Part 1

Robert Mugabe is being lynched by Britain and her allies. The BBC has been drafted to soft-bomb public opinion and public discourse with sleaze against Mugabe; even to the extent of Stephen Sackur using his daily platform Hardtalk of 8th July, 2008, with Frederick W. der Klerk, as a guest, to openly call for military invasion of Zimbabwe to oust Mugabe and install a lackey of the British on Zimbabwe’s corridor of power. This is against all international principles and protocols that made it a law in international relations to respect the sovereignty and territorial integrity of every sovereign country. This is akin to Ahmadinejad of Iran calling for the annihilation of Israel, which is another independent country. I am appalled that no one saw it as a monumental indiscretion on the part of the BBC to be calling for the invasion and the destabilization of another country, because it happens to be an African country.

These British imperialists are so hypocritical and shameless for their consciences  that they should be indicted for their brazen idiocy. The question is: when did Mugabe become Britain’s problem? Mugabe in the classical words of an erstwhile American president was a motherfucker. But when he was Britain’s motherfucker, it was okay. But once he woke up from his slumber and decided to be his own motherfucker, Britain saw a tyrant and condemned him to be hanged like Sadaam Hussein. Is Mugabe the greatest problem in Africa? No is the answer. Darfur Sudan, where black Africans are being genocided out of existence is a continental sore on the conscience of the world.

The whole world looks on inactive as the Janjaweed militias slaughters women, children, and old people for fun across Western Sudan. Intervention by the ill-equipped African Union soldiers has not achieved anything. The Janjaweed goes on with its murder of black Africans. The reportage of this silent holocaust has almost disappeared from the Western press. They have no particular interests in Sudan. If Sudan had sacked white farmers, the British kites would have swooped down on that country as they are now doing with Mugabe.

Hypocrisy is really reprehensible. A roll call of those rising to criticise Mugabe are worse than him. George Bush was in Japan calling Zimbabwean elections a sham. Does that ring like someone you know? Look at who is talking! Is this not called projection in psychology? The election that brought George Bush to power in 2000 was a sham, rigged in his favour. Florida is a footnote to that. Al Gore beat him to it. But stupid white men a la Michael Moore saw a man who went AWOL in the army and a Dick Chenney, a professional draft dodger during the Vietnam War became the helmsmen of the New American global domination enterprise. To this end, Bush criticizing Mugabe’s election is like the pot calling the kettle black. Some people will not see anything wrong or hypocritical with that, because Bush happens to be a white version of this pot, and Mugabe the black version. Is this not an exercise in racial profiling?

Another critic of Mugabe is Nicholas Sarkozy. This man should have kept his mouth shut and kept on his detail as a man in mid-life crisis, jumping around like a love-crazed teenager who never dreamt in his wildest imagination of landing a beautiful woman. He should have occupied himself with the business of France and his new wife. Any way, this is a man with a Napoleonic complex. The French have nothing to tell Africa about good governance. All French colonies have been basket cases. The only country that tried to set herself free and latch unto the path of development was the one that decided against the French way, namely, Burkina Faso. But France pulled all strings to frustrate this positive force that smiled on Africa. The French government, upon which Sarkozy sits today, financed and chaperoned the murder of Thomas Sankara.

They killed a young African leader who wanted to transform his country and make it socio-economically independent.

But French greed for domination frustrated that effort. The French intelligence engineered his murder and got a stupid African face to execute the orders. Blaise Campaore has not led Burkina Faso anywhere since he got there. That is one of the ways that Western imperialism has frustrated an African renaissance. Yet the French are giving us lessons in good governance. Sarkozy should take his homiletics elsewhere. The guys the French supported like Paul Biya in Cameroun or Houphouët-Boigny in Cote d’ Ivoire left their countries broken for good measure while obeying French dictates.

After destroying Africa, the French are the ones in the EU who are today spearheading the effort to stop African immigrants from coming to Europe. They destroyed an African future and are now doing everything to prevent young Africans whose futures were embezzled on French plates from coming to show their scars to the imperial metropole that destroyed their lives, hopes, and expectations in the first place. The new immigration policy introduced by France at the European Internal Affairs ministers’ conference in Cannes this July 2008 is to all intents and purposes designed to be a new slave trade, where qualified African skilled labour would be brought over and allowed to stay in Europe instead of in their home countries to help development there, while those who are not so skilled could be shipped off or dumped outside the border like pieces of wood.

