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Nduduzo Tshuma
MDC leader Professor Welshman Ncube has uncharacteristically accused western countries of sponsoring conflict in Africa under the guise of “helping the people” when in actual fact they would be plundering resources.

Prof Ncube is one of the founding members of the original MDC in 1999, a party formed on generous British and American funding and moral support. It is blamed for inviting sanctions against Zimbabwe in a bid to effect illegal regime change and advancing a neo-colonial agenda.

He led a split from the party in 2005 in what was initially caused by failure to agree to participate in senatorial elections but later tribalism was said to have frustrated Prof Ncube and former vice president Gibson Sibanda, among others, out of the party.

Prof Ncube before the split seemed to have been out of favour with the United States, the sponsors of opposition parties in the country with former Ambassador to Zimbabwe Christopher Dell quoted in leaked diplomatic cables describing the former united MDC’s secretary general as a deeply divisive and destructive player who needed to be pushed off the stage.

Ncube made the surprise attack while responding to a participant Fortune Mlalazi at the Bulawayo Agenda Africa Series last week, where the MDC leader was a speaker. He said Europe and America contributed to the underdevelopment of Africa by sponsoring conflict and taking advantage of the chaos to tap resources for a song.

Mlalazi had indicated that in all conflict-affected areas in Africa, rebel forces used state of the art weapons and vehicles an indicator of a hidden European and American hand in African conflicts.

Prof Ncube responded: “You’re absolutely right. When I was young we used to call it imperialism. I don’t know in the global village whether it has a new name. To continue to have access whether it’s oil or gas, I can assure that the Libyan intervention wouldn’t have happened if Libya was Swaziland and that’s what imperialism is about. New ways of continuing the plunder of resources elsewhere in the world are clothed as interventions in favour of the people.”

However, Prof Ncube seemed to be frustrated at South Africa’s stance on Zimbabwe after the 2013 harmonised elections which President Robert Mugabe and Zanu-PF won convincingly.

The MDC leader blamed the recent xenophobic attacks of foreigners in South Africa on the failure by the southern African neighbours to handle what he claimed the “Zimbabwean problem.”

“One hopes that with the increasing realisation in South Africa that their own problem with the migration of Zimbabweans into their country and whatever social effects there, as we go forward they’re able to link their failure to insist in Sadc and in the AU on a government in Zimbabwe which is able to work for the people and that in future they’ve learnt something,” said Prof Ncube.