“Chidembo kana choda
kuramba mukadzi chinoshereketa!” (When the skunk (bad husband) wants to desert
the wife, it will do anything and everything to provoke a fight, beat her up
and then divorce her for “starting” the fight!)
When President Mugabe
warned UN Secretary – General, Ban Ki-Moon that Africa will, en mass, walk out
of the UN if the continent’s demands for two permanent Security Council seats are
not met; this was just him, the skunk, itching for a fight.
There is no stopping a
skunk, with a hidden agenda, itching for a fight.
“We are supposed to be
free and independent Mr Ban Ki Moon; supposed to be free— the 54 countries (of
Africa). We come to the United Nations for the ceremonial (General Assembly);
every year, September, we are there,” said Mugabe at the AU Summit in Addis
Ababa, Ethiopia. He is there to hand over the AU Chairmanship to Chad’s
President Idriss Déby Itno.
“We pay lots of money,
go there and attend the General Assembly and make speeches, go back home: year
in year out.
“But the bosses in the
Security Council say you shall never have the powers that we have as permanent
members … Reform the Security Council!” thundered Mugabe to thunderous applause
from the gathered African leaders.
Mugabe, out of your own
mouth cometh thy judgement!
Mugabe is fighting for Africa
to have the same power to veto UN Security Council resolutions that the five
permanent members have. This is rich coming from the man who has systematically
denied the Zimbabwean people the freedoms and basic human rights including the
right to a meaningful free vote and even the right to life! In any case giving one
or two of Africa’s tyrants the veto would not help advance the post independent
Africa’ call for democratic change.
If these African leaders
were not suffering from collective amnesia then they would remember that it was
the AU itself which resolved that Zimbabwe’s 2008 elections, Mugabe’s claimed
were free and fair, were not. The AU would only grant Mugabe political
legitimacy after he agreed to implement wide raging democratic reforms and to form
a GNU. Sadly none of the reforms were implemented so Mugabe rigged the 2013
elections.
Mugabe is facing an ever
tougher election in 2018 than in 2008 because the national economic is now in
total meltdown and Zanu PF popularity is rock bottom. To remain in power Mugabe
will have no choice but to once again rig the elections; something the West, the
UN and the Zimbabwean people themselves are set to object to with renewed
vigour.
Last week VP Mnangagwa confirmed
the Zanu PF regime will renew its banning UNPD, although it is the one paying
for Zimbabwe’s new biometric voting system, and all the Western nations’
election monitors from observing the country’s next elections. The fight with
the UN over reforms is a contrived in that when the regime is criticized for rigging
the elections it will counter and accuse the West is punishing it because Mugabe’s
repeated demands for UN reforms.
Mugabe played the same
dirty trick of picking a contrived fight when he accused the British of
reneging on their promise to fund Zimbabwe’s land redistribution programme. So
when he was accuse of rigging the 2000 and 2002 elections he countered claiming
the elections were free and fair and accused the British and their Western allies
of punishing him for seizing white owned farms.
When the AU and SADC
both refused to endorse Mugabe’s claim that the 2008 elections too were free
and fair, Mugabe had no counter accusation then. If the AU sided with the West
in condemning Mugabe’s vote rigging in 2018 he will accuse the African leaders in
turn of hypocrisy; many have turned a blind eye to vote rigging in Africa with
a number guilt of committing the same crime themselves – to as extensively but enough
and that is all Mugabe needs. The few leaders with a clean bill of electoral health,
Mugabe will accuse them of being puppets of the Wests taking orders to play
hardball with him even though his megaphone diplomacy has accomplished nothing.
In 2003 Mugabe took
Zimbabwe out of the British Commonwealth when it was clear the country was going
to be kicked over its failure to hold free and fair elections. If push comes to
shove he will walk out of the UN and AU too rather than hold free and fair
elections and lose.
