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To make bigger profits faster,
capitalism has long offered the world a long string of hyper products: instant
photo, instant glamour, instant sex, instant coffee, instant rice, instant date
and instant millionaire.
With the hijacking of information technology by global media monopolies and northern intelligence services, we have entered the era of the instant lie, where a false story is created within minutes and sent around the world before the first cock�s crow, all in the name of Press freedom and freedom of expression. "Telling it like it is" has come to mean reproducing the instant lie exactly as it appears on the conveyor belt of lies. Fortunately, the rest of the world, especially in the South, is aware of this growth of the instant lie and its threat to peace. From the last two weeks alone, we in Zimbabwe have witnessed several clear demonstrations that the instant lie � though prevalent � does not fool everyone everywhere all the time. For example, in The Business Tribune of February 6 2003, Udo W. Froese published a leader page article called "Media now global opinion leader", in which he demonstrated the contamination of global media language by a few media monopolies backed by some North Atlantic states. Froese went further to say that the IMF and World Bank are extending the conveyor belt for instant lies by demanding that countries wishing to obtain credit through these two institutions must adopt neo-liberal media policies as a prerequisite for credit extension. Much of the evidence Froese used came from John Pilger and from the Glasgow University Media Group of the UK. In The Sunday Mail of February 16 2003, Dr Sikhanyiso Ndlovu published a dismissal of Professor Masipula Sithole�s so-called public opinion surveys. He showed that the surveys can be dismissed as bogus, not only because they failed in real history to predict any mass political behaviour, but actually because they violated all the basic principles, ethics and methodology of professional academic opinion research. Then in The Herald of February 18 2003, Kamuzangaza Chigumbu, writing from the US, also dismissed Prof Sithole�s so-called public opinion research both on moral and professional technical grounds. Chigumbu concluded that the only reason why Prof Sithole continued to ignore all professional and ethical principles of academic research was that he was driven by "hatred, ignorance and greed" combined. It was clear from the two responses to Prof Sithole�s propaganda that the conveyor belt for instant lies is indeed global in scope. Much rubbish was multiplying its cash value exponentially simply by being loaded onto the internet. In The Sunday Mirror of February 16, the best example of a big instant lie put on a global conveyor belt was US Secretary of State Colin Powell�s speech against Iraq at the United Nations. Ali Abunimah�s article about the speech was called Focus on Iraq: Powell�s UN Speech dissected. It showed that the culture of public lies, which George Orwell depicted in 1984 and other writings, was always Western. That culture is now definitely Anglo-American. The same Sunday Mirror of February 16 also carried Tendai Chari�s piece called "Western Media follow government lead", again exposing the food chain of imperialist lies and its role in the global media�s attack on Zimbabwe and Iraq at present. On the surface, the publication of five scathing media reviews within less than 10 days, in a small country like Zimbabwe, should be depressing. Yet the fact that there is so much awareness of media fraud from writers who are scattered all over the world should also encourage us. The conveyor belt for instant global lies can be exposed. It can be made to flow backwards for a moment, as we noticed during President Robert Mugabe�s speech at the World Summit on Sustainable Development. Some of the liars were "stitched up" by President Mugabe�s candour and integrity. Why are so many being compelled to expose this conveyor belt? Recently we saw former South African president Nelson Mandela springing to the challenge which this global conveyor belt of lies poses to global peace. He spoke in the clearest language about the role of lies in the current Anglo-American attacks on Zimbabwe and Iraq. And he offered to travel to Baghdad to show how serious the Western conveyor belt of lies threatened all of humanity by destroying world peace. Mandela�s offer brought back the words of another world figure, Pope John Paul the Second, in his New Year 2003 message, where he repeated the four conditions for peace from Pacem Terris (1963): ". . . the essential conditions for peace (come) in four precise requirements of the human spirit: truth, justice, love and freedom. Truth will build peace if every individual sincerely acknowledges not only his rights, but also his own duties toward others. "Justice will build peace if in practice everyone respects the rights of others and actually fulfils his duties towards them. Love will build peace if people feel the needs of others as their own and share what they have with others . . . Freedom will build peace and make it thrive if, in the choice of the means to that end, people act according to reason and assume responsibility for their own actions." From the scathing criticisms of Prof Sithole and other donor-dependent lecturers, it is obvious that the global conveyor belt of lies has managed to rope in, not just newspapers and their reporters and editors, but also some once great and vibrant universities. At the bottom of the problem is the fact that too many countries in the South allowed their universities to be externally modelled and to serve merely as purveyors of external models of learning, intellect, philosophy, research and science. This modelling made it easy for the universities to accept neo-liberal ideology and structural adjustment both for their countries and for their own campus governance. As a result, by the mid-1990s, the African university was already just one of the stations on the fast-track of global instant lies. Those who had roped in the African university as a substation of the global conveyor belt of right-wing ideology proceeded to fund studies which named the disease as the cure. The Scandinavian Institute of African Studies and many other Northern think-tanks simply diagnosed the disease of the African university as "lack of capacity", saying that this university has suddenly become "incompetent, inefficient, irrelevant and isolated" from its society. As the Committee for Academic Freedom in Africa pointed out in its late 1996 newsletter, the main reason for the sudden reversal in the fortunes of the African university was the acceptance and implementation of neo-liberalism and structural adjustment which brought about the sudden de-funding and impoverishment of both the university and the society. The process was as profitable for the North Atlantic states as the Second World War had been for the United States. At the end of the Second World War, the US was able to receive from the rest of the world a free gift of more than 100 000 ready-trained doctors and scientists in each of whom the losing countries had invested about 20 years of intensive education and training. Structural adjustment and corporate cannibalism on a global scale have resulted in a similar transfer of ready-trained professional personnel from the South to the North. The main instrument in the 1980s and 1990s was an economic structural adjustment programme which required the fast impoverishment of both the university and the society, so that the only "professors" who could live well in the South in the aftermath of Esap were those willing to pimp for donors, selling their research for foreign currency, foreign trips and allowances. In other words, the imperial capitalist strategy for the African university has three components, which explain why the new conveyor belt of lies is so lethal and strangling the university. First, the education system is based on a model of escape and external imitation, so that intellectuals and professionals from the South tend to measure their success by their ability to emigrate to the North, even in normal times. Second, neo-liberalism and structural adjustment accelerate the impoverishment of both the society and the university, thereby forcing more of the educated elite to emigrate to the North where they become even more enmeshed in the external culture and ideology. These people can be used any time to influence the destinies of the societies from which they ran away. Third, even the educated elites who fail to emigrate to the North can be used, where they are, to do the kind of donor-driven work for which Prof Sithole, Dr John Makumbe and Dr Lovemore Madhuku (in Zimbabwe) are now being criticised. In order to overcome the widening conveyor belt of imperial lies, an African education system for African autonomy and independence must be based on a clear understanding of the Northern strategy. Otherwise African education will remain just one of the exotic stations on the new conveyor belt of global lies, disseminating the most shameful insults to the entire South: strife-ravaged nation, war-torn country, marauding war veterans, Islamic militants, Islamic fundamentalists, Taliban terrorists and tribal warlords. These are the labels which flood this conveyor belt every minute, every second.
The Mulindwas Communication Group
"With Yoweri Museveni Uganda is in Anarchy" Le groupe de transmission de Mulindwas " avec Yoweri Museveni, Ouganda est dans anarchy " |
