By Dr Tafataona Mahoso
THE way the declaration of October 25 as the day of solidarity with the people of Zimbabwe by the Southern African Development Community (SADC) was greeted and treated exposed appalling levels of civic education particularly in urban centres of Zimbabwe.
The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural organisation (UNESCO) defines civic education as follows:
“Citizenship education can be defined as educating children, from early childhood, to become clear-thinking and enlightened citizens who participate in decisions concerning (their) society. ‘Society’ is here understood in the special sense of a nation with a circumscribed territory which is recognized as a state.
A (thorough) knowledge of the nation’s institutions, and also an awareness that the rule of law applies to social and human relationships, obviously form part of any citizenship education course.”
With regard to this ideal of civic education, one of the scandals here is that Zimbabwe is one of very few cases where the US sanctions decree against it, the Zimbabwe Democracy and Economic Recovery Act (ZDERA), is actually older than the country’s liberal Constitution by 12 years!
One of the white men of North America who were asked in 2000 by the Movement of Democratic Change (MDC) and its white Rhodesian sponsors to impose sanctions on Zimbabwe was the late Senator Jesse Helms, then chairman of the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee and a friend of Ian Smith’s UDI and P. W. Botha’s apartheid.
On January 20 of that very same year, 2000, Helms told the UN Security Council that:
“Most (white) Americans do not regard the United Nations as an end in itself they see it as just one part of America’s diplomatic arsenal.”
Therefore, there was no need for the US to follow the rule of law when it came to lesser peoples and lesser nations.
This is why the adjectives ‘illegal’ and ‘racist’ should always be attached to the US sanctions decree on Zimbabwe.
It was imposed without involving the UN system, which means that today, ZDERA directly violates and nullifies the United Nations Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) in the case of Zimbabwe.
This means that UN agencies and our local public education institutions are lying to our own children when they fail to expose the continuing use of ZDERA against Zimbabwe as a direct negation of the MDGs.
This fact alone should make the white sanctions against Zimbabwe an important and on-going civic education subject.
The US-EU sanctions have been in place far much longer than our own Constituion!
This fact also makes the anti-sanctions message an on-going process and not an event limited to October 25 2019.
In other words, most of the glaring weakness in the execution of the October 25 2019 Harare version of the demonstrations should be blamed upon those civil servants tasked by the state to plan and execute the event.
But otherwise the SADC anti-sanctions message should be as permanent a part of our history as the Soweto Uprisings became a permanent part of the history of the pan-African struggle in the form of the Day of the African Child.
To those who mistakenly think the SADC resolution making October 25 a SADC Anti-sanctions Day is just like previous resolutions, it is important to note how 2019 is different.
For instance, forward-looking Zimbabweans in Botswana celebrated the electoral victory of the Botswana Democratic Party (BDP) over its rival because they felt that the former party is ideologically clear about an African future in which workers with skills and experience from one SADC member-state or AU member-state should be able to obtain employment anywhere within the region without visas or citizenship restrictions.
Likewise, SADC, through its anti-sanctions resolution, was looking into an African economic future governed by the African Free Trade Area which cannot work while Zimbabwe groans under illegal sanctions.
Indeed ZDERA directly attacks the principles of free trade and regional economic integration. In this regard, it is a lie to suggest that SADC and the AU are just clubs of senile old men who feel they must support one another no matter what, as some MDC leaders suggested during the October 2019 sanctions debate.
By trying to defeat the purpose and message of October 25, the MDC set itself up as one enemy of SADC regional integration and African free trade.
This issue of regional co-operation and free trade is about the future, about real ‘modernisation’.
Economic warfare of the kind forced upon Zimbabwe by Europe and the US is a direct attack on SADC and Africa!
And, as we go to press, the Non-Aligned Movement’s summit of Heads of State and Government have also joined in the condemnation of the same sanctions.
The long-term civic lesson
I have already noted the strange fact that the US sanctions decree, ZDERA, is 12 years older than Zimbabwe’s liberal Constitution.
So, for an illustration of the sort of learning which must happen in our contemporary history lessons, I shall briefly summarise what happened concerning sanctions during the so-called Government of National Unity (GNU) from 2009 to 2013.
