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I FOUND it quite amusing that the Zimbabwean President loomed so large in the recent South African poll in which Mbeki�s ANC emerged indisputably victorious. The President owed this entry to none other than Tony Leon, the Democratic Alliance leader (assuming he still is) known to hate the Zimbabwean leader quite passionately. The Democratic Alliance, I am told, pinned up a loud and imposing banner that sprawled across one of the busiest South African inter-city highways warning, or so it thought, South African voters against electorally favouring a man (Mbeki) and a Party (ANC) so close to "the bloody Mugabi"! Not one from the few hundreds of thousands of Zimbabweans Leon and filial Britain exported to South Africa in the vain hope of creating an overseas constituency for the MDC, stepped in to help Leon. Leon should have been told that a witch-doctor�s lots are not to be trusted until they are cast, lest they catch your own mother! As it turned out, the banner worked magic for Mbeki and his ANC. "If uM-b-h-e-eki supports Mugabe", reasoned the South African voter, "then he must be go-ood!" Unbeknown to this smug white-man, South Africa�s teeming black millions have waited impatiently by the horn�s end for the plenteous benefits promised by uhuru in 1994. Their overwhelming vote for Mbeki and the ANC was not an acceptance of the status quo, only a recognition and reward that the ANC wishes to challenge and change it. And Mugabe personifies that no-nonsense change they yearn for and will get or wrestle sooner than later. Typical chink in the armour of white settler politics in Southern Africa. For all those years they have misruled us, they do not know, in fact may never know, the continent and its mind. Their so-called mind-minders/managers transpose to us the psychosis of deference they wish in us. They vainly hope to make revolutionary change revulsive and frightening to us by carving gorgons out of those of our heroes who have sought to overthrow a settler set-up. That way, they drive themselves into permanent denial against an imposing outward fact of Mugabe-ism in Southern African politics. Countless moons may pass but I bet my last dollar they will never get to know what politically turns on this bituminous child of cactus land. It is simple: you don�t use water, however, dirty you think it is, to frighten a man you have forcibly flung into a desert. Blacks of Southern Africa need a place in the sun, a place long denied them, full-stop. We from the savannah know that when shadows loom so long and large on the wall, the sun declines and is about to set. It means Africa�s eerie, primeval darkness cometh! Inkatha: MDC�s first cousin. I read with amusement indications that South Africa�s Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP) is set to challenge the KwaZulu Natal election results in the Electoral Court which apparently has powers to reduce the number of votes received by a party, if it finds there has been a gross violation of the electoral code of conduct. The IFP�s beef is that rampant intimidation, assaults, voter barring and malicious damage to property, made the ANC victory on its supposed electoral turf fraudulent and thus nullifiable. It seeks the removal of 367 000 votes from the ANC on grounds that these came from voters who did not appear on the voter registers of those contested districts. After all, adds the IFP, there is no proof that these voters did not visit the box twice! "The IFP records that the ANC had hired buses which conveyed ANC supporters from one voting district to another and, in some instances, into the province of KwaZulu Natal," ran the IFP petition. Sounds familiar, doesn�t it? And this apartheid-time political tool of the Nats has done its mathematical homework. The number of votes it is contesting is exactly what it needs to reverse the ANC�s victory in KwaZulu Natal � and give the IFP a majority of one seat. Again sounds familiar? In the meantime, the people of KwaZulu Natal can forget about a new provincial government which would have been launched this coming Monday, until of course a court determination of this case. All this, I repeat, is familiar to a Zimbabwean who is struck by the uncanny parallel between IFP and Blair�s MDC here. Both after June 2000 and March 2002, the MDC, clearly instigated by the ceaseless flow of donor funds through the Legal Resource Foundation�s Test Case facility, indulged its own governing fancies through numberless, vexatious petitions calculated to arrest democracy and baffle governance of the Republic. The lawyers who prepared the so-called test cases came from all over white Europe and white South Africa, and put their collective legal wisdom towards the all-important goal of stymieing post-electoral governance. To this day, those petitions are pending, only a few months to the next poll. Is democracy that vulnerable? Why are the same legal subterfuges plied African country to African country by the same forces for whom our democracies are nothing better than toys to be baffled, twisted and turned through such vexatious petitions? Above all, why curse our democracies with two like- and evil-minded cousins conceived