If the truth be told; Africa
does not need the two permanent seats complete with veto powers. Africa has had
its share of dictators, despots and tyrants. There is the late Colonel Muammar Gaddafi who ruled Libya for 42 years (he did not bother with
the niceties of elections); Muhammad Hosni El Sayed Mubarak, was schooled
in vote rigging, he ruled Egypt with an iron fist for 30 years; President Omar
Hassan Ahmad al-Bashir of Sudan has been indicted by ICC for genocide, crimes
against humanity and war crimes in Darfur; we know Mugabe and his checked track
record; etc. The thought of any of these tyrants wielding a veto is very worrying
indeed for Africa and the world at large!
Africa’s democratic
institutions, where they still exist, are very weak to deal with serious
institutionalized crimes like genocide, crime against humanity, etc. The presence
of rogue states like China and Russia wielding the UN Security Council veto has
allowed many African tyrants to get away with murder as long as they had
Chinese and/or Russian support. Africa needs a strong UN and adding the number
of rogue states with a veto will make the UN even weaker than it is!
How ironic that Mugabe should
be using demands for an African UN veto as a smoke screen to hide his more
sinister plan to continue denying millions of Zimbabweans the right to free,
fair and credible vote. But then it is to be expected given his skunk mentality!
“Ichokwadi! Chidembo kana choda kuramba mukadzi chinoshereketa!” (Yeah up! There is no stopping a skunk itching
for a fight to hide its more sinister agenda!
Africa needs the UN, at least the ordinary people. For all their grand standing and posturing the AU has failed the people of Africa again and again just as the individual African leaders have failed their own people again and again.
ReplyDeleteIt is all very well for President Mugabe to talk of Africa has paid its dues to the UN, he of all people would know Zimbabwe has received a lot more from the UN than it has paid out. He has gladly accepted UNPD money to pay for the biometric voting system but will not want the UNDP to witness how the new system will be used?
The UN's failure to hold member states to account for their failure to live-up to the UN Char-ter have helped prop up tyrants. It is no secret that President Mugabe has relished the prospect of taking centre stage during the annual UN General Assembly to give his vitriolic speeches "full of sound and fury signifying nothing" as Shakespeare would say.
There most important reform at the UN should be that the body should be manned by people with a proven track record of their commitment to upholding the UN’s cherished goal of making sure the universal human rights are enjoyed by all. Allowing individual nations to nominate UN staff through a quota system has allowed tyrants to reward their cronies with cushy UN positions!
Hence we end with this ridiculous situation where UNPD staff in Harare will spend millions of dollars on a new biometric voting system, for example, without a care whether the new system is used properly or not! It may be a job to the UNDP employees but free and fair elections is a matter of life or death for the Zimbabweans fighting a losing battle for democratic change!
There is no doubt Mugabe is softening up both the UN and the AU for the fight over another rigged Zimbabwe elections that is coming. The African leaders can give him a standing ovation but we, the Zimbabwe povo on the coal face of his 36 years of corrupt and tyrannical rule, the battered wife of the skunk, are not applauding. We know only too well the skunk's sinister agenda!
@ Stobart
ReplyDeleteWhy the UNDP has continued to spend billions of dollars on projects designed to deliver free, fair and credible elections knowing fully well that the Zanu PF regime has no intention of holding free and fair elections is what is shocking here. The trouble is that the UN itself is staffed by individuals who care more about their cushy UN job than promoting UN values.
UNICEF that bankrolled the writing of Zimbabwe's the new constitution and the idiots sat there twiddling their thumbs as President Mugabe made a complete mockery of the whole exercise. Now it is UNPD's turn to spend millions on this biometric system which Zanu PF is using as proof of its willingness to reform only for the regime to corrupt the system to short change the nation.
The regime's operatives will post the biometric data of an individual to the wrong constituency just as they did with the person data in 2013, for example. A piece of cake!
These MDC idiots are letting the nation down with their focus of electoral law reforms instead of the structural institutional reforms called for in the 2008 GPA reforms. Zanu PF has failed to hold free and fair elections in 36 years not because we did not have the biometric voting system that is nonsense. The regime is determined to rig the elections regardless how modern the electoral system happens to be!