IF it is true that Rhodesians are financing RENAMO’s return to Gorongoza, it is hardly surprising.
After all, was it not the Rhodesian Special Branch that created RENAMO in 1977 at the height of our own war?
They created it to destabilise Mozambique so that it didn’t support the guerrilla war that we were fighting from there.
Right from the beginning, RENAMO was a bandit organisation without a tangible political agenda.
Then, the Rhodesians gave them one; that they were an anti-communist movement, fighting for the establishment of democracy in Mozambique.
But one wondered what sort of democracy the Rhodesians would teach RENAMO when, at home in their own back-yard, they were embroiled in a bloody war to perpetuate their minority rule of 250 000 whites in a country with seven million blacks.
That is how RENAMO was created.
But it failed to stop black majority rule in Zimbabwe.
When many Rhodesians fled to South Africa at independence in 1980, they carried RENAMO with them and gave it to the apartheid regime because they knew that one day, the South African government would find the project useful.
Indeed, because the ANC already had military bases in Mozambique, the apartheid regime used RENAMO on FRELIMO, to try and cripple Umkonto weSizwe’s war in South Africa — the exact use the Rhodesians had created RENAMO for.
Today, RENAMO is refusing to accept it has become entirely irrelevant in Mozambican politics.
It has woefully failed to garner any meaningful support that continues to dwindle in the past four general elections.
It’s difficult to imagine the Rhodesians ever contemplated RENAMO would one day rule.
It appears they created the project merely for destabilisation purposes.
That is the tragedy of foreign founded and financed political projects.
If they fail to win elections in the confusion of the initial years of their creation, time will eventually expose their true identity and the people will shun them because they have much to do with our former colonisers.
The connection they claim to have with the people is not true because they represent the agenda and interests of our former colonisers.
That is the fate of the MDC.
If it is true that the Rhodesians are now re-directing their funding of the MDC towards RENAMO, why are they doing it and which people in the MDC are prepared to follow them to Gorongoza?
It would be interesting to see the expression on Tendai Biti’s face right now, especially the disbelief at the possibility of his party at Gorongoza with Afonso Dhlakama.
But is this not what we have always told them; that the white people who surrounded them want to use them to abort the empowerment programmes set in motion by the triumphant conclusion of the liberation war and the horror of returning acquired land back to the white farmers.
And they denied the charge claiming the formation of their party was a response to the plight of the people.
Which people, one may ask?
After the crushing defeat, members of the Rhodesian lobby like Roy Bennett realise the MDC, in its present configuration, has lost the capacity to destabilise the country through such actions as mass stay aways, strikes and other forms of civil disobedience.
But they realise they can still destabilise the country through other fronts and means such as joining forces and hiding inside RENAMO.
Zimbabwe’s diamond mines lie along the border with Mozambique and our major road, railway and oil pipeline to the sea pass through Mozambique’s Manica and Sofala provinces.
Today, four elections down the line with their political fortunes nose-diving, there is an irresistible temptation to draw parallels between the MDC and RENAMO
Suddenly, Afonso Dhlakama, the RENAMO leader refuses to acknowledge the legitimacy of the FRELIMO government, citing the country’s electoral laws as the weapon FRELIMO routinely uses to rig the elections.
More than a month ago, Dhlakama returned to Gorongoza in a bid to force FRELIMO to the negotiating table for another mediation process similar to the one that brokered their peace in 1992.
If the MDC lost the 2013 general elections, which they believed they would not lose, they wanted another GNU. Their refusal to accept the outcome of the July 31 elections was a ploy to throw the country into a false crisis in order to have another mediation process leading to another GNU. Ironically, while the MDC and RENAMO mull the possibility of negotiations, their elected representatives continue to sit in parliament receiving their monthly salaries!
But what are the chances of RENAMO mounting a sustained insurgency similar to the one during their time in Rhodesia and Apartheid South Africa?
When Samora Machel died in a plane crash at Nkomati in South Africa in 1986, he was coming from a Frontline Heads of State meeting in Lusaka where he had threatened to mount missiles along his country’s border with Malawi because Kamuzu Banda was allowing RENAMO to launch attacks into Mozambique from his country.
Even if the Rhodesians and their Western allies support RENAMO, it’s hard to see any SADC country offering RENAMO sanctuary.
Meetings such as the one the Heads of State held last Monday night in Pretoria on security in the Great Lakes region and SADC are intended to eliminate chances of member countries giving sanctuary to rebels attacking a member country.
Without another country offering it rear bases, RENAMO cannot mount a sustained armed revolt from Gorongoza.
There is talk that the Rhodesian lobby in the MDC, angered by the crushing defeat that the party suffered in the harmonised elections on July 31, is mulling joining forces with RENAMO.