On Wednesday last week, Gates Foundation CEO Mark Suzman announced the foundation would be governed by a board of trustees beyond the trio of Gates, his ex-wife, Melinda, and 91-year-old billionaire Warren Buffet, who resigned in June 2021. Suzman, who aims to vaccinate 100 percent of the world’s population – ostensibly with products Gates is invested in – also plans to join the board.
The move “represents an explicit recognition by Gates and [Melinda] French Gates, especially in the wake of their recent divorce, that the foundation will be well served by the addition of independent voices to help shape its work in the future,” the organization stated in a press release.
Though the foundation has flaunted its new trustees’ “diverse” backgrounds, the appointees represent a united front in support of traditional Gates goals like privatization and imperialist strong-arming behind the guise of public health.
The first trustee named by the foundation, Strive Masiyiwa, is the perfect example of the kind of activist-oligarch Gates has been drawn to; a professed “global citizen” spouting altruistic bromides while raking in astonishing profits.
As the founder of Africa’s Econet empire, self-exiled Zimbabwean telecom tycoon and new Gates board member Strive Masiyiwa has used his wealth to advance the cause of neoliberalism across southern Africa.
Masiyiwa is a close ally of British billionaire and “green” capitalist Richard Branson of Virgin, having collaborated with him on several projects, including the “Carbon War Room” that was founded as “a mission to stimulate business-led market interventions that advance a low-carbon economy.”
As Grayzone editor Max Blumenthal and this writer have documented, Branson sought to launch “Enterprise Zimbabwe” in partnership with fellow billionaire Pierre Omidyar’s Humanity United at the Clinton Global Initiative.
Enterprise Zimbabwe sought to “catalyze investments from philanthropic and commercial donors to fund… social development initiatives,” and “help” Mugabe rival “Morgan Tsvangirai and the coalition government to get Zimbabwe back on its feet.” The shady initiative prompted then-president Mugabe to slam Branson as a “vulture disguised as an angel.”
As Masiyiwa noted when Branson was first launched into space, the British billionaire once invited him to meet with an organization called “The Elders.” This coterie of international elites would serve as a base for organizing the regime change plot in Zimbabwe.
Zimbabwe has long been a target for regime change by the West, with its former colonial ruler, the United Kingdom, taking the lead in undermining Mugabe’s government. The compulsory land reforms that Mugabe presided over during the 2000s, through which farmland was seized from white farmers without compensation and redistributed to landless black Zimbabweans, prompted an escalation of Western aggression against Zimbabwe.
Former South African President Thabo Mbeki recalled being pushed during the early 2000s by then-British Prime Minister Tony Blair to accede to a military intervention in Zimbabwe. “Tony Blair…was saying to the chief of the British armed forces, ‘You must work out a military plan so that we can physically remove Robert Mugabe,’” Mbeki told Al Jazeera. “We knew that because we had come under the same pressure that we need to cooperate in some scheme. It was a regime change scheme, even to the point of using military force and we were saying ‘no.’”
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