from the same adulterous a womb? Surly Donnelly: shut up, limb away in shame This out-gone British ambassador who continues to shout from the brink, what is his beef? Democracy? Human Rights? Rule of Law? Justice? Freedom of _expression_? My foot! The man (if one he is) got no shame. To wield a pen and dare write about Zimbabwe and democracy when he carries the identity and history which he does is the height of impudence. His failed mission in Zimbabwe for the past accursed years we have allowed him to blight our soil has been to bring about "regime change" in Zimbabwe. He came so Blair could happily see the back of Robert Mugabe. Now, that is not a matter and mission for quarterly magazines. It is an assignment for the arcane world of treachery and conspiracy, the kind he furiously pursued right up to the sunset of his tour. He tried and stretched the luck of his stooges here; tried spewing them into the streets in the hope of making Zimbabwe ungovernable. He failed. He tried to mobilise Africa against Zimbabwe. He failed. He tried Europe and got not much, beyond obliging symbolic gestures that hardly pass for policy. He tried America but only got an economy so peripheral to Zimbabwe. Four years later Zimbabwe moves on, stout and ever belligerent, quite unready and unwilling to change course for the edification of Blair and his gang. "Unfortunately we see no sign of willingness on the part of the Government of Zimbabwe to change [and to] move in this direction". Which direction, Mr Empire? Whose direction? In any case did you come to persuade or to oust? Why do you hope to be heard and followed? It is a breathtaking kind of naivety expected from a man bewildered by a consuming sense of failure. His last ditch efforts include smuggling failed white journalists here, smuggling phoney barristers, deploying gold dealers and other saboteurs, penetrating UN agencies in the hope of building a case against Zimbabwe. And much more. How does a man representing a war criminal dare open his mouth to talk about the rule of law and independence of the judiciary. Was Lord Hutton free and independent? Was the life of the conscientious objector scientist which Hutton busied himself with larger than the question of the legality of a whole war that ate hundreds of thousands of lives, Britons included? Why was that not a legitimate question to address in the inquiry? Your boss conscripts the bench to give blatant lies a legal tenor? The got no shame, I tell you! And the chilling effect of that whole inquiry on the media? Did Lord Hutton and all that followed uphold the banner of a free Press? Turning BBC into that huge, awesome toothless rottweiler it has been, much so now, a harmless hound that repeats, not report, government viewpoint! And you dare pontificate about press freedom? The man just got no shame. I hear he dreads his departure day which draws too nigh. Will be pay a farewell courtesy call on the President? If he does, will the President oblige? When he does, what scorching message will the President give? Much the same he gave Sir Falstaff Long . . . long . . . longworth, the man to whose brains Bacchus� deadly fumes ascended most easily! Well, the goodly Longworth achieved something: he got thoroughly drunk. Not this surly one wearing the face of a weeping failure. Pecking Wood or laced drink? To be a woodpecker means being endowed with a beak that endures hard surfaces, not the blunt, flat leaps made redder by much more than boring laced drink during the Johannesburg WSSD. Well, let�s see how beaky this chattering promontory is by testing it a little bit with dying embers of a funeral fire. Nhai Dhevi Masunda, unorweiko mudaka revatema? To put your entire journalistic skills at the defence of De Klerk and Kondozi Farm? What makes you so angry brother? Tell you what, when we heard about your misfortunes in Jo�burg, we put aside the embarrassing facts that made you vulnerable to those ladies of easy virtue. We commiserated. You were and remain a brother, thoroughly black and indigenous, and thus one deserving sympathy and help. And help you we did, even though you will never get to know how. You came back to your country, hopeful of rehabilitation. To this day you stay here, proud in spite of yourself and your workplace. But we expect you to have a sense of history, a sense of the contemporary which would invariably inform you that De Klerk power declined way, way back in 1994, with the rise of Mandela and his rainbow nation. The South Africans said kwaheri to the De Klerks, there and abroad. It was precisely because the South Africans pensioned off the De Klerks that you were able to find work in that country and, yes, lose it too! You wish to reinstate the De Klerks by founding an "Orange Free State" on this side of the Limpopo? Oh no Dhevi, hazviite. The people shall govern and work the land, regardless of the misdirection of your imperfect sympathy. In the meantime just remember that at the rate at which you are going, you will not need any shavings! Regards, N.M. � [EMAIL PROTECTED] The Mulindwas Communication Group
"With Yoweri Museveni, Uganda is in anarchy" Groupe de communication Mulindwas "avec Yoweri Museveni, l'Ouganda est dans l'anarchie" |
