A more serious situation had also developed. Some of the NGOs were being used to launder or to clean dirty money, which would find way into our systems, thus impinging on national security and breaching international laws.
This presented a real, direct threat to our nation, including how our country was perceived and rated internationally. In this era of ever-present threat of international terrorism, this could not be ignored.
Our dollarised economy did not help matters. Because this sector had become veritable refuge for the deviant and wayward, and for actors with sinister motives, our country, which is relatively small both by territorial size and by population, acquired and assumed the dubious honour of having one of the largest number of NGOs. Yet little showed on the ground by way of real humanitarian work.
Quite the contrary, Government’s burden in carrying and looking after the poor, the vulnerable, the ailing and the unemployed, grew and multiplied. Inevitably, Government started asking very pertinent and penetrating questions.
We also wondered why, more than any other nation of our size, we seemed so much favoured, patronised and blest by so many foreign-funded NGOs. And why the presence of these foreign-funded NGOs seemed to grow and increase numerically whenever certain Western countries became hostile to us, especially in the wake of our Land Reform Programme, and especially always towards every election.
Surely, the poor, as the Bible teaches us, have no season, are and shall always be with us. Why these patterned ebbs and flows, which invariably coincided with our politics and broken relations with a certain group of countries, all of them drawn from one specific hemisphere? To the number, nations connected to us through a peculiar history of colonialism; nations, therefore, opposed to and challenged by our mere existence as an independent and fully sovereign people.
Bilaterally and multilaterally, the concerned nations would shun normal channels of government-to-government relations and interaction, preferring instead to work with and through particularly selected NGOs, which tried to become substitutes for the Zimbabwe Government. Why would foreign sovereigns seek to relate to another sovereign State through NGOs?
On close scrutiny, we discovered that the preferred NGOs traced their origins to those same countries which favoured them: by lead personnel, by funding, by politics, by agenda, by values they espoused, by the attitude they adopted towards Government and by loyalties which were decidedly foreign.
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