The events should be compared with what happened in 2019 concerning the same sanctions:
With the help of certain misguided journalists, some of the politicians benefitting from the inclusivity of the coalition Government of Zimbabwe seemed to believe that coming together in a coalition meant that the people should tolerate public displays of ignorance, hypocrisy, insults and lies in the name of inclusivity.
No. Inclusivity does not mean ‘anything goes’.
Inclusivity for the people of Zimbabwe meant that we wanted the best patriotic service, the best competence and the best performance of all the three parties in the (GNU).
Unless we got the best of each of the three parties, the people would question the need for the GNU.
In case our readers wonder what we are referring to, let us illustrate, using several media stories involving members of the GNU at the time.
λ On Friday, February 27 2009, the late Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai toured Harare Central Hospital after having toured Parirenyatwa Group of Hospitals the week before.
Media reports at home and abroad presented the Prime Minister as making shocking discoveries of the collapse of the health system in Zimbabwe, shocking because until the PM’s visits, the horrific damage to the health sector over the previous nine years was supposed to be unknown and undiscovered.
Then on March 2 2009, the leader of the Zimbabwe Teacher’s Association (ZIMTA), Tendayi Chikowore appeared on the ZTV programme Media Watch to discuss teachers’ demands and the state of education in the country. She too said some astounding things which remained largely unchallenged, unsubstantiated and uncorrected.
Asked why ordinary teachers were demanding a salary of US$2 300 (two thousand three hundred US dollars) per month and what scientific research led to the demand for that amount, Chikowore said the salary figure came from Canada.
Yet the Canadian dollar was not at par with the US dollar and Canadian conditions were in no way comparable to Zimbabwean conditions.
The TV host did not bother to pursue that line of questioning. But that was not all. The host asked what Chikowore thought were the reasons for the problems facing the education sector and how the challenge could be tackled.
Chikowore gave exactly the same answer the late Prime Minister had given in relation to health sector: Failure by the previous government to prioritise education!
The host then said how could ZIMTA make such an allegation when in fact Zimbabwe was famous in the region and abroad as a country which, since 1980, had placed a very high premium on education?
The ZIMTA head then mumbled something about the ‘current economic environment’ and its impact on teachers’ salaries. It became clear that, to ZIMTA, prioritising education meant Canadian salaries in US dollars to Zimbabwean teachers!
The following evening, February 3 2009, another TV programme Melting Pot hosted two ‘economists’ interviewed by Walter Mupfanochiya.
The programme focused on how the Inclusive Government of Zimbabwe should disburse the theoretical US$5billion in aid which Prime Minister Tsvangirai said Zimbabwe needed.
As the discussion went on, the reader was misled to believe that the Prime Minister’s recent delegation to South Africa had already sourced US$5billion which now awaited ‘prioritisation’ and disbursement! SADC was supposed to be providing the US$5billion.
However, the reality was that the promised SADC assistance was not based on the Prime Minister’s delegation to South Africa but on the SADC Summit resolutions of March 2007 in Dar-es-Salaam, where the SADC Heads of State resolved to condemn and fight the Euro-American sanctions imposed illegally against Zimbabwe and to organise financial assistance for Zimbabwe. SADC was, in fact, considering a package of US$2billion, not US$5billion.
But even the US$2billion was not yet available for disbursing. Moreover, due to ZDERA, there would be serious impediments to any regional banks wishing to take part in offering such aid.
In our fourth exhibit for this lesson, the Prime Minister presented his maiden speech to the Seventh Parliament of Zimbabwe on March 4 2009.
The meaning ascribed to the speech by some of the public media was very generous, if one read the whole speech in context.
These media outlets seemed to have gone out of their way to assist the Prime Minister by making him appear to have condemned the illegal and racist sanctions, to have acknowledged the catastrophic damage the sanctions inflicted on the economy and the people, and to have demanded their unconditional lifting.
This was what we call, in communication studies, the influence of evoked set.
Because the interparty agreement committed the three parties to condemning sanctions and demanding their lifting, because the President on Saturday, February 30 2009 complained that the MDC formations had not yet done what was agreed: to condemn sanctions and demand their unconditional lifting, reporters and editors were waiting for any vague and indirect MDC reference to sanctions which would prove that the GNU is one and fighting the illegal and racist sanctions as one.
