Why is Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe not a Hero?

– by Shenali D Waduge –

Robert Mugabe has to be one of the West’s worst nightmares. He is certainly one  amongst the handful remaining Africans that is open against white oppression. Africa needs African leaders rooted in Africa not African leaders that the West hero worships because they are ready to continue white supremacy. This was the difference between Mugabe and Mandela. Robert Mugabe is fighting to reverse the legacy of colonialism, Mandela was prepared to continue Apartheid economy in exchange for black political power that really meant nothing for the blacks. How wrong can Mugabe be when he says the land and natural resources belong to Zimbabwe and not to white colonialists? Mugabe has ruled Zimbabwe since independence in 1980. Mugabe is the only native leader who ever repossessed territory that was usurped by foreign colonisers. And he did so while they were in full occupation and while they were actively farming and prospering. No other African leader has ever re-possessed land while the purloined real estate was actively occupied by the usurpers. Mugabe did it! And he did so single-handedly! That surely must judge his heroism.

Zimbabwe was formerly known as Rhodesia named after Cecil Rhodes – the only Rhodes memory today is that of the Rhodes Scholarship. Cecil Rhodes was defeated but the British were quick to appoint Idi Amin to look after their interests. The Heroes of the whites are those willing to ensure that no blacks will touch any of the land the whites had stolen. They loved Mugabe when he like many other white appointed leaders were ready to dance to the white tune. That however did not last long.

Mugabe was in fact given knighthood in 1994 by the British Government! Sir Robert Mugabe Knight Commander of the Order of the Bath of course he was stripped of the title 7 years later. Lord Doughlas Hurd was foreign secretary when Mugabe was given knighthood and when questioned he said the knighthood may have been given because Mugabe hosted the Commonwealth. Lets hope President Rajapakse is not fooled into this possibility by his advisors!

When these leaders started to shift allegiance, the heroes soon became villains. We all know how Osama, Saddam, Gaddafi fell from grace. BBC wrote glowing reports on Mugabe for 25 years up until the time Mugabe started introducing land reforms. Thereafter the white media started to promote Morgan Tsangvirai’s MDC party after the West started to pumping cash. MDC was no different to South African ANC – both ready to allow the whites to continue the economic hold on their respective countries.

Sanctions became the best way the West knew to deal with Zimbabwe. US froze credit against Zimbabwe and this was how Zimbabwe’s economic troubles started and not during the land reclamation. The white media was quick to relay about whites being forced off the land. Every story will refer to create a false scenario that Zimbabwe’s problem are because the whites lost their land and had to leave and not because the credit was removed. Reclaiming lands did not cause starvation – sanctions against Zimbabwe did. Robert Mugabe has not committed any action against the US, nor supported any terror but he remains on the terror list. Mugabe was wise to strike up alliances that would protect Zimbabwe and protection came. China blocked moves for military intervention that US and Britain was attempting to achieve through the UN.

Mandela is a hero because he was ready to dance to the tune of the imperialists. 65% blacks in South Africa remain unemployed while 90% of whites remain rich and in possession of over 90% of South Africa’s wealth because Mandela was quite prepared to keep it that way and for maintaining the status quo Mandela remains their hero. Let us not forget that none of the Whites ever confessed to any crimes before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Blacks remain very poor in a very rich nation with white South Africans still very rich. This is narrative of reconciliation appears nothing but a bogey to avoid coming down to real terms to discuss violations and the redress of these violations.

The whites possessed the title deeds for the finest agricultural land upon which they established 70.000 mega-farms. And they farmed the land for 110 years. The physical labour was provided by the natives of the country. And these people were virtually enslaved.

Mr Mugabe said he embarked on the land-grab programme in 2000 to address the expropriation of land from blacks during white rule that ended after a civil war in 1980.

Zimbabwe’s land reforms are an envy to most. Of course we need to always keep in mind that there are sanctions and limitations. But given that the land is now under ownership of Zimbabweans who are slowly putting the land to use, with proper investments and if treated as co-partners instead of mere employees of western foreign governments Zimbabwe would surely prosper. This is a good lesson for other Third World countries ever ready to dole out land to foreign investors and leaving their own people mere employees in lands that belong to the natives.

