THERE are many lessons that can be drawn from South African opposition party, EFF’s collaboration with the ruling ANC to cut ties with Israel over its unjustified military attacks on Palestine.
What is clear is that the key to any country’s well being and global peace and security is the pursuit of the national interest, by all political parties.
Last month, the EFF moved a motion in Parliament that called for the closing of the Israeli embassy in Pretoria and suspending all diplomatic relations with Israel.
The ANC duly embraced the call.
“The African National Congress will agree to a Parliamentary motion which calls upon the Government to close the Israel Embassy in South Africa and suspend all diplomatic relations with Israel until Israel agrees to ceasefire,” the ANC said in a statement.
On November 21, South African lawmakers voted overwhelmingly in favour of the EFF motion.
This was just one of the many instances where the two parties have joined hands in furthering South Africa’s national agenda.
Certainly not in Zimbabwe where the opposition is disappointingly at odds with doing what is necessary for the country’s security and development.
The biggest challenge confronting the opposition in the country is its chronic lack of identity while it claims to represent Zimbabweans.
Western fingerprints are visible on its ‘agenda’ and alarming is the party’s hostility to national interests.
For instance, the CCC led Harare City Council officials had the temerity to hold a workshop in Nyanga at a time cholera has claimed several lives in the city and the Government has given the local authority a seven-day ultimatum to remove vendors from the central business district (CBD) to avert disaster and the workshop cost US$24 000 funded by ratepayers.
It is time the CCC grasp the compelling fact that Zimbabwe’s national interests are premised on the ideas, ideals and values of the liberation struggle which they detest.
The liberation struggle forms a critical chunk that CCC handlers want to quickly erase from the collective memory of the majority of Zimbabweans for reasons they have done little to mask.
The CCC is under strict instructions to push the narrative that the liberation struggle has run its course and is thus no longer part of our history while glorifying the chief aggressor in that war, Ian Douglas Smith whom they want to present as ‘better’ than the current leaders.
‘Democracy’ and ‘human rights’, according to the West, and not economic empowerment of the majority has become the focal point of CCC’S ‘struggle’ on behalf of that part of the world.
Robert Osgood tells us that national interest ‘is a state of affairs valued solely for its benefit to the nation’.
And the state of affairs is anchored on giving unfettered ownership and control of land and means of production to the masses who have realised immense economic benefits from the land and resources in fulfillment of the goals and objectives of the country’s struggle for freedom.
While ZANU PF has achieved that to the letter and spirit, there remains disturbing existential threats to the maintenance and sustenance of those tenets wrought by the opposition’s unholy alliance with Western countries and the country’s erstwhile colonisers.
This calls for more stiffer measures to protect the country’s sovereignty.
This is so because while opposition parties are supposed to be the alternative, keeping Government in check, protecting the country’s sovereignty and territorial integrity among other things, in Zimbabwe the CCC openly endorses and abets attempts by Western countries to recapture the country.
This is why the move by EFF should ordinarily redefine the role of opposition parties in the pursuit of the national interest especially where the CCC is concerned.
Their brazen, provocative collusion with Western countries goes against the principle of non-interference in another state’s affairs.
CCC’s myopic belief that the country’s ‘salvation’ will come from the West when its ‘leader’ Nelson Chamisa picks up the phone and calls his ‘brother’, US President Joe Biden to remove the illegal economic sanctions against Harare if by some stroke of luck he takes over power sums up why it has become necessary for the country to go it without such opposition entities.
That Chamisa has no qualms in telling the hard-pressed masses that his handlers, the West’s illegal economic sanctions will only be removed if and when he takes over the reins not only confirms his complicity in the suffering of the people, it must compel the authorities to implement measures to deal with that insanity as treason.
And EFF becomes important in many ways.
The EFF has been clear on its stance on issues to do with equitable distribution of land and resources, while CCC is clear that it will reverse the Land Reform and Resettlement Programme as well as the many economic empowerment initiatives being spearheaded by the Government.
This is what they call the struggle for ‘democracy’.
However, real democracy is under threat from their Western handlers.
Democracy has been destroyed across the globe by their owners.
Zimbabwe has survived, barely, that aggression.
Since the turn of the millennium, successive Republican and Democrats governments in the US have taken turns to maintain the sanctions against Zimbabwe because this tiny African nation causes ‘an extraordinary and unusual threat to its foreign policy’.
That is the correct summation of the national interest, US national interest of plunder, a fact which eludes the opposition which believes, naively, that regime change through illegal means is ‘democracy’.
In Britain, the Conservatives and Labour have done the same in their hostility against Zimbabwe, they continue supporting the opposition do their bidding.
Until such a time comes when there is collaboration between ZANU PF and CCC in fending off anything that threatens the country’s wellbeing such as the relentless attempts by Western countries to subdue Harare then in the interim the country needs no opposition party.