via Mugabe ‘is idolised by entire Africa’ | News24 2014-03-18 by Betha Madhomu
Robert Mugabe is a leader “who virtually every Zimbabwean is fond of” and is “idolised by the entire African continent”, Zanu-PF deputy director of information, Psychology Maziwisa has said.
Maziwisa said this, as Zimbabwe, through the recently launched Zimbabwe Global Initiative (ZGI), seeks to “re-write” the country’s “story”, which Zanu-PF claims has been distorted by its enemies.
“Our view is that the real Zimbabwean story needs to be told and we believe that if that is done well- in a concerted way… Zimbabwe will be seen in the best possible light in a couple of years if not months,” Maziwisa told News24.
Maziwisa, who is the executive chairperson of the initiative,said the Zimbabwean story had been “deliberately” distorted by America, Britain and their allies in order to suit their “vested economic and political interests in Zimbabwe”.
Sanctions
“The perception has been created that we are a country at war, that there is a civil war of sorts here- that there are rampant-unimaginable human rights abuses here, that we are a dictatorship, that the moment an investor arrives in Zimbabwe every bit of their investment will be expropriated by Mugabe…And as a result of this negative image- our prospects as a nation have suffered,” he said
This comes as Zimbabwe continues to suffer under sanctions that were imposed against Harare over a decade ago.
The EU last month lifted most of the sanctions, although those of Mugabe and his wife Grace remained in place.
Restrictions against the State-owned Zimbabwe Defence Industries (ZDI) also remain.
“It doesn’t please us at all that a person whom we see as our hero, a leader who virtually every Zimbabwean is so fond of and who is idolized by the entire African continent is portrayed in such a negative and derogatory way,” said Maziwisa.
Business opportunities
Maziwisa said the ZGI would see him and his team taking the Zimbabwe story to South Africa in April, the US in May, the UK in June and Australia in July.
“During these visits we will also be able to discuss business opportunities in Zimbabwe and to dispel some of the myths around our empowerment policies which, again, we feel have deliberately been misconstrued”, he said.
Maziwisa said the aim was to make sure that the world interacted with Zimbabwe on “an equal footing”.
COMMENTS
Mazivisa ,kutengesa amai.this level of political prostitution is un heard off. He gives us all the true points on Mugabe then says it s all lies.
You are trying to find a good reason to visit the west so you can hide your mafia bosses loot.
We know your kind ,learning from the master conman Mugabe,highjacked of the revolution.
Better watch your backside young man,they will use you and dump you.
Then why not do the honorable thing and resign Mr. revered President? Mandela did it and his name is immortalized.
Why are 90% of your people out of employment Mr President.
Why do you need those insult laws?
Why do you need the biggest personal security around yourself Mr. revered President?
Why do you need to steal elections?
Why do you harbor the corrupt ministers Mr revered President?
Why do you not give your people freedom of speech!
Why can you not allow a harmless Williams to express herself!!!
Why do allow honchos like Maziwisa to fool you!!!
Why were under SADC supervision from 2008 to 2013!!!
The list goes on.
oh what bs !!!!! Mugabe is a old senile man who cannot even hold a decent conversation in the way he talks, its like listening to a 7 yr old… what planet do you come from to even suggest when a president refuses to step down, that is called dictatorship..he is the OLDEST LIVING president in the world which makes him the laughing stock of the world…
Well he’s not idolised by the families of the 20000-30000 Gukurahundi victims he butchered.
Roving Ambassador, you’re right on…
“The perception has been created that we are a country at war, that there is a civil war of sorts here- that there are rampant-unimaginable human rights abuses here, that we are a dictatorship, that the moment an investor arrives in Zimbabwe every bit of their investment will be expropriated by Mugabe…And as a result of this negative image- our prospects as a nation have suffered,” he said
HHhhhmmmm… I wonder how those perceptions were created….
Yeah, Suziq, Mugabe sounds like a 7 year-old… and Maziwisa sounds like an 8 year-old trying to do a PR job on other 8 year-olds. I know it’s serious stuff, because people are really suffering, but ZANUPF’s reactions are so silly they’re laughable. And what will be even more laughable is when those who make such nonsense pronouncements as Maziwisa later try to walk-back the comments to excuse or disavow what they said.
In Ireland we call you all feckin eedjits. No pity for you lot.DO something.
ok, Lindy Lou… we await your suggestions. Tell us where to start. If they’re reasonable, then reasonable men will follow.
@fallenz mugabe and his goons are far worse than Ian Smith and his government was.What actions were taken to remove him and his government.?Can’t remember.!!!!