Yet this hypocrite lectures Mugabe about human rights and rule of law. And it is interesting because Sarkozy is the son of an immigrant from Hungary. I wonder if he would have been president had the French promulgated the kind of immigration law he is now proposing at the time his father was forced leave Hungary. But in his racist mind, Africans should not be allowed to emigrate to escape the scathing poverty bequeathed them by a collection of French and Euro-American plunder, perfidy and economic sabotage.

Angela Merkel joins the fray. We would respectfully ask this woman to keep her words to herself. She is heir to a country that was synonymous with human rights abuses. The Jews were not the only ones murdered by the German state. What about the extermination of the Herrero tribe of Namibia, which was virtually wiped out at the instance of the German state. German companies have been bribing and upholding western lackeys on African power corridors. Siemens is a footnote to this. These guys compromise African governments and prevent them from executing social programmes for the interest of their people, but only to dance to imperial designs of totalitarian capital. So, none of them is untainted enough to preach to Mugabe. They are all white versions of him. If such structures of control as are absent in Zimbabwe are the same here in Europe, many of them would aspire to presidency for life like their friend turned fiend, Mugabe is doing.

All of them were witnesses to the fact that Mugabe was there for 20 years. And none of them said or did anything in defence of democracy. He was their pal, even to the extent of being awarded a British knighthood, that refuge of pirates and plunderers. But once he took back Black land from white farmers, he became a devil, and a non-democrat. Why is George Bush and all the other guys not attacking Teodor Obiang Nguema, who has been in power for more than 30 years, even more than Mugabe? They wouldn’t. He is a stable trading partner and has a strategic resource, which their economies are addicted to; namely oil. Once he dares shut off his oil spigots, Mugabe’s present fate will befall him, even with greater impact.

Why is America, Germany, France and Britain not saying anything about the fraudulent selection and the murder of democracy in Nigeria? Why didn’t the imposition of Yar Adua, on Nigerians, which violated every known canon of decency and democracy attract international condemnation? It is because what the West is fighting for is not democracy. It is the reign of their capital and the exploitation of nations pursuant to that vision. The West and her allies welcomed Yar Adua’s illegitimacy because it served them real good. They now have a puppet that was too morally compromised to be a strong voice in power.

Such men are easy to blackmail. And they are now deploying to good effect. Yar Adua is a new errand boy on the block. And he must be installed in power, even if his election is fraudulence personified. To top off the cake with an icing, Yar Adua goes to Washington to get his job detail listed for him by Bush, immediately after his election. He has gone to pay homage to the august emperor at the White-house. And that blueprint designed in Washington is what he is running in Nigeria right now. That is why the groans and pains of the people in the Niger Delta are being treated with imperial disdain.

This rhetoric of ‘hang Mugabe’ is a prelude to an invasion of Zimbabwe and the killing of Mugabe. The plans are definitely in the offing. The Western intelligence agencies are already on their drawing boards plotting on how to knock him off. It is not the first time they would do that. Any African leader that oversteps the boundaries of the job detail mapped out for him by this Western cabal is knocked off; and another puppet has always been groomed and raised in his place. Buhari/Idiagbon challenged the British government up to the extent of seizing a British Caledonia Airways plane in Lagos, when Britain detained a Nigerian Airways plane in the wake of the Umaru Dikko kidnap attempt. Babangida who was a sleeper CIA agent was raised up to knock them both off and overthrow them.

I do not know who recruited whom? Abiola or Babangida? But both guys have known each for long, even helping each other in collusion with the government of Olusegun Obasanjo, to get the Nigerian army to buy some obsolete communications gadget from ITT, which has since been revealed as a CIA front company. Fela sang about it and many Nigerians were brainwashed into seeing Fela as a mad man.

Why are these Western hypocrites caring so much now?  These pseudo-lovers of  Africa! Why? They stood by as the Hutus slaughtered one million Tutsis during the Rwandan genocide. That was when their intervention was needed. They never granted that. They wanted an African equivalent of the Nazi holocaust, as to be able to cite Africa as where barbarism was invented. And they achieved their aim.

