By Special Matarirano
ONE thing that has become apparent as Zimbabwe gears up for by-elections on March 26 2022 is the escalation of the anti-establishment drive by civil society organisations (CSOs) and NGOs.
There has been ascending interests from organisations like Team Pachedu, Crisis in Zimbabwe Coalition (CiZC), Election Resource Centre, Zimbabwe Peace Project and many others to try and look as if they are effectively taking stock of the alleged ‘election rigging’ shenanigans by ZANU PF and the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission (ZEC).
This is, however, not an indigenous or domestic drive.
It’s a funded drive.
Why?
The answer is not far from what has been happening over the years in Zimbabwe since the West ‘manufactured’ the regime-change-driven opposition.
In the past month in Zimbabwe, there have been some imagined and manufactured statistical presentations by mostly Team Pachedu pontificating that there is a massive voter migration, mostly from non-by-election constituencies and wards into those set for elections on March 26 2022.
This ascendance has been closely linked to the resurgence of the US’ National Endowment for Democracy (NED) project which, for years, has been failing to gain traction in countries with hardcore nationalist governments.
For Zimbabwe, NED has raised funding to CSOs, some of which have become too overt to hide the essence of their creation.
NED claims it is in the business of ‘democracy promotion’, but in reality, that ‘democracy’ must entirely be synonymous with the elite American interests.
NED’s Ukraine shocker
Alan Macleod Rokfin, in a damning document that revealed the US government’s funding for the promotion of an anti-Russia narrative in Ukraine, contends that: “Amid soaring tensions with Russia, the US is spending a fortune on foreign interference campaigns in Ukraine.
Washington’s regime change arm, the NED, has spent US$22,4 million on operations inside the country since 2014 when democratically-elected President Viktor Yanukovych was overthrown and replaced by a successor government handpicked by the US.”
Those operations included propping up and training pro-Western political parties, funding pliant media organisations and subsidising massive privatisation drives that benefitted foreign multinational corporations, all in an effort to secure US control over the country that NED president Carl Gershman called ‘the biggest prize’ in Europe.
Unpacking NED
NED is an NGO in the US that was founded in 1983 for ‘promoting democracy in other countries by promoting democratic institutions such as political groups, trade unions, free markets and business groups’.
NED is funded primarily by an annual allocation from the US Congress.
It was created by the Democracy Programme as a bipartisan, private, non-profit corporation, and in turn acts as a grant-making foundation.
In a 1982 speech at the Palace of Westminster, President Ronald Reagan proposed an initiative, before the British Parliament “…to foster the infrastructure of democracy — the system of a free press, unions, political parties, universities.”
This dovetailed with previously-formulated plans to create a government-funded but privately-run democracy promotion foundation to support democratic civil society groups and parties.
The idea was that a non-governmental foundation would be able to support dissident groups and organisations in the Soviet Bloc and Africa while also fostering the emergence of democratic movements in US-allied dictatorships that were becoming unstable and in danger of experiencing leftist or radical revolutions, without provoking a diplomatic backlash against the US Government.
NED supports more than 1 600 grants every year in over 90 countries to NGOs working to advance purported democratic goals and strengthen democratic institutions.
However, over the last 14 years, global freedom has consistently declined, with 64 countries experiencing democratic deterioration in 2019, including decline in 25 of the 41 established democracies.
Writing in Slate in 2004, Brendan I. Koerner said: “Depending on whom you ask, the NED is either a non-profit champion of liberty or an ideologically driven meddler in world affairs.”
The latter is true for most of the cases reviewed by this writer.
March 26 by-elections and the NED factor
For the 2022 by-elections and for shaping the protest discourse in Zimbabwe as the country gears for the watershed harmonised elections in 2023, a number of organisations (CSOs and NGOs) have been funded to be conduits of the NED agenda in Zimbabwe.