Of course they won’t seize the investment immediately. When they seized the farms, it was usually when a crop was ready to harvest, usually the last harvest for the farm. If you want to setup a mining venture, they would obviously wait until you have installed all of the infrastructure before they would steal it. I wonder where investors get the idea? Maybe its from ZANU telling investors that ZANU gets more than half of what’s not theirs.
ZANU likes to create the truth by telling the lies often enough and controlling the media. Unfortunately, there are enough gullible people to believe it, and the rest too afraid to speak up.
The only reason that Mugabe hasn’t been brought to the Hague is that Russia and China keep vetoing any resolutions. At least Russia may be kicked off of the UN Security Council soon.
That is correct! Mark.
It may seem incredible, but there are people who truly believe as this Mr Psychology does. I have met some of them and they are not rare to find. The idea that sanctions are partly to blame for our situation is widely held. The idea that the British, Americans and Europeans spend a lot of time plotting on how to get hold of our natural resources is also widely held. The idea that what happened in 1980 was actually a liberation is believed by almost everybody.
I listened to an Air Force man once explain how they had chased an American Aircraft Carrier out of the Mozambique Channel. He was being serious and went on to comment on how they had shown the Americans not to mess with Zimbabwe.
I encounter seemingly normal intelligent people who genuinely expect the economy to pick up now that ZANU is back in power and who become upset if doubt is expressed.
The ideas of most of the commenters on this forum, myself included, that the regime is on a path of greed driven self destruction, are not as widely held as we might expect and we should always be aware of this.
Sadly John Thomas you are right. This has been my experience as well even when talking to those I would consider fairminded people. Many are not thinking about the greater good or the future as they are benefitting from the chaos. It is largely a case of each man for himself where we find they don’t care what happens to the underprivileged.
John Thomas it is called brain washing and deception. When a lie is told enough it eventually comes to be believed and ZPF have spent many a year spewing lies. I wonder if they know that Jesus said the father of ALL lies is the devil? All it takes for a nation to see godly change is for a ‘remnant’ to be clean before the Lord and interceding God’s heart for this nation. I am beginning to wonder if we are not becoming more like Sodom and Gomorrah where the Lord found it hard to find 5 righteous people. the Lord has told me in plain language that Zimbabwe, especially the Zimbabwean church, needs to repent. There is never restoration before repentance! never!
You are right Brother and we were praying about it on a prayerwalk this morning. Its time for the churches to break down their tribalistic attitudes and draw together and lift the Lord on high so He can draw all men unto Himself.
My Verse of the day…Collosians 3: 9 Do not lie to each other, since you have taken off your old self with its practices 10 and have put on the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge in the image of its Creator. 11 Here there is no Gentile or Jew, circumcised or uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave or free, but Christ is all, and is in all.
Hey reverend you have encouraged me so much. I was beginning to feel like one of those lone voices in the wilderness. Have you by any chance seen the Fiji story, “let the seas resound. ” It is amazing; a nation with problems not unlike Zimbabwe and then the conviction comes on some church leaders and you have to see it to believe what happened to that nation.
I have been distributing it and I have a DVD copier and get it and many others out to whoever I can, and I weep like a baby every time I watch it.I also posted the Youtube version on this site a while ago, it is short but got the basic message across.
We serve an AWSOME GOD!
Zimbabwe is a nation of fools that’s why it’s going down fast all the smart people left years ago. We have all heard of the child fairy tale story about the emperors new clothes haven’t we. That is the true life situation in Zimbabwe.
Mr Psycology. He has the right name. Thinks he can psychologically bullsh_t people that can actually read. Agriculture almost dead except for small scale tobacco farming that is destroying three hundred of thousand hectares of natural forest each year. This is absolutely unsustainable. This to grow a noxious weed for the new Zimbabwe masters, the Chinese. So little food been grown that two and a half million Zimbabweans need food aid from the hated West, even after more than three million have fled the country. Zimbabwe’s wildlife down by about seventy percent in the last twelve years, country wide. All the while the idol of Africa spends millions of dollars on himself and heaven only knows how much he and his gang have stolen. They live like Hollywood stars in massive mansions while the population try to eek a living by trying to sell what produce they manage to grow on the street corners along with cheap Chinese junk. Zimbabwe does not have a government but a gang just like Al Capone and his gang but much bigger and more vicious. Mr Psycology, you still think you can fool the people. Remember that you can fool some of the people some of the time but not all of the people all of the time. The people have long ago stopped listening to your bull.
