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Perspective Stephen Mpofu
Running dogs of imperialism have again been at it against Zimbabwe, as their nature has always been wont to be, and this time around de-campaigning President Mugabe, in particular, ahead of the election of a new chairman of the African Union which took place yesterday and with him silencing his detractors by getting the nod.

Not that our President would be a disaster in the chair of Africa’s continental body with political and economic retrogression on the continent as a result. Far from it.

Contemporary Western imperialists know full well that with a person of Cde Mugabe’s mature political mettle, combined with a no-holds-barred critique of the West’s unilateralism, impelled by an obscene desire remotely or directly to control political and economic environments in smaller nations, with President Mugabe in the AU chair their designs would come unstuck.

The nemeses of Zimbabwe’s image as a democratic state and President Mugabe as a credible leader loosed their paid lackeys in civil society and in politics to go on a war path claiming that Cde Mugabe violated human rights in his country, as a way of trying to get him disqualified from the chairmanship.

Tragically, some of Zimbabwe’s scribes working for Western media as well as some so-called political commentators at home have jumped on the bandwagon of President Mugabe’s external detractors, brandishing “brushes” dripping with muck to try to tar his image.

You (yes, you) should have listened to a Zimbabwean journalist working for an American radio station claiming in an interview with an AU official in Addis Ababa, the headquarters of the continental body, that President Mugabe stood accused of human rights violations.

However, the writer failed lamentably to either quantify the alleged violations or to specify them either.

Of course, the person stabbing the motherland in the back put the mouth where the money was.

But, astute as the AU leader is, he said his organisation was aware that some civil-society groups were “mouth pieces” of their  foreign paymasters and so did what they were paid to do – discrediting targeted African leaders.

The official said that if a country had a constitution whose provisions it religiously followed, there was no justification for the AU discrediting that country’s leader.

Then there was this other commentator in Zimbabwe who blamed President Mugabe when being interviewed by Voice of America radio for running away from the country’s problems to go on holiday outside Zimbabwe. He claimed that if Cde Mugabe became chairman of the AU, he would spend more time on the organisation’s affairs instead of on challenges at home.

But Zanu-PF’s Paul Mangwana told the American radio station in response that the chairmanship of the AU did not require an incumbent to work permanently from the body’s headquarters and away from home so that, if elected, President Mugabe would still concentrate on his leadership roles in Zimbabwe, while with his vast experience he re-directs and reinvigorates the continental body.

Moreover, the West’s paid spoilers of leaderships of Africans neglect the fact that the grinding, economic challenges that Zimbabwe is experiencing are directly the results of economic sanctions imposed by the West to try to destroy the economy and with that weaken Zanu-PF leadership and bring about regime change in hopes of reversing the agrarian revolution whose sole purpose was to restore human dignity by giving Zimbabweans back their land, an inalienable right.

As things are on the continent, the AU sorely needs tried and tested leaders of the calibre of President Mugabe to help it come to grips with debilitating economic and political challenges in parts of Africa and whose overall repercussions are leg irons preventing the continent transcend to a status of advanced development, like continents elsewhere on the globe.

For instance, Africa needs rapid responses to crises such as the Boko Haram Islamic menace that threatens to truncate Nigeria with huge areas now under its siege going radically Islamic.

But no only that, Boko Haram, which has made several incursions to Nigeria’s neighbouring  states, killing, maiming and destroying  homes poses a threat to the rest of Nigeria and farther afield to other African states that now enjoy the freedom of their own religions as well as peace and tranquillity under which meaningful  social and economic development can only take place.

The AU has also indicated that the continent needs to establish a centre  for disease control, following the Ebola catastrophe that has killed thousands of people in West Africa and left countless numbers of children orphaned and with a bleak future ahead of them.

Come to think of it, Ebola will go down in history as an indictment of the world at large over its failure to act at the initial signs of its outbreak in order to stop it developing into a conflagration  that swept through several West African country’s, destroying lives and economies as it rampaged through the affected nations