This was not true then. It is not true even now, six years after the GNU.
In fact the Prime Minister’s maiden speech as a whole was contradictory. It helped to damage the fight against sanctions and the demand for their unconditional removal, but it was good in at least making a vague reference to ‘restrictive measures’ to be lifted.
Our fifth exhibit is the BBC World report on the same maiden speech to the Seventh Parliament of Zimbabwe by the Prime Minister on March 4 2009.
BBC World reported that the Prime Minister called upon his own Government to stop oppression and repression in order to earn the good marks for improved behaviour which might convince those who imposed sanctions on the country to remove them.
In terms of his body language as well, the Prime Minister was so uncomfortable with the issue of illegal and racist sanctions that he could not bring himself to use the word sanctions.
But his full message in context communicated the following:
λ The most urgent priority for the GNU is not to fix the damage which sanctions had inflicted on the economy and the people but to adopt a neo-liberal reform ‘human rights’ programme.
λ Zimbabwe deserved the sanctions and their removal was now due only because the GNU had improved its behaviour and would continue to so improve in order to earn the lifting of sanctions bye-the-bye, not now.
λ The behaviour which had to be improved in order for Zimbabwe to deserve the lifting of ‘restrictive measures’ included stopping repression and oppression. Tsvangirai’s words were quite telling:
“I therefore urge the international community to recognise our efforts, and to note the progress that we make in this regard, and to match our progress by moving towards the removal of restrictive measures….”
This was a speech from someone whose party had asked for the sanctions to be imposed in the first instance.
It fell far too short of the position taken by SADC as far back as March 2007.
Tsvangirai’s view was contrary to the views of most Zimbabweans.
Most Zimbabweans, to this day, view the illegal and racist sanctions as totally unjustified and never deserved because there were two fundamental reasons they were imposed in the first place; that is Zimbabwe’s leadership in countering the Western-sponsored and genocidal invasion of the Democratic Republic of the Congo; and Zimbabwe’s decision to back the indigenous land reclamation movement leading to a revolution in land tenure.
Most Zimbabweans know that the allegations of lack of democracy, lack of the rule of law and violations of human rights were mere pretexts.
If these were the reasons, Britain, the US and Israel would today be the most sanctioned and most isolated rogue states on earth for their respective roles in Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine (Gaza) and Guantanamo Bay (Cuba). The people of Zimbabwe are not daft.
The political parties must help them with facts which empower them to face reality and defeat the illegal sanctions.
The rhetoric of righteousness alone will not do.
MIT Professor Noam Chomsky makes an important observation about the usual neo-liberal Euro-American demands for programmes of reform in other countries in the name of democracy, rule of law, human rights and transparency.
In Hegemony or Survival: America’s Quest for Global Dominance (p.129) and in Failed States: The Abuse of Power and the Assault on Democracy, Professor Chomsky says serious scholars studying and trying to evaluate the Anglo-Saxon crusade for democracy, rule of law and human rights as part of foreign policy did not take such claims and benchmarks seriously: “The reason, perhaps, is that they recognised that lofty rhetoric is the obligatory accompaniment of virtually any resort to (illegal) force (by these imperial powers) and therefore carries no (objective or measurable) information. The rhetoric is doubly hard to take seriously in light of the display of contempt for democracy that accompanied it, not to speak of the past record and current practices (by the same people and powers using the rhetoric.)”
Chomsky’s observation is relevant to the late Prime Minister’s maiden speech which dedicated its first 68 paragraphs, out of a total of 84, to the very same rhetoric which has been found by its originators to have no real substance.
Chomsky’s observation is critical because the late Prime Minister made it clear that the rhetoric and reforms he was calling for were meant to please the very same powers who had imposed illegal sanctions on Zimbabwe and who are condemned as posturing by Chomsky and other scholars of international relations.
In other words, the rhetoric occupying the first 68 paragraphs of the Prime Minister’s maiden speech is usually treated in the West itself as signalling a mask for coercive power; and illegal sanctions are one application of such coercive power.
So, we find that the public media headlines concerning the Prime Minister’s speech were very generous to Tsvangirai, as they were based on a very vague reference to ‘restrictive measures’ in paragraph 69. Yet Zimbabwe was, and still is, facing an economic war.