@lindy lou “In Ireland we call you all feckin eedjits. No pity for you lot.DO something.” I cannot understand why you wuold say something so silly. I’ve read you comments in the past and though you might be one that left because of the situation ,but still loves your country. You now sound like an Irish person that just came across this website and started to comment about a place you have no connection to. That would really be idiotic. You are the Irish version of Apolitical. We don’t need you or your opinions. If you were true Iris you would sympathise with what is happening here considering the hundreds of years you were in bondage.
Yep!
What a Gukurahundi dreamer. Maziwisa, can not put across his wishes as reality – they remain wishes. Nobody except Gukurahundis idolises the Shona Gukurahundi.
Mugabe is a Shona Gukurahundi, period – there is nothing to idiolise here. He is simply a savage who loves Mthwakazi human blood!
I travel alot around Africa no one I met liked the old man. If you give him a new house it will be Mugabe who smashes his own.home burns his children’s books and shoots his neighbours and doesn’t grow his own mealies but steals then. He will then tell everyone he is doing it for their own good. He also destroys hospitals. Note he won’t use Zimbabwe hospitals as he has chased the good doctors away. And he now only uses us dollars wow Africans no what they see by what they see around them. No jobs corruption. I noticed no African leader following his stupidty.
Felix, Mugabe himself flies overseas when he needs ‘medical’ attention, he has ruined a great health structure that Smith built up! When his useless Minister’s need to see a specialist doc they also fly out of the country!
in my travels around the continent, the reaction to Mugabe is only vocalised outside of Zimbabwe. In Zim, from North to South, East to West I have only ever encountered the shaking of the head, looking at the ground and mumbling about prices, lack of zesa and a few other mutterings. My take on it…fear! Fear of all that CIO etc represent and a feeling of hopelessness coupled with absolutely no idea as what to do. A leader has not emerged in any way shape or form and they can mumble till the cows come home (forgot, no cows left) so,till the sun rises in the west. The only reason the so called liberation “worked” was because u had the chinese and russians falling over themselves to provide a illiterate bunch of thugs with weapons… it sure as hell did not happen because of similar political ideology! The political landscape has seen the importance of Zimbabwe diminish to such an extent that noone really cares anymore, so even if someone stood up he would find backers of any kind very lacking. It may well have been that fatboy Morgan found no serious backers because those in power saw him as being just as useless as those already in power??
A little modesty would not be out of place. Surely there is more to being an idol of Africa than taking advantage of honest God fearing Zimbabwean citizens. It is hard to imagine why Africans would idolise someone oblivious of the true nature of the job and who has presided over world record setting economic contraction outside a war zone.
what Lindy Lou says might not be far of the mark. All of our hand wringing, head shaking and pontificating on this site will help nothing. At least the Irish rose up against the british and quite rightly told them to (*&^ off!
@I am not the one it is not that whether what she says is true or not. It is the way you say it, and why. Some man that I know during my time in England as soon as he got his British passport tore up his Zimbabwean one and swore he wanted to have nothing to do with the country.He has never returned and to those that know him and are in contact with him say he never talks about it. That’s his choice and I respect him for that. There are Zimbabweans on this forum Black, White and Brown that are in Zimbabwe and the Diaspora that love their country and understand the predicament that the people are in. Then you get some person that refers to us, you included as an idiot. Then the person goes and use a phrase “You lot” that has overtones that I do not want to go into and yet not long ago in certain countries there were signs “NO IRISH, BLACKS OR DOGS ALLOWED” can come out and refer to a whole population as idiots? The people of Zimbabwe are not feckin eedjits and if anybody on this forum thinks that stop debating with idiots.In my understanding is An idiot, dolt, or dullard is an intellectually disabled person.
Then we Africans, not to speak of Zimbabweans, are damn fools.Idolatry of a man sitting apparently pretty in a sea of despairing 80% unemployed.
Mugabe for as long as I live you are nothing but a thief in the night who stole the limelight from more worthy opponents namely Father Zimbabwe himself, JOSHUA NKOMO.SO as much as you want to rewrite our history books that wont last forever because we will rewrite it again to tell the true story which I tell my family.
@Mlimo “Zimbabwe is a nation of fools” I don’t usually like to get in these kind of arguments because they don’t achieve anything as the person you are talking to is not facing you. I just feel a conviction that I needed to say what I have to say and after this of cause I will continue to do what I do and ignore those remarks that I find offensive to my suffering brothers and sisters.
If you are a Zimbabwean national then respect to you, there are three fingers pointing back to you. If you are not then of course I will understand that you are not calling yourself a fool. I beg the forgiveness to anyone I might have offended because it is in my nature to ask and to forgive. I AM DOCTOR DO LITTLE, I AM A PROUD ZIMBABWEAN AND I AM NEITHER A FOOL OR AN IDIOT.