Mugabe is about to be lynched. He should prepare himself for invasion. Since South Africa under Mbeki could not be used to do that kind of dirty job on Zimbabwe, while America uses Ethiopian forces right now in Somalia, the invasion may be engineered from within. A palace coup is in the offing in Zimbabwe. This is because any vote in the UN for a UN intervention force will be vetoed by China, which has some good relationships with Mugabe. Britain is really desperate. Every news media is being deployed to soften public opinion, paint Mugabe as Lucifer himself, so that there will be no outcry when his head eventually graces the hangman’s noose of British perfidy.

This is exactly the way it happened with Sadaam in Iraq. Before an Anglo-America target is to be lynched, the CIA first leaks and deluges the press with damning information, both re-engineered and manufactured to numb the public with the alleged atrocities of the subject, which should justify the removal of the target in question. The public is scarcely allowed time or the luxury to sift through, analyse or digest this flow of information because they pervade the airwaves and cyberspace with their sheer volume, speed, and consistency as to dwarf our slender attention-spans.

That is a classical brainwashing technique. Lies repeatedly told start to sound like truth. Once the public is deluged with such falsehoods, they start to believe it. Any observer to the sacking of Sadaam Hussein in 2003 can see this cycle repeating itself in Mugabe’s case. Sadaam was painted as evil so much so that 74 percent of Americans supported taking military action against Iraq in February 2003. This was the time when cooked and manufactured intelligence was presented as “slam-dunk” by the CIA to nail a dictator whose only crime at that time, was simply being the spent president of a nation emasculated by years of UN sanctions, after the Kuwaiti invasion, coupled with the compelling fact that he was sitting atop the second largest oil deposit in the world, a resource the USA considered a strategic national interest.

The document titled Rebuilding America’s Defenses: Strategy, Forces and Resources for a New Century, prepared by Project for a New American Century for Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and other hawks in the Bush presidency showed that Bush planned to invade Iraq even before he became president.

In addition to this campaign of calumny presently directed against Robert Mugabe, a video alleged to have been taken by a Zimbabwean Prison guard going by the name Shepherd Yuda surfaced. I took time to watch this clip. The questions the clip threw up are really disturbing. First and foremost, the clip was too perfect to be taken by someone in a country where such actions are supposedly treated as treason, and could attract instant execution, as the BBC and other British establishment surrogates would have us believe. It was like those men were dressed and asked to pose for the camera. I wonder how the camera man could have gotten a very perfect background sweep of the picture of Mugabe hung high up behind Mr. Shambira, who was supposed to be the hawk and Mugabe’s surrogate stealing the votes for him.

Even the young woman in uniform seems to betray a look that says: oh, are you guys here? I would love to appear on camera too!. Thirdly, the voting for Mugabe was so perfectly done for the camera that this cannot be the job of an amateur freelancer, who risked his life to get out those pictures.  Mr. Yuda looked straight into the camera to confess ‘his painful decision’ to leave Zimbabwe. Here, he simply reminds you of American POWs in Vietnam who are drugged, beaten, and tortured into renouncing their country. He looks like one reading from a board. In case you did not hear that, Guardian UK admitted to having flown the camera in to Mr. Yuda. Guardian UK must have probably paid him to do that job.

What do you expect when you pay a poor mercenary in a country where Western sanctions has pushed inflation over the 1000 percent mark. You don’t need a prophet to tell you that this video was a doctored sham. In spite of what the voice over would have us believe, nowhere in the video was Mr. Shambira captured as saying, ‘you must vote for Mugabe’! In some countries, people vote with their voter’s card, or national identity cards. The video does not show us convincing proofs that they were asked to give their service numbers or ID card numbers before they vote as a basis of recognizing and fishing them out if they failed to vote for Mugabe. This explodes the allegation that their numbers or identities are asked to compel them to vote for Mugabe.

What the  Guardian did is akin to what CNN’s Jeff Koinage did in Nigeria, paying some people to masquerade as members of Niger Delta militants in other to spice his assumptions and spin a story palatable to the Western audience. Shambira was described as being friendly on the surface but he is feared. Although this man supposedly did not know he was filmed, but he never raised his voice to utter a violent word or throw around his weight throughout the entire footage. He never asked anybody to vote for Mugabe, supposedly an ogre feared by all. The people there were not brow-beaten at least they did not look afraid or as people scampering for safety in his presence. It was a very normal proceeding.

