NOT so long ago non-governmental organisations (NGOs) operating in the country were covert in the pursuance of their anti-state operations, but when images of Chitungwiza-based 62-year-old Lillian Chinyerere Shumba’s encounter with law enforcement agents at the Rotten Row Magistrates Court were splashed on local and international media outlets, the secret in the change of tack was out.
They have employed many failed strategies.
An example is March 11 2007 when opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai was used as a bait to taunt law enforcement agents.
The beating he got attracted exaggerated coverage from NGO partners.
In recent weeks NGOs have changed tack, using children and grandmothers instead.
In 2007, Tsvangirai told the Nation that the year was the ‘Year of Action’.
What followed was the training of MDC youths to commit acts of violence.
They were organised into terrorist cells called Democratic Resistance Committees (DRCs) which were unleashed to administer mayhem on innocent people in the name of ‘regime change’.
In all these violent activities, NGOs were in tow, providing moral support and acting as conduits for slash funds flowing in abundance from Western citadels.
On August 10, the police’s resolve to deal with provocation was tested when Harare protestors were joined by Itai ‘Dzamara’s children’ during the so-called #BringBackDzamara protests in the Africa Unity Square.
During what was dubbed ‘The Spirit of Itai Dzamara March’, scores of children offered roses and queen cakes to the police ‘as a show of love’.
One of the organisers of the flowers project, Sten Zvorwadza, then unwittingly let the cat out of the bag when he unravelled the motive behind that brazen child abuse.
“We chose love over hatred, flowers over guns, unity over disunity, prosperity over poverty, justice over injustice,” he said.
The project was meant to use children as a shield to the violent protests that followed in the aftermath of that crude campaign, to test the police, bring Zimbabwe to global limelight and convict it of human rights abuses.
That action provoked a furious reaction from the United Nations Children Education Fund (UNICEF)
In a statement, UNICEF chief of communication, Zimbabwe, Victor Chinyama condemned the use of children in the demonstration.
In the statement Chinyama said:
“UNICEF in Zimbabwe deplores the use of children in the demonstrations that took place in Harare on Wednesday (August 10).
“Children are not political and should be sheltered at all times from situations that expose them to the risk of harm or violence.
“It is everybody’s duty to ensure that children are not used to advance a particular political cause.
“In all actions concerning children, the best interests of the child should override all other considerations.”
The decision to involve children was condemned as a gross violation of children’s rights as contained in the United Nations Convention on the Rights and Welfare of Children (UNCRC) and the African Charter on the Rights and Welfare of Children (ACRWC).
Public Service, Labour and Social Welfare Minister Prisca Mupfumira also weighed in, hinting the organisers could be charged for the act.
Then came Gogo Shumba whose interview with a local weekly last Friday exposed her as an activist not the victim of police ‘brutality’ that she had been portrayed to be by other sections of the media.
An active member of the MDC since its formation in 1999, Gogo Shumba was among the protestors who came face-to-face with the might of a provoked state.
And this was not the first time in her apparent rehearsed provocation of the police.
Both the ‘Dzamara children’ and Gogo Shumba are fronting for NGOs who have upped the tempo in their bid to dislodge the Government from power.
In a paper titled, NGOs, politics, and participation: A critical case study of the foreign-funded NGO sector and its capacity to empower local communities, Kimberly Vallejo argues, while NGOs pretend to be apolitical, the opposite is true.
“Non-governmental organisations often employ the rhetoric of local empowerment through ‘participatory’ programming,” says Vallejo.
“A critical analysis of such programmes, however, suggests that the capacity of NGOs to politically empower local communities is often misconstrued, especially since many of these programmes overlook the ways in which foreign funding structures actually restrict local participation and limit local empowerment.
“This point is illustrated by a critical examination of studies claiming that the World Bank’s 1994 PLANAFLORO programme in Rondônia, Brazil, did politically mobilise local populations.”
Zimbabwe has seen NGOs dabbling in its politics.
From November 2006 to September 2010, the Zimbabwe Civil Society Fund (ZCSF) in its first stage worked through the Gender Equality and Rights, Democracy and Governance funding.
They had 59 projects whose main purpose was to improve the ‘capacity of Zimbabweans to exercise their civil, political, economic, social and cultural rights’.
With support from the donors, ZCSF conducted countrywide human rights campaigns and voter-education from January 2007 to March 2008.
An article in The Herald, on Friday last week, by its foreign correspondent, Obi Egbuna Jr titled ‘Carson’s pre-occupation with Zimbabwe’reveals that the United States’ US Institute of Peace (USIP) sponsored a forum entitled ‘Zimbabwe: Opportunities For and Challenges to Peaceful Transition’ which saw leadership change as a forgone conclusion.
And the moderator was Johnnie Carson, the former US Ambassador to Zimbabwe and former Assistant Secretary for African Affairs.
The USIP and Britain’s Chatham House share similar sentiments on Zimbabwe and have played a pivotal role in trying to undermine the Government.
The forum was scheduled for yesterday.
When flowers are delivered, it shall forever be known that they were being used, like Gogo Shumba, to provoke the police and make their anti-Zimbabwe project attractive in the eyes of the world.
But the role of NGOs in these projects is known and soon chickens will come home to roost.
It is just a matter of time.