I am not the one is correct. people cannot express themselves in Zimbabwe because of fear. It disgusts me that people who call themselves liberation leaders have used fear to rule their people. I am also Zimbabwean, love my country more than words can tell; am still in Zimbabwe and been a part of all the you know what that ZPf throws at us. I would Never tear up my passport but the one who did probably has terrible hurt. If someone wants to call me a feckin eeedjit that is ok. I know what I am and I will return the insult with a blessing! It is time for us Zimbabweans, black, white, Mr mixed race, and all in between to stand together. I know God and there will come a time when His judgment will fall on this evil. Believe me. I would rather they repent but will they? They walk a very dangerous path believe me!
@NBS Hats off to you. You and others have been a rock on this forum. Please understand that when I answer these people it is with no malice at all. Sometimes people need to be reminded to respect other people. It is a wise man that chooses his word. I also had my own opinion about the man tearing his passport up. The reason why I respected him is because he took a stand. In my eyes it might not have been the way to go. I just wish that people would choose their words more carefully and realize that when they talk like that we move backwards.
Each in his own context has worthwhile things to say if he speaks truth from the heart. Even calling someone a fool or eedjit, IF that’s what it takes to get someone, anyone, to pick up a standard and march forward. Yes, the pen is a powerful tool, and Zim needs to have more freedom of such expression and less fear from the CIO and ZANUPF thugs for openly contending for opposition dialogue. But, until someone is driven by those words to put down the pen and actually DO something, anything, to move forward toward restoring sensibilities in Zim, then we do nothing on this web site but vent frustrations.
Mighty words are used here, excellent ideas, expressive thoughts, but only action will make the changes for which we plead.
Yes, within Zim most speak in quiet voices, or only when in safe company… but they do speak. Most of those are old enough to have known of life before the war. They had jobs and security, food and possessions, healthcare, education. They remember what was, and they see what is. They know the difference. They are not racists, nor are they political. Ordinary people with ordinary lives, now struggling and grieveing at what was lost. They are hurt and angry, but they are not warriors, and have no weapons. Most of all, they have no leader.
So, Doc, NBS, Roving Ambassador, John Thomas, et al., if these writings do not inspire that leader to pick up a banner of freedom and start marching, and if others aren’t driven to follow, then we have accomplished nothing but to satisfy ourselves that we have spoken truth and hope that someday, somewhere, someone will say “Yep, they told us so.”, and if being able to say “I told you so” is our only goal, then we are, indeed, fools and eedjits of the first order.
Thank you… I’ll be here all week.
How can an old man of90 honestly tell the nation that he feels like a 9 year old you do not need rocket scientist to see that the stupid old man is out of his head.
Spot on
@Fallenz as usual you bring out words of wisdom.It is not what they say but how they say it. I note (with a little chuckle) you choice of words “then we are, indeed, fools and eedjits of the first order.” WE being the operative word rather than YOU LOT or ZIMBABWEANS. I might call my biological brother a fool but I won’t let my best friend call him that.
Doc, you are the one who chooses wise words… and I much appreciate your thoughts and drive for change, as you have contributed much food for thought for those willing to think… and a drumbeat for those willing to march.
Lindy Lou, of Irish decent. The same Irish who fought against the British for centuries and still didn’t get their independence, wants Zimbabweans complaining in this forum to do something! But Zimbabweans did, on July 31st 2013, 67% of the people who voted, voted for Bob. Does Lindy now expect the 33% who didn’t, to use unconstitutional means?
The majority of responses here would give a shallow analyst like Lindy an impression that these views represent the majority. They don’t, the majority, including yours truly, actually adore the guy. Isn’t that what democracy is about, the majority right or wrong.
I respect the views of those who hate and despise him, call him names and vilify him, they very well might have reason to. But what I can’t get is why do they fail to understand that by all measures, a former village herdboy like myself, hasn’t done too badly under this “monster” and I wouldn’t be where I am under the previous “monster”! Things are pretty rough right now, we the majority, are very clear about the causals. We are also very clear about what needs to be done.
Lindy how is Jerry Adams doing with the fight? Bob is doing just fine! When he becomes a liability we will get rid of him, not when you say we should. The 33%, Idiots they are not, show some respect girl!
@fallenz,how can u guys call us fools just because u wanna see blood falling,you encouraging innocent people with spears axes and all to fight someone with an ak47 whistly u will be lying on yo back watching people dying on yo screen then u become happy, there must be a better way to this whole problem.
What do you suggest..? We’re listening…..