D12 American blacks strip Zim flag off Mawarire - we have our own lunatics too. By Wilbert Mukori

Mugabe is in America to attend the annual UN General Assembly denounced. Pastor Evan Mawarire whose #ThisFlag campaign calling for Mugabe to fire corrupt ministers, for the return of the looted $15 billion, etc. had hundreds of thousands of followers on the social media inside Zimbabwe and beyond. #ThisFlag staged a number of well supported public protests in Zimbabwe and was hoping to stage one such protest in New York City to surprise Mugabe. It was the Pastor who was in for a big surprise.

 

A group of, mostly black Americans, calling themselves December 12 Movement’s street protest out staged that of Mawarire and his group. The D12 Movement activists, as they called themselves, who were interviewed, were as generous in the praise of Mugabe as they were ruthlessly critical of Mawarire.

 

“He is a preacher without a church, with a following of less than 50 members in Zimbabwe, but who has apparently unlimited funding,” reads a D12 report.

 

“He denounces the conditions of life in Zimbabwe but NEVER mentions what the devastating effects of hundreds of years of Western underdevelopment, terrorism and 16 years of direct US and European SANCTIONS have had on the Zimbabwean economy and quality of life.”

 

The D12 article was headed Pastor Evan Mawarire’s True Flags: America & Great Britain and had the photograph of Mawarire draped in the two flags.

 

The shallowness of the D12 movement’s arguments is what screams at you. At the heart of the people of Zimbabwe’s tragic economic suffering as a result of the country’s economic meltdown and political helplessness is a cry for freedom and human dignity including the right to free, fair and credible elections and the right to life itself.

 

Given that most of the D12 activists are descendants of black slaves and that over 150 years after the abolition of slavery blacks still continued to suffer to this day all manner of racist abuse, exploitation and  oppression should have made D12 activists even more sympathetic to anyone else out there crying for freedom and human dignity.

 

Indeed one of founding members of D12 even has the chutzpah call himself human rights activist!  

 

“One of the founders of the December 12th Movement was Sonny Abubadika Carson, who, according to Workers World Org, was a staunch activist against racism and #Police Brutality," according to a report in BlastingNews, a USA based publication.    

 

Zimbabwe has been independent for the last 36 years now and is yet to hold free, fair and credible elections. What has that got to do with “devastating effects of hundreds of years of Western underdevelopment”?

 

If the December 12 members have heard of the “16 years of direct US and European SANCTIONS” they must too have of Zimbabwe’s rampant corruption.  In February this year Mugabe, himself, admitted that $15 billion of diamond revenue were “swindled”.

 

"Lots of smuggling and swindling has taken place and the companies that have been mining, I want to say, robbed us of our wealth," Mugabe said.

 

Surely not even one D12 activists would deny that the looting of $15 billion from USA’s US$18 trillion GDP will have adverse effect on country’s economy and its people; if it causes a hip up on the American economic it will cause a fatal heart-attack on the Zimbabwe economy whose GDP is a mere $14 billion! So are these D12 busy-bodies are telling us, Zimbabweans, we cannot raise the serious problem of corruption, even when it has become “fatal” to the national economy, because we have “never” mentioned sanctions? How stupid is that!

 

Mugabe has used his liberation war credentials to hide his corrupt and tyrannical post-independence record. He has kept up his anti-colonial rhetoric especially to the naïve and gullible captive audience outside Zimbabwe who had no first-hand experience of economic hardship of 90% unemployment or 500 billion percent inflation rates or the mental anguish of being beating and some killed to vote for a tyrant.

 

The D12 members are supporting Mugabe because he has always been very quick off the mark to condemn white oppression and has often taken over the top position on such matters as homosexuality just to bolster his radical reputation and draw attention away from his corrupt and tyrannical rule. D12 members love Mugabe because he has supported them against white abuse although Mugabe has committed even worse acts of abuse on his own people then the D12 member have ever suffered but, of course, that is irrelevant to them. How selfish it that!

 

Like it or not the D12 activists who attended the UN demonstration in support of Robert Mugabe have tarnished the image of the movement for all time. Anyone with an self-respect will never ever want to be associated with the group.

 

Thank God the D12 activists who took part or supported those who did in whatever form constitute the lunatic fringe of black Americans and it would be wrong for any Zimbabwean to paint all black Americans with the same brush. After all Mugabe has a hell lot more Zimbabwean lunatic supporters then Americans! He has used some of the looted wealth to buy the lunatics’ continued blind loyalty; the war veterans only finally came up to their sense and acknowledge Mugabe’s “dictatorial tendencies” when Mugabe stopped paying them and poverty started to bit!