Source: Mugabe must look beyond Pan-African rhetoric – DailyNews Live
Mugove Tafirenyika 28 May 2017
HARARE – President Robert Mugabe must match his Pan African rhetoric by
providing food, jobs, schools, housing and healthcare that are still so
sorely lacking in his country, academics and the opposition have said.
Pan-Africanism, including even a “United States of Africa”, has been a
rallying cry since the continent started to shake off its colonial
shackles in the 1950s and 1960s.
But in messages to commemorate Africa Day on Thursday, a cross section of
Zimbabweans said African governments in general and Mugabe’s
administration in particular have failed miserably to improve the lot for
their people, hence the need for citizens to “fight against black
liberation struggle elites to stop their pervasive plunder of our
resources under the pretext of the emancipating the masses.”
University of Zimbabwe Sociology lecturer Rudo Gaidzanwa said bodies such
as the Sadc and the African Union (AU) have become platforms for
solidarity with dictators.
Gaidzanwa dismissed calls by African leaders to quit the International
Criminal Court (ICC) and establish an independent African Court saying
African states unhappy with the ICC should work to reform it from within
rather than pulling out.
Almost a third of the ICC’s 124 members are African, and a withdrawal by a
large number of them would cripple a court that has yet to fulfil hopes
that it would ensure perpetrators of war crimes and genocide never go
unpunished.
Fifteen years old this year, the ICC has only ever charged Africans,
including the presidents of Kenya and Sudan, although it has procedures
open at earlier stages dealing with crimes in Eastern Europe, the Middle
East and South America.
Gaidzanwa said African leaders only pronounce Pan-Africanism in the belief
that it can help them withstand foreign criticism against their
dictatorships, life presidencies, corruption, negative ethnicity,
violations of human rights and perpetration of civil wars and genocides.
“However, when I went through the Zimbabwean experience I said to myself
`what is there to celebrate about not having water, electricity, food and
access to health?’,” Gaidzanwa said.
“When I talk to my students, they don’t believe when I tell them the life
we lived under colonialism, that I lived in an African township like they
called it but it had drainage, there was electricity and the postman
brought letters to our home.
“I actually walked to school and at my school, I learnt French, did
Technical Drawing, played tennis and my teacher was gay, although we
didn’t know what it means. I tell them that at the University of Rhodesia,
we used to have bacon and egg, fruits and everything.
“They (students) ask me how this could have been in an African township
because they come from places where there are no roads, no water and
sometimes they have to take a bath at the campus, so it’s been an invasion
of reality.
“They grow up in conditions of terrible deprivation without water and
potholes everywhere, so when you bring about the discourse of liberation
and freedom and our heroes, there is a disconnect and I can see the
contempt they (students) have for it because sometimes they take turns to
come for lectures and take notes on behalf of each other.”
Opposition MDC leader Morgan Tsvangirai said in his Africa Day message
that given the continent’s vast mineral wealth and its wide base of
natural resources, it is without any rationality and justification that
Africans must continue to have such poverty.
Tsvangirai said while Mugabe is a national and continental hero who played
a huge part in the development of the country and the continent, he has
since turned into a villain on account of his policies as well as
ambitions to die in office despite his advanced age.
Willias Madzimure, PDP secretary for international relations, said
liberation movements who did the excellent work to liberate the continent
from colonial rule failed to transform themselves from military wings to
proper modern civilian governments capable of driving the economic
transformation agenda on the African continent.
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