lost in all these power plays, ran by the opposition as directed by their Western sympathizers are that these sanctions are hurting the ordinary Zimbabweans- businessmen, school-going children, the working class, farmers to mention but a few.
How the opposition has never noticed this reality in their unmitigated power-lust leaves me wondering how they seek to lead the same people they are conniving with their powerful western friends to punish.
On behalf of Africa, and other friends of Zimbabwe worldwide; I appeal to the governments of the USA and the EU to:
To cultivate a better working relationship with President Emerson Mnangagwa. He has extended a hand of friendship and fellowship; wisdom demands that these governments must unclench their hands and reciprocate the good gesture.
GOD BLESS ZIMBABWE
The writer is a political scientist and international relations expert with a bias towards conflict resolution. He is also an investigative journalist, and a Pan-African based in London, the United Kingdom