In other words, the late Prime Minister made an effort to avoid saying Zimbabwe, for the previous eight years, had faced an illegal economic war first invited by his party.
Let us now return to the beginning, to The Standard’s discovery with the Prime Minister, of shocking decay in Zimbabwe’s health sector:
The editor was insulting the intelligence of his readers because he had already reported the decay or collapse of the health sector long before the formation of the GNU.
So his February 27 2009 story was merely a PR item for the late Prime Minister. What should have shocked him and his readers was the claim that the late PM was surprised and shocked.
On May 13 2007, The Standard reported decay and collapse in the health sector in a story called ‘Doctors, nurses strikes persist, cripple health delivery’.
On July 27 2008, the same paper reported the same matter in a story called ‘Service delivery crumbles in Harare’.
On September 14 2008, the same editor published a story on the same catastrophe called ‘Patients get raw deal as state of hospitals crumble.’
On October 19 2008, the same editor reported the same catastrophe in a story called ‘Water crisis: health catastrophe looms in Harare’, the very same city he and the late Prime Minister discovered in February and March 2009 to be facing a surprising catastrophe!
On February 11 2009, the same paper told readers on page 15 that the urban hospitals were now so badly hit by crisis that patients were now being sent to rural mission hospitals!
Then on January 11 2009, the same paper had dealt with the same collapse of the health sector in a story called ‘Of misery, pain and death’.
The question was: Given all these record-shattering discoveries on health and hospitals going back to 2006 and 2007, what exactly was this editor and the late Prime Minister trying to do; announcing yet another novel revelation in the same city and the same places two or three years later?
What humanitarian purpose was served by misleading readers, listeners and potential voters?
There was more.
The following three stories suggested that there was another agenda which made it necessary for The Standard editor to skirt around the realities of the economic war waged against the people of Zimbabwe.
On November 30 2008, The Standard carried a story called ‘The Cholera effect and Mugabe’s isolation’.
On December 14 2008, the same paper carried a ‘Sunday Special’ called ‘Cholera defies Mugabe’. And, on January 25 2009, the same paper carried yet another story called ‘Mugabe blamed for cholera deaths’. That story used the late Morgan Tsvangirai, the then Prime Minister, to make such an accusation.
In order not to confuse readers about the seriousness of the issues at hand, let us quote from one of the press statements of the National Taskforce to Eradicate Cholera. It was issued late 2009:
“Illegal sanctions paved the way for the cholera emergency by weakening or destroying our personal, professional and institutional capacities to prevent the epidemic. Once that happened, it was obvious that our collective capacity to fight and eradicate the epidemic after it had broken out was also compromised. Therefore, absolute unity is needed, against the illegal sanctions and against the cholera which the sanctions helped to trigger.”
The most direct way in which illegal sanctions helped to trigger cholera was to stop the World Bank from investing in projects for constructing sewerage and water reticulation systems for Zimbabwe’s urban areas. But the general deterioration and shrinkage of the economy affected many other inputs required for building and sustaining a preventive capacity: motor vehicles and motor vehicle spares, water treatment chemicals, water pipes, water tanks, sewer pipes, cholera drugs and even skilled health personnel who migrated to other countries to escape the shrinking economy.
From this brief history, it can be seen that even in 2019, the MDC and papers supporting it have not changed.
In this regard, the stories carried by The Standard newspaper in 2009 demonstrated either malicious intent or gross ignorance.
Whichever was the real cause, the effect on our nation building efforts was the same.
The stories were provocative, insulting, divisive and full of gross distortions. It was implied constantly that in the name of tolerance and inclusivity the MDC formations should not be made to account for what they have done in the last 20 years but, in the name of ‘democracy’, ZANU-PF, the liberation movement, resettled farmers and the late President Mugabe and now President Mnangagwa must be made to account even to foreigners for everything they had done.
In this way, the catastrophic effects of sanctions requested by the MDC formations can even be blamed on the victims, the African liberation movement and its Government.
The account I have outlined here makes it clear, I believe, that the sanctions story is now an integral part of Zimbabwe’s history.
The more that history is taught factually, the sooner MaDzimbahwe can hope to overcome the illegal white sanctions, with or without their lifting.