The indigenisation policies in the mining sector have added to the land-owning middle class by creating mining entrepreneurs. These are people who have taken advantage of the availability of state shares in foreign owned companies. The state owns 51% of the mineral resources part of which belongs to the community, another percentage is due to the employees. Another is availed to the entrepreneurs who can purchase them. The rest is used by the state for the benefit of the country. The minerals under Zimbabwean soil belong to Zimbabwe and anyone who needs them must join Zimbabweans on that basis. The West must therefore stop the silly regime change programs that are being replicated the world over simply to put white men on indigenous ground or get indigenous men who would work on behalf of the whites – only a thin line sets both apart. Let us remind ourselves that it was only after the British were confident that they had created enough ‘Yes Brown/Black Men’ that they decided to give independence and bumped off the real nationalists who would have stood in the way of their outsourced domination.

Famous Speeches by Robert Mugabe

18 April 1980 – Independence Speech

An evil remains an evil whether practiced by white against black or by black against white. Our majority rule could easily turn into inhuman rule if we oppressed, persecuted or harassed those who do not look or think like the majority of us. Democracy is never mob-rule. It is and should remain disciplined rule requiring compliance with the law and social rules. Our independence must thus not be construed as an instrument vesting individuals or groups with the right to harass and intimidate others into acting against their will. It is not the right to negate the freedom of others to think and act, as they desire.

UN General Assembly 2007

Even after 1945, it would appear that the Berlin Conference of 1884, through which Africa was parcelled to colonial European powers, remained stronger than the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It is therefore clear that for the West, vested economic interests, racial and ethnocentric considerations proved stronger than their adherence to principles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

The West still negates our sovereignties by way of control of our resources, in the process making us mere chattels in out own lands, mere minders of its trans-national interests. In my own country and other sister states in Southern Africa, the most visible form of this control has been over land despoiled from us at the onset of British colonialism.

Clearly the history of the struggle for out own national and people’s rights is unknown to the president of the United States of America. He thinks the Declaration of Human Rights starts with his last term in office! He thinks she can introduce to us, who bore the brunt of fighting for the freedoms of our peoples, the virtues of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. What rank hypocrisy!

Ian Smith (Prime Minister of Rhodesia/Zimbabwe) is responsible for the death of well over 50 000 of my people. ….. He would have faced a different fate here and in Europe if the 50 000 he killed were Europeans. Africa has not called for a Nuremberg trial against the white world which committed heinous crimes against its own humanity. It has not hunted perpetrators of this genocide, many of whom live to this day, nor has it got reparations from those who offended against it. Instead it is Africa which is in the dock, facing trial from the same world that persecuted it for centuries.

Let Mr. Bush read history correctly. Let him realise that both personally and in his representative capacity as the current President of the United States, he stands for this “civilisation” which occupied, which colonised, which incarcerated, which killed. He has much to atone for and very little to lecture us on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. His hands drip with innocent blood of many nationalities.

He still kills.

He kills in Iraq. He kills in Afghanistan. And this is supposed to be out master on human rights?

He imprisons.

He imprisons and tortures at Guantanamo. He imprisoned and tortured at Abu Ghraib. He has secret torture chambers in Europe. Yes, he imprisons even here in the United States, with his jails carrying more blacks than his universities can ever enroll. He even suspends the provisions of the Universal Declaration on Human Rights. Take Guantanamo for example; at that concentration camp international law does not apply. The national laws of the people there do not apply. Laws of the United States of America do not apply. Only Bush’s law applies. Can the international community accept being lectured by this man on the provisions of the universal declaration of human rights? Definitely not!

Mr President, We are alarmed that under his leadership, basic rights of his own people and those of the rest of the world have summarily been rolled back. America is primarily responsible for rewriting core tenets of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. We seem all guilty for 9/11. Mr. Bush thinks he stands above all structures of governance, whether national or international.

