Mnangagwa blasts the West for threatening Africa’s right to self-determination

This is against basic tenets of international relations under the United Nations Charter. Our rights as sovereign nations, principally the right of self-determination, are being threatened.

Southern African region has witnessed a more sinister dimension to this coercive economic diplomacy by the West. Including here in Zimbabwe, we have seen some Western Governments sponsoring several false environmental and mining advocacy groups which seek to agitate communities against non-western mining interests.

Peasants are being roused and mobilised to fight battles in which they have neither stake nor gain either way. Here in our country, we have seen such sponsored lobbies active in Hwange, Uzumba, Mutoko, Makaha, Marange and, lately in Bikita.

Surprisingly, all these mining concerns are not new. They are old claims which have only changed hands as broke western miners who owned them previously voluntarily disinvest.

While those mining properties were in western hands, both long before our Independence and after, not once did host communities benefit. Nor were host communities incited, mobilised and sponsored to defend their depletable resource and environment.

The NGOs which now proliferate were nowhere in sight. Not even the false doctrine of resource or environmental justice for Africans and Africa was there. Our struggles would have taken much shorter if such level of agitation was there as we fought for Independence. What has changed now and opened these long closed eyes? Clearly it is the rise of countries like China as global players.

The same wave of false activism we lately witness in Zimbabwe is also gaining traction in neighbouring countries like Zambia, South Africa, Namibia, and elsewhere on our continent. On the face of it, this new sentiment looks like a second wave of genuine people-nationalism, led by radical African cadres seeking to defend and protect African heritage, resources and interests. Yet on deeper examination, it reveals a sinister, deceitful and manipulative hand of the West. It, too, is staked against our sovereignties.

The West now seeks to sponsor and instigate false and fake African community nationalisms as potent tools in its fight against China, Russia and other actors who are now challenging its exclusive historical dominance on our Continent whose roots lie in colonialism. This is a false and bastardised form of nationalism which does not benefit Africa or Africans.

Rather, it only seeks to weaponise Africans, while making Africa an exclusive and uncontested frontier for the West’s sole resource exploitation. Africa stands to gain nothing from this parody of genuine resource nationalism.

Sub-regionally, this Western sponsored, anti-African form of fake nationalism has assumed both absurd and deadly dimensions. In the sister Republic of Namibia, it extends to shutting down little Chinese retail outlets in the name of protecting Namibian consumers against “fake” Chinese products. The underlying assumption is that the Namibian consumer is too simple and infantile to distinguish between fake and usable items for his or her gainful purchase. The assumption, too, is that genuine goods come from Western manufacturers. Yet China exports to the same West!

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