These are not limited to the below-mentioned:
NED is working with organisations like the Centre for International Private Enterprises (CIPE) whose mandate is to strengthen informal economy participation and voice.
This organisation was given US$271 104 to work with a coalition of informal associations to ‘engineer reform and strengthen democratic, social and economic development in Zimbabwe’.
The International Republican Institute (IRI) is another organisation that has been given US$400 000 by NED to carry out its promotion of ‘civic awareness and action to counter disinformation’.
The organisation’s so-called major role is ‘to promote civil society and citizens with the ability to identify and respond to State-sponsored disinformation in Zimbabwe’.
The organisation is already working with a number of CSOs and media partners (name supplied) and all those championing the CCC movement to increase awareness around what they allege to be ‘inaccurate information disseminated by and through State-sponsored media outlets’.
Not to be let down, the Institute for Young Women Development Trust is another organisation carrying the flagship of NED in Zimbabwe as we speak, with a funding of US$65 100 to ‘advance young women’s democratic participation and representation in Zimbabwe’ even though the Government has already enacted legislative support for women quarter.
One, therefore, wonders why such organisations cannot just augment Government than pressure it on such issues.
Youth Forum Zimbabwe and CiZC are the other organisations taking funding from NED to antagonise and push an agenda for regime change in Zimbabwe, and they have so far received US$49 950 and US$91 886, respectively, in the month of February 2022 alone. For those who may not be in the know, CiZC has become the most vehement organisation since the debate to introduce the new and amended legislative Act on the Private Voluntary Organisation (PVO) Bill.
From the above revelations, it is obvious that the role-playing by organisations like Team Pachedu, Centre for Community Development in Zimbabwe Trust, Zimbabwe Democracy Institute, Zimbabwe Human Rights NGO Forum and others engaged in such acts is but corroborative of NED objectives.
Some academics have gone further in ascribing and apportioning even the CCC, purporting that their rallies are being funded from the ‘GoFundMe’ and donations from supporters as a ‘big lie’ to mask the source of their real funding.
Who, in any case can believe that crap?
Even the insane will laugh that US$107 000 can be raised for an ideologically bankrupt and content-less party that thinks the word ‘change’ is actually an ideological statement of magnified volumes.
What then is the proper perspective on how NED should be viewed in Zimbabwe?
For Zimbabwe and Africa, this is an organisation that seeks to push an imperial hop towards the destruction of the nationalistic spirit in Zimbabwe.
It is an organisation that enables Nelson Chamisa to unashamedly remark at a rally that, “…it will take a week for whites to come back to Zimbabwe and uplift the lives of ordinary Zimbabweans if the CCC party wins the elections.”
Does Chamisa understand the white mentality or he just read it wrongly, like Tendai Biti’s Oxford English dream?
The CCC must ask black students in Ukraine.
The black race is treated differently even today.
Russia, NED and the Ukraine crisis
The Russian government officials and State media have frequently regarded NED as hostile to their country.
For example, in 2015, the Russian State news agency RIA Novosti blamed NED grants for the Euromaidan mass protests that toppled former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych from power.
In July 2015, the Russian government declared NED ‘undesirable NGO’, making the endowment the first organisation banned under the Russian Undesirable Organisations Law, the anti-establishment drive signed two months earlier by Russian President Vladimir Putin.
If at all we need our country to be really free, we must resist the narrative that is being championed by NED and its surrogates in Zimbabwe.
They say the future is white and that our history is not important in today’s political discourse.
They say ‘change’ is opposition politicking and that a confused, power hungry quisling will bring the change that suits our history.
Surely Zimbabweans are not that gullible.
Perhaps Zimbabwe must also have, and support existing, home-grown CSOs, NGOs and think-tanks that counter foreign NGOs and CSOs by defending national interests at all costs.
These patriotic and home-grown NGOs and CSOs, if wholly funded by the Government, will ensure that NED and its surrogates will, one way or the other, bite the dust.