At home, he apparently does not need the Congress. Abroad, he does not need the UN, international law and opinion. This forum did not sanction Blair and Bush’s misadventures in Iraq. The two rode roughshod over the UN and international opinion. Almighty Bush is now corning back to the UN for a rescue package because his nose is bloodied! Yet he dares lecture us on tyranny. Indeed, he wants us to pray him! We say No to him and encourage him to get out of Iraq. Indeed he should mend his ways before he clambers up the pulpit to deliver pieties of democracy.

The British and the Americans have gone on a relentless campaign of destabilising and vilifying my country. They have sponsored surrogate forces to challenge lawful authority in my country. They seek regime change, placing themselves in the role of the Zimbabwean people in whose collective will democracy places the right to define and change regimes.

Let these sinister governments be told here and now that Zimbabwe will not allow a regime change authored by outsiders. We do not interfere with their own systems in America and Britain. Mr Bush and Mr Brown have no role to play in our national affairs. They are outsiders and mischievous outsiders and should therefore keep out! The colonial sun set a long time ago; in 1980in the case of Zimbabwe, and hence Zimbabwe will never be a colony again. Never!

UN General Assembly 2013

We cannot accept situations whereby the UN Security Council is increasingly encroaching on issues that traditionally fall within the General Assembly’s purview and competence, including in the area of norm setting.

Indeed, recent events have revealed that its formal decisions have provided camouflage to neo-imperialist forces of aggression seeking to militarily intervene in smaller countries in order to effect regime change and acquire complete control of their wealth. This was so in Libya where in the name of protecting civilians, NATO forces were deployed with an undeclared mission to eliminate Muammar Gaddafi and his family. A similar campaign had been undertaken in Iraq by the Bush and Blair forces in the false name of eradicating weapons of mass destruction which Saddam Hussein never possessed.

“Shame, shame, shame we say to the United States of America. Shame, shame, shame we say to Britain and its allies who have continued to impose sanctions, illegal sanctions upon our people,”

Addressed to David Cameron on Gay rights

‘You, David Cameron, are you suggesting that you don’t know that, or is it some kind of insanity or part of the culture of Europeans?’… ‘In their newspapers, that’s one of my sins. That I called (gays) worse than pigs and dogs because pigs know there are males and females.

‘You are free as a man to marry a woman and that is what we follow.

‘That’s what produced you and me. This kind of insanity is now part of the culture of Europe and the United States.’

His comments about homosexuality came after Mr Cameron told a conference of Commonwealth leaders in October that Britain could cut aid to developing nations which failed to protect human rights, including gay rights.

“They (the UK) will praise you only if you are doing things that please them. (Nelson) Mandela has gone a bit too far in doing good to the non-black communities, really in some cases at the expense of them …

Some famous quotes of Mugabe:

• The only white man you can trust is a dead white man.
• “We don’t mind having sanctions banning us from Europe. We are not Europeans.”
• “Cricket civilizes people and creates good gentlemen I want everyone to play cricket in Zimbabwe; I want ours to be a nation of gentlemen”
• “If the choice were made, one for us to lose our sovereignty and become a member of the Commonwealth or remain with our sovereignty and lose the membership of the Commonwealth, I would say let the Commonwealth go.”

Making interviewers speechless:

Interviewer: ‘Mr President don’t you think 89 years old would have been a great time to rest and retire?’

President Mugabe: ‘Have you ever asked Queen Elizabeth this question or is it just for African leaders?’

Only a truly decolonized mind could come up with such an answer.

Robert Mugabe remains a victim of Western misinformation and a favorite whipping boy for the neo-colonial mindsets.

Mugabe is a threat to white power and the whites just hate it

The Blacks and Asians are scared to question these lies. It is time the Third World started to stand up and question like Mugabe.

Anyone who says you cant beat the whites at their own game says so because they have never tried and Mugabe has and did beat the whites and that’s what has annoyed them no different to why they remain annoyed at Sri Lanka’s President Rajapakse for defeating their poodle LTTE.

Its time we set the history books straight and start sifting the lies of Western media.

Former Foreign Secretary David Miliband best describes the plight of the West’s plans and plots against Mugabe ““Every British government in the last 20 years has scratched its head on what to do about Mugabe…Sanctions don’t work. Pressure doesn’t work. Enticement doesn’t work,”