PERSPECTIVE: Big brother is watching you America has told Paul Kagame not to run for president
America has told Paul Kagame not to run for president

America has told Paul Kagame not to run for president

  Stephen Mpofu
“Big Brother is Watching You” is a warning repeated in the book Nineteen Eighty Four, a political satire by George Orwell written many, many years ago.

It was as though Orwell read the minds of Western imperialists with precision.

Leaders in Africa and elsewhere in the developing world can ill afford to ignore the message so succinctly immortalised in Orwell’s book, for to do so will be tantamount to digging their own political graves.

Actually, the mind boggles. Specifically, the African mind boggles at the clear penchant for playing God on the continent by governments in the

West who seem by their behaviour to regard governments in Africa per se as make-believe games, like, for instance, little girls playing house out in their courtyard by preparing meals of sand and water in small tins with toy babies strapped on their backs.

The Zimbabwean government at its inception in 1980 and right through to this day may be cited as an example of an inconsequential institution in the eyes of Britain, this country’s former coloniser, and of America, the incumbent world super power after the demise of the Soviet Union.

Zimbabwe’s move to take control of the land seized from her by imperial Britain as a mark of true independence landed this country in the iniquitous position in which we find ourselves with sanctions imposed to try to exact regime change and in that way kill land reform and return our birthright, land, to white settler farmers, with Britain and America as leading self-anointed godfathers in the campaign that has left the country in an economic quandary.

Today the two governments as a leading pack in the sanctions war seem to appear ashamed, aware of their behaviour, of joining Asian and some countries from Europe making a beeline to invest in this country which is rich in natural resources, particularly minerals.

The message clearly inscribed in their policies toward this country is that Zimbabweans should govern themselves not in accordance with their own will but, rather, in the will of Big Brother.

The United States of America — supported by Western countries — is making strenuous efforts for the people of Rwanda to govern themselves in ways that accord with America’s desires and not with their own will.

This week the American state department, or foreign ministry, was telling the people of Rwanda that America does not want their president Paul Kagame to continue to rule after 2017, or else the USA would reconsider its relations with that African country.

Just recently the Rwandan senate amended that country’s constitution to allow Kagame, the sixth Rwandan president, after Pasteur Bizimugu, to continue in office that he assumed in the year 2000, ending a genocide in that country in which Hutu extremists massacred between 500,000 and 1,000,000 Tutsis.

The change in the constitution, according to a senate spokesman reportedly followed petitions by millions of Rwandans for Kagame to continue in office because, they said, he had performed well as leader of their country.

Kagame, a soldier who grew up in Uganda, ended the massacres in his country through military intervention and has restored stability under which the economy has reportedly grown under peaceful conditions and to the satisfaction of the people of that country. When pressed by a reporter to say what measures the Obama government would take should Kagame not step down at the end of his term of office, a state department spokesman would not specify.

However, a cancellation of aid remained a thinly-veiled option for the Americans.

The United States is known also to be strongly opposed to Democratic Republic of Congo President Joseph Kabila remaining in office when his term ends.

But is America — or any other government in the West — interested only in seeing new faces of African leaders in office, or in the stability and economic and social development that long serving African leaders have brought to their native countries?

This would appear to be the mother of all questions that Africans will ask when threats are made to withdraw aid or other forms of assistance in the event leaders continue in office at the request of their own people and in recognition of their dedicated service to their country.

In the circumstances, is the question not also to be asked whether the West provides aid or other assistance not really to help needy nations but rather as disguised mechanisms for Western policies on governance that aid recipient countries must follow slavishly?

That being so — and it truly seems so — does aid not therefore mark out some if not most of the so-called big Western powers as typologies of international dictatorships?

This pen challenges especially Western governments to respond to this assertion to the contrary.

Students of international aid — this pen happens to be one of them — know that technical assistance is the most innocuous of international aid.

This is because the experts sent to recipient countries improve skills of indigenous people in most cases using technology introduced vertically from their mother countries.

Perhaps our postmodern world should see foreign assistance or aid as a genuine gesture in fostering international cooperation and not as some form of lever used surreptitiously by aid givers to make recipient countries political puppets dancing on the string of Big Brother.

Aid in whatever form, therefore should not be seen as sellotaping rich and poor or big and small nations. On the contrary, aid should form immutable bonds of brotherhood or sisterhood between nations.

That way the world will have succeeded, albeit in a small way, in equalising the rights of humanity as desired by God before whom all the people, white or black, tall or short, pretty or repulsive are equal.

To repeat the upshot of the discourse above; Big Brother is watching you, Africa.

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