The Herald
10 July 2010
By Alexander Kanengoni
John Howard, the former Australian Prime Minister is not exactly our friend.
Considering that he was one of the people at the forefront of the global campaign to impose sanctions on the country and cripple our economy to achieve the regime change objective, all well-meaning Zimbabweans find it difficult not to dislike him.
Recently, he paid an unexpected visit to the country to canvass for support to be elected ICC vice president.
I don’t think we extracted much, if any political mileage at all from his unexpected visit.
Just as the visit by the Brazilian Samba Boys a week or so before him, his visit offered a huge opportunity for the country to use him to correct the negative perception of the country that he was instrumental in creating.
Instead of confining him to the five star Miekles and the leafy environs of the Harare Sports Club, we should have taken him on a tour around the country to see for himself the devastation that the sanctions that he prefers to call targeted are causing on ordinary people.
Of course all this would be before a tour of the Victoria Falls or Gonarezhou Safari resort to sample the true African beauty that these places offer.
Because he came through David Coltart, the Minister of Education, he should have been taken to visit an unfinished rural school because funding dried up in the middle of construction due to sanctions.
He should have been asked to talk to the poor pupils learning under a tree to discover their enthusiasm to learn; that they are just as eager for education as their Australian counterparts except that they happen to be Zimbabweans and black.
He should have been taken on a tour to a council clinic in Makokoba or Budiriro and see for himself the tragic situation there because the country is having difficulties in accessing the Global Fund to fight HIV and Aids because of the sanctions that people like himself advocated for on the dishonest pretext that they are targeted.
Because, just like the Brazilian soccer team, he had the entire global media focussed on him, we certainly would have extracted much political mileage.
That would also have helped to expose some misconceptions that he assisted the world to construct about the country.
We would have loved Howard to say something during the tour. Perhaps as Shakira said during her whirlwind visit to Gonarezhou, he might have said he would visit again when he had more time and in more relaxed circumstances, perhaps together with his family that time around.
The man was desperate for our vote.
How we would have loved it if he had spoken this before CNN, BBC, Sky News and all the other international news agencies!
As usual, those news agencies might have chosen to omit that or used the story with their usual twist to suit their anti-Zimbabwe stance but some other agency would have reported it correctly.
There is no doubt Howard would have done that because of the reason for his visit. He wanted us to support his bid to be elected vice president of the ICC.
The man was down on his knees.
He was at our mercy.
And all this would not necessarily translate into a vote to support his bid to become vice president of ICC in Singapore. Absolutely no!
I don’t know how David Coltart feels about it but we must at least credit him for bringing us Howard on a silver plate.
We could have done whatever we wished to with him but we didn’t take the chance! It might not have meant much but in this world where we are fighting tooth and nail against the machinations by the powerful and highly organised and well-funded Rhodesian lobby spawned all over the West, every little thing that we do counts.
Talking about the Rhodesian mentality, it’s amazing how it is still reflected in our midst. Nathaniel Manheru’s contribution in The Herald on Saturday last week went a long way to describe it in the private media. But I cannot help adding one more frightening example. Last Sunday’s issue of The Standard carried a cartoon about Brazil’s painful exit from the World Cup in South Africa. It depicted the Brazillian coach, Dunga telling a journalist: “My boys played well. But I think we were cursed by that country that we played friendly with.”
The question that immediately comes to one’s mind is whether the cartoonist is Zimbabwean or not. The love for one’s country cannot be imposed on any person. It is instinctive. In our culture, it’s like the love for one’s biological parents. No matter how much you might disagree with them, it’s unthinkable to disown them. In fact, it is impossible to disown them.
The cartoonist is literally disowning his country, that is if he is Zimbabwean. He makes reference to the country as if it’s another country that he happens to be making a glossing comment over.
If the cartoonist comes from this country, he is displaying a frightening Rhodesian mentality. The Rhodesians do not believe in Zimbabwe. If they had their way, they would bring back Rhodesia and they do not hide the fact.
While most people agree the visit by the Brazilian team, which was beamed live to more than 60 countries, helped tremendously to allay the perception that the country was lawless and chaotic, that nothing functioned any more, that the people were violent and unfriendly, the cartoonist tragically helps to perpetuate this misconception.
That is why it is difficult to believe he could be Zimbabwean because a Zimbabwean cannot condemn his country to that extent even if there may be many things that he does not agree with.
While the Minister of Finance, Tendai Biti, is pleading with the KPCS to grant the country a certificate to enable us to sell our diamonds and get the much needed money to kick-start the economic recovery efforts, some young Zimbabweans, representing Crisis International, are arguing we should not get the certificate purportedly in the interests of the Zimbabwean people. They were there on television a few weeks ago.
What interests of Zimbabweans can an NGO called Crisis International represent that the inclusive government is unable to do?
It eventually required government intervention to also suspend sales of diamonds from River Ranch and Murowa mines because the definition ‘blood’ diamonds had been inexplicably confined to mean only diamonds from Chiadzwa.
There is nowhere in the world where anyone has ever heard such shameless hypocrisy.
A long time ago when Nathaniel Manheru discontinued his column in The Herald on Saturday, I am one of those people who mourned his sudden exit because I wanted him to continue his political duels with The Independent’s Muckracker.
Well, he has returned and the debates are increasingly becoming so one-sided. Muckraker mirrors the dilemma of the so-called independent press in the country since the formation of the inclusive government.
The people are tired of being fed with messages of endless conflict and painful images of hopelessness, which continues to be the main recipe of the private media. People might have liked it during the height of our crisis, when there was no solution in sight.
The formation of the inclusive government has provided people with hope, the people love their country and want it to pull out of the crisis.
They want to read hopeful stories about themselves and the future of their country not gloom and predictions of a pending collapse; it’s as simple as that.
The British might disagree over their costly adventure in Afghanistan but that disagreement is never allowed to sway their total support for their men fighting there and their media reflects it.
If any of their papers dares to support the Taliban, there would be an uproar from the public.
It would be promptly accused of treason, even banned. That is what is called patriotism.
We had a completely different story when our men were fighting in the DRC several years ago. Some of our so-called independent papers behaved as if they were published and controlled in Kigali and we were supposed to view that as ‘freedom of the press.’
Now, that stance has come to haunt them in the current political dispensation. They have nowhere to hide their Rhodesian mentality.
They are unrepentant Rhodesians with men placed in strategic positions in almost all NGOs around the world to influence the West’s opinion on Zimbabwe because they still dream of getting back to what they consider ‘their’ farms.
The Zimbabwe Media Commission has licensed several papers to begin publishing.
If they come onto the streets and push the Rhodesian anti-Zimbabwe agenda that sold papers like The Daily News because they were hiding behind the MDC, they might just be in for a rude awakening.
Even if they give away the papers for free, they might still discover people want to read more hopeful messages about themselves and their country.
Because honestly, it will be difficult to convince anyone that Crisis International represents the interests of Zimbabweans more than the inclusive government does, as those poor fellows tried to tell us on television.
It will be even more difficult to convince anyone that Rio Tinto, a foreign company, can sell its diamonds because they are ‘clean’ whereas Mbada, an indigenious company, cannot because its diamonds are ‘blood’.
But because they have no shame, they will attempt to do just that.
We should not get completely surprised if former British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, decides to pay us a surprise visit in the future for whatever reason.
Rather than hype on our past disagreements with him, we should think wisely on how to turn such a visit into a political advantage for the country.
As they say in football, we will live to rue John Howard’s visit that we allowed to go begging.