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Nathaniel Manheru The Other Side
Against all odds, President Mugabe yesterday bagged the African Union chairmanship. He did not waste time, immediately striking the tenor as to the nature of his year-long leadership of the continent.

He made sure the West got a jab, promising a focus on Africa and the control and utilisation of her resources, and of course the rebuilding of peace against mounting insecurity linked to terrorism. The run-up to the chairmanship saw many decampaigning shenanigans, most of them amateurish.

Take the so-called anti-Mugabe demonstration in some little hotel in the Zambian capital, Lusaka.

A small collection of bored, battered and defeated supporters of an MDC look-alike Zambian opposition decided on a diversionary sideshow in some shrunken lobby of this little, foreign-owned hotel called Radisson Blu.

An equally bored foreign media looking for some little action and amusement against besetting and abiding languor that had lasted for many days, decided to turn this non-action into a big, anti-Mugabe tweet-led story.

And the tweeting twit took the form of some dimunitive yet aging girl clearly frustrated by unrelieved spinsterhood.

Rocking static in Zambia

Curiously the story gets magnified by eager and willing cogs in a big propaganda game, winding up playing very big in South Africa and Zimbabwe, but hardly ever noticed in Zambia, itself the supposed locale of this “huge” anti-Mugabe demonstration which was said to have “rocked” the Zambian capital.

No, quite the contrary, Zambians had a different focus, different news value, different political question, to the point of hardly noticing the activities of this small, drunken oppositional rubble situated in the citadel of global capitalism’s paid leisure park, indeed a park hardly affordable even to Zambia’s rich and famous.

They know Radisson Blu to be an excrescence on their soil, a capitalist creature whose roots are traced to 1909 Minnesota, USA, and whose current owners are decidedly foreign, some Carlson Rezidor Hotel Group that can never carry Zambia’s totem. Or even assume an iota of her burdens.

And contrived graphics accompanying the opening rounds of the story are soon frozen, most probably after someone in the poor propaganda chamber realises these were not buoying the claim of widespread anti-Mugabe feelings at all. So graphically, the “rocking” demonstration shrinks into tightly cropped, tiny, static pictures which cannot be enlarged or moved.

Looking for Zambia

But the whole effort was bad and doomed from start.

Breaking a day before the national stadium-based inauguration ceremony of the Zambian president-elect Lungu, the “events” in that little hotel lobby were fated to be compared with what was set to follow in that giant stadium, in which Mugabe had received repeated rousing welcome before, had received rousing welcome on more than one occasion, not least during the solemn funeral of late President Sata.

One did not have to do or say much in defence of Mugabe.

Time would deliver a damning comparison, a deadly juxtaposition which shrank to a matter of waiting for a night and a dawn before its realisation.

And true to fame, the morrow saw Mugabe setting the 40 000-seater Zambian stadium alight, leaving his unimaginative detractors with a smack of fetid dung and a brownish, decaying glob on the brow.

What’s a faint, forlorn defeat’s jeer, compared to a stout, lingering cheer from Zambia’s 40 000-strong? Which is bigger, Radisson lobby or the rotund terraces of Zambia’s national stadium in which Zambia was packed on that good Sunday morning?

Where is one likely to meet Zambia’s mood and attitude: in the lobby of an upmarket foreign-owned hotel, or in the national stadium of teeming, jovial multitudes?

Much worse, do you successfully use a small, rented crowd in a hotel lobby to damn a grassroots politician like Robert Mugabe, a man who goes out of his way to poke and upset the type that patronises lobbies of foreign hotels?

In our local parlance we warn against looking for a missing bow and arrow in a small clay pot!

Abusing Zambia

But the story was never meant for Zambia. Or for truth for that matter. It was meant to caricature President Mugabe as a politician no longer at ease, no longer admired or wanted on the continent.

Zambia had been chosen for its foremost attributes as home to Southern African nationalism, as the cradle of liberation politics.

So a rejection of Mugabe, or the appearance of it, in the Zambian capital, would send a ringing message of revilement and rejection, would repackage him as a once-upon-a-time-icon-now-turned-demon in the eyes of Africa, and all this just under a week before the AU chairmanship question.

Why would the AU want such a chairman, the propagandists reasoned! It did not work.

The skies have fallen

But even before that, we had had Didymus Mutasa’s little drama by way of his missive dedicated to ruing the passage of fatty patronage he was so used to. The missive raised many cheap points, all of them building towards one “key” question: how would Africa view this “erstwhile” icon who had now turned against his comrades, against his Party’s constitution, against the ideals of the liberation struggle?

The missive was calculated to appeal to an African audience, indeed was addressed to an African audience, which is why poor Didymus targeted Sadc and the AU.

The real meaning was in the timing: the document was released a few weeks before the AU meeting, in the hope that the whole matter of Didymus Mutasa would gain convolution, to become an AU preoccupation!

My late mother used to put it better: when a rock-trap falls on a vain, little mouse, the rodent is sure to die biting a big claim on its adze-shaped teeth: the skies have fallen. It is the folly of registering your swollen self-importance by magnifying the consequences of your little predicament.

You get a sense of little Mutasa equating his demise to a major cosmological disaster. And the objective was two-fold: firstly to suggest Zimbabwe faced impending instability deriving from a major split in the ruling Zanu-PF party.

And that rift threatened to suck in, and away, one Robert Mugabe, the man aspiring for the AU chairmanship.

Secondly to put to sharp relief Mugabe’s credentials as a deserving candidate for AU chairmanship. Again, that wile failed dismally, with Mugabe surging forward to chairmanship, unstoppable.

And of course, what Didymus placed in the public domain as a mobilizing rhetorical question, today stands answered by Africa, answered emphatically.