When the officers gathered, the clip did an usual thing, which indicates that this video was doctored. The audio went so low, but we were offered some English subtitles. The words died to a crawl. The man could be saying anything. But we were offered the subtitle that he said ‘Up ZANU PF and down with MDC’. The last question to the clip: As the footage closes, Shepherd Yuda had a picture taken of him with his family as he prepares to leave Zimbabwe. Someone took that video because Mr. Yuda posed with his family. The question is: who was that person? Does he have an accomplice? Why didn’t the accomplice or any other person collaborate what Yuda tendered orally as the case.

He said that the election violence created a lot of orphans, but we did not get to see any orphans. I think anybody who is shopping for credibility should have done a better job, even with his life at stake. Sorious Samura did a better job in “Cry Freetown” even with bullets and shrapnel flying around him and over his head. But Mr. Yuda’s piece seems to be a heavily doctored mishmash of various shots taken in various locations and merged together using modern computer technology, which Guardian UK must have in abundance to be competitive in the cutting-edge competitive internet media market of today.

Another question arises from this video is: how did Guardian UK got the camera into Zimbabwe? Is that not a crime? Not only is this economic sabotage, because custom duties should be paid for it. Was any duties paid for it? Can I bring such a thing into the UK without declaring or being asked to pay duties for it? Not only that, it is espionage as well? Can a Zimbabwean do that during a debate in the UK’s House of Lords, without going to Old Bailey to answer for treason? This shows that the British government and other non-state actors are running a very dangerous network in Zimbabwe. Any country worth its name will protect its territorial integrity with everything it has got. Guardian UK has proven that it is ready to commit crimes in a foreign country to sell its prejudices to the public as truth in the name of news reporting. It is only in Machiavellianism that the end justifies the means.

The British government is under great pressure from the cigarette lobby to kick Mugabe out. Zimbabwe happens to be a major exporter of tobacco leaves; the major raw material for cigarettes, which is a multi-billion dollar industry, and a great source of tax to the British government. Mugabe’s seizures of white-owned farms threaten this cheap source of raw materials. It is exactly the way it happened in Biafra. Since Shell BP was never sure what the Easterners will do with the oil in their backyard if they seceded, Shell leaned on the British government never to back secession, even when that was the only sane way of resolving the impasse and setting Africa on the way to development and self determination.

Either way you look at it, Zimbabwe is the fight between corporate capital and the late realisation of a government that it runs the risk of historically failing its people, if the status quo is allowed to go on.  Africans must weigh in on the side of Mugabe. The imperialists must be kept in their place. Africa is old enough to take care of her own problems on that scale. She should be allowed to do that and not blackmail and terrorised into towing a line that is unpalatable for the continent.

The G-8 is meeting today in Japan. Africa is on the table again. Presidents Yar Adua of Nigeria, Wade of Senegal and Mbeki of South Africa and some others are invited to observe once more as their continent is carved up like the Berlin conference of 1885 did. The G-8 is going to come out with a strong worded condemnation of Zimbabwe. But make no mistakes about it. These pretenders masquerade as the forces of good and democracy, whereas it is a club of capitalistic and neo-liberal gangsters, whose sole aim is to represent the parochial and narrow interests of the corporate lobbies and conglomerates that financed their elections in their various countries.

Mugabe may be a useless tyrant, but he is not being fought for his tyrannies. No! Western hypocrisies are given a free reign to crush Mugabe with extreme prejudice because their financial interests are at stake. They are never interested in the people of Zimbabwe. They never cared and would never give a hoot about democracy once their lackey is installed in power in Zimbabwe. That is what is happening all over Africa and in history. They want to push their lackey, Tsvangari, into power so that he should reverse policies detrimental to British interests, even if those were good for the people of Zimbabwe. Until then, they are not going to lift sanctions on Zimbabwe. The fundamental issue here is not Zimbabwe. It is the right of Africans to self determination. Britain and her alliance of totalitarian capital should allow Africa to determine her destiny free from outside diplomatic, military and economic intimidation.

Part 2 of this is would follow shortly. It will be a critique of history and memory using Mugabe and Zimbabwe as backdrop. It is historico-contextual analysis. Watch out!

