BOB CORKER, who is he?
I will tell you. What he is does not matter at all.
Suffice to say he is some white man, in America, attributes he thinks make him a god to Africans.
Condescending, patronising, arrogant, pompous and racist, that is who he is.
Corker’s production of a litany of ‘conditions’ and dos that Zimbabwe must ‘comply’, ‘adhere’ to before it must be eligible to receive loans from the Bretton Woods institutions, even if it clears its debt, is not surprising.
Elsewhere in this paper we write about this arrogance, when the West, itself or through proxies, behaves like a school-head lecturing to students.
This Corker, some chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, represents everything that is keeping the African continent down, everything that exists to make the African feel small and inferior.
His chairmanship of some committee is supposed to give him power to lecture a whole African Statesman of repute like President Robert Mugabe and give him orders on how to run the affairs of his people.
Now Mr Corker, we do not care who you are.
We do not care about your orders and instructions.
“Without meaningful progress toward long awaited reforms by the Mugabe regime…” you say Zimbabwe must not access loans.
What progress, what reforms?
Have you recently set foot in our beloved country?
And carried out consultations with the formerly marginalised but now small-scale and large-scale farmers.
Have you talked to local entrepreneurs?
Difficulties, challenges, hardships and even pain we might be experiencing but we know the causes.
We are not fools.
We know you very much want us to lay it all on Robert Mugabe.
You imposed sanctions on us that were designed to, according to you Chester Crocker, ‘make the economy scream’ so that people would turn against the leadership of the country.
But our hardships have nothing to do with Mugabe but everything to do with you, the West.
We know who to blame for our hardships.
Because you have failed to have your way in Zimbabwe, because you have failed to effect regime change, because you have failed to loot our resources with impunity, you have made conditions in our country horrible.
Of course you run the ‘world’ economy and can strangle and squeeze the life out of any nation if you so choose.
But in Zimbabwe you have failed.
And the failure does not sit well with you.
Let it be known to you that with or without you Zimbabwe is not going to, will not, collapse.
Your ‘instructions’, Mr Corker, do nothing but further prove the point that engaging with you is indeed a waste of time.
Because you are not a sincere people.
Because you are not capable of engaging Africans on an equal footing like the East.
Even when you profess to wanting to work with Africans as equal players you just cannot help but want to be the bigger brother.
You are no longer the world’s superpower.
You are no longer the dominating economy.
Solutions to a myriad of challenges facing the world no longer lie with the West.
The East has better and more effective solutions that we get without compromising our values as a people.
There are no conditions set in our engagement with the East.
Mr Corker you need us more than we need you, we have the East.
If you continue on your path, of wantonly disrespecting our leaders, our aspirations, our values, you will rue the day.