In your best interest?

The third plank of this whole anti-Mugabe campaign was reserved for the westerners.

They worked hard, worked so hard to influence African countries against endorsing Mugabe’s chairmanship.

And the question was one and unvarying: are you sure it is in your interest to ask a man on western sanctions to be your chair.

The blackmail to Africa was obvious: get Mugabe on and you suffer a dead, frozen year at the hands of a hamstrung chairman. Well, many questions begged.

The sanctions in question were not AU sanctions; they were unilateral sanctions passed by the West in pursuit of its own selfish interests.

Was Africa being asked to wage an unprovoked fight for another continent? Secondly, the West itself is already undoing its own sanctions, having realized their futility against an unyielding Zimbabwe.

The British have started to re-engage, only constrained by a general election set for May. The French were on Zimbabwe’s doorstep only the other day, walking away a satisfied customer.

The EU itself promises US$260 million, starting as early as February, as the grouping loosens its EDF purse.

So, what question was being put to Africa in the run-up to the selection of a continental chair? Thirdly, Africa had observed Zimbabwe’s July 31, 2013 elections, marking them as free, fair and representative.

The issue of democratic credentials could not be raised against Zimbabwe, raised through the same AU which had given Zimbabwe’s elections a clean bill of health.

If one added the credentials of Robert Mugabe as a liberation hero, and a personification of Africa’s second struggle, that of economic independence, the odds against his detractors simply became insuperable.

Harnessing a double boon

Now that Zimbabwe is in, what next? It is always good and humane to celebrate the continuing life of a mother who has just survived a difficult childbirth.

But we should never forget the new, little, fragile life shivering, shaking and crying in the cote.

There is a new, delicate life born anew. Until 2000, for Zimbabwe the issue of continental leadership would have been a matter of a responsibility to be borne by a member state with the equanimity of a man discharging a tasteless duty.

And we discharged that responsibility in the past, thereby showing we were a responsible member of the AU.

Now since 2000, the issue of continental leadership has become a resource for use by a country, a nation which has been under siege for more than a decade and half.

The West knew it, which is why it sought to deny us leadership of the continent, nay to turn the AU into an odd against us.

But we now have it. We have to deploy that resource to defeat our enemies, to regain our tarnished lustre. We are Sadc chair.

Now we are also in the AU chair, a nonesuch combination in the history of sub-regional and continental leadership. And both responsibilities are onerous, not so much by way of the burdens of leadership, but by what our economy can bear presently.

We are struggling to meet our wage bill. The whole economy has drifted into the twilight zone of informality.

While the EU shows signs of reviewing its policies against Zimbabwe, the USA is as obdurately hostile as ever. Countries like Japan, while meaning well, have remained reticent and non-committal for fear of upsetting America.

The costs of America’s hostile policies towards us are reckoned and accurately calculated by an eye cast beyond the ledger of our bilaterals as two countries that must interact by way of investments, trade and mutual aid.

America is a bad bully that burdens the rest of the world with its enemies. The costs are by way of vicarious hostility practised by countries harbouring no grievance against us, but feeling obligated to support America unconditionally, often without much thinking.

Clarifying indigenisation

The Sadc and AU chairmanship must see Zimbabwe extricating itself from western hostility, but without ceding any of its core values, core objectives.

And to extricate itself means more than winning better friends; it means weakening the appeal and zeal of bad enemies. It is not always that enemies have to be humiliated to be defeated. We have a wonderful opportunity now. Today the gateway to Sadc is via our leadership, willy-nilly. The gateway to Africa is through our chairmanship, willy-nilly. The West will have to reckon with both capacities we wield today.

In the case of America, it has to accept Zimbabwe’s new role, something likely to be driven home this year at the UN, on New York. We have just acquired a good pedestal from which to shout loud, or to charm and love hard. What is our choice? Whither Zimbabwe?

That is the key question. We must get out of this mess, and the age of anger came, but is now gone.

We can’t keep fighting, shouting. Give it to R.G., he deployed just a sentence to allay fears of French investors, just a few days before his continental chairmanship.

Indigenisation, he reassured, was only limited to resource-based operations, never to the rest of investments which are unrelated to the exploitation of our natural resources.

Immediately the French delegation relaxed, counselling it was not so much the position on indigenisation, as it was about miscomprehension of this laudable position. It is a major convergence, one overcoming a key area of conflict.

A requirement of no colour, direction

More important, it sets the tone to our likely direction of interaction in the future, always bearing in mind that investor concerns are pretty much the same, whether these hail from the West, or from the East. Security of tenure is as much an issue for the Chinese as it is for the French. They need security of tenure, itself a small recompense for their acceptance of our repossession of our natural resources.

Illustrative it the French have tied up with the Chinese to begin an energy project in Binga.

How do you make love to one without coming into contact with the other? Without being seen by the other? The bedroom has shrunk, the affair and its offices very much a noisy matter. Are we ready to use the double resource of Sadc and AU leadership, use that double resource sensibly, responsibly? Chinamasa says he has fallen in love with the IMF, the World Bank. Nothing wrong, for as long as Amaiguru is comfortable with a second love in her household. More accurately, for as long as she remains the big house! But there is a difference between being in love and going uxorious, succumbing to dotage.

Falling in love smacks of an accident, recklessness. Walking into love implies preparation, a well wrought strategy. We risk swinging from extreme antipathy to reckless love, the type that would lead to transgression, cost us God’s affection, and ultimately innocence and citizenship in the Garden of Eden.

There has to be a grand strategy to underpin all we do with outsiders, henceforth. The visibility is now there. What remains is to turn it into a dividend, into dollars, a recovering economy and a citizenry that owns, works, earns and eats. Will we?

Icho!

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