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Emmanuel Franklyne Ogbunwezeh was born in Nigeria and currently lives in Germany. He had his Bachelors in Philosophy from the Pontificial Urban University Rome. Mr. Ogbunwezeh is currently working on a Ph.D. in Social Ethics and Economics at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main, Germany. His book The Tragedy of a Tribe: The Grand Conspiracy Against Ndigbo and the Igbo Quest for Integration in Nigeria was published in 2004. "Shots at Immortality: Immortalizing Igbo Excellence" and "The Scandal of Poverty in Africa: Reinventing a Role for Social Ethics in Confronting the Socio-economic and Political Challenges of Africa of the Third Millennium" will be published in 2005. Additionally, Mr. Ogbunwezeh published dozens of articles in newspapers, magazines, internet sites, and trade journals.

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Another African Autocrat

Teodoro Obiang Nguema: A brutal, bizarre jailer— It is hard to think of many African despots who make Robert Mugabe seem stable and benign, but Teodoro Obiang Nguema is one who does. For Simon Mann, the Old Etonian mercenary who seems about to pass from the custody of the former into the hands of the latter, it is a less than comforting thought. Whatever his other faults, Zimbabwe's leader - to take one example - has never been accused of cannibalism. But if Obiang's opponents are to be believed, the dictator of Equatorial Guinea likes nothing more than to eat the testicles of those who have crossed him. Since Mann is accused of plotting to overthrow Obiang to get his hands on the tiny state's massive oil wealth, he could be excused for having sleepless nights.

Severo Moto, the exiled politician whom Mann and his fellow adventurers hoped to install in power, says Obiang "systematically eats his political rivals". He once told Spanish radio that the ruler "has just devoured a police commissioner. I say 'devoured', as this commissioner was buried without his testicles and his brain". Other opponents have had their livers removed, although it is not known whether they were served to the president. Independent UK

Still Another!

Papa Bongo's 40 years in power—Since gaining independence, most countries in west Africa have experienced lengthy civil wars or successive military coups. Yet Bongo, who came to power in 1967 aged 31, has ruled largely unchallenged, and mostly without force, despite squandering much of the country's natural wealth and leaving it facing a deeply uncertain economic future. . . Bongo's rule has been a masterclass in the use of patronage. His ascent to the presidency coincided with Gabon's rise to being Africa's third-biggest oil producer, and he quickly realised that money could be more effective than bullets in keeping power. He built some basic infrastructure in Libreville and, ignoring advice to establish a road network instead, constructed the $4bn (£2.02bn) Transgabonais railway line deep into the forested interior. Petrodollars funded the salaries of a bloated civil service, spreading enough of the state's wealth among the population to keep most of them fed and dressed. France, whose companies were happily extracting Gabon's oil, guaranteed security by maintaining a military base in Libreville that still exists today. . . .

Most of his wealth is hidden overseas. In the 90s, US investigators found that more than $100m had passed through US bank accounts linked to Bongo, while in France it was alleged he had received tens of millions of dollars in kickbacks from the oil company Elf. Last year, French prosecutors found the Bongo family owned 33 properties in France alone, including a $27m villa. At the same time, Ali-Ben Bongo's wife, Inge, appeared on a US reality television show, Really Rich Real Estate, shopping for a $25m mansion in California. The theft of billions of dollars of oil money has stalled the country's development. Nearly 50 years after independence, Gabon has fewer miles of paved road than it has of oil pipelines. Guardian

 

Meles Zenawi—George Bush, who has violated every international law known to man, still believes he has the moral authority to “law down the law” to Robert Mugabe, in Zimbabwe. Bush took his anti-Mugabe hysteria to Japan, this weekend, for the yearly meeting of the world’s eight most powerful industrial nations, the G-8. Seven African nations were there as well, constituting the “African Outreach Group.” They served notice on Bush, the Brits and other rich countries that they continue to oppose sanctions against Zimbabwe. Meanwhile, the United States is directly complicit in what the United Nations has called the “worst humanitarian disaster” in Africa. The Ethiopian invasion of Somalia, launched in late 2006 with massive air, naval and logistical support from the Americans, has resulted in the displacement of 3.5 million people, 700,000 from the capital city of Mogadishu, alone. U.S.-Ethiopian Occupation of Somalia

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Horace Campbell. Reclaiming Zimbabwe: The Exhaustion of the Patriarchal Model of Liberation (2003)

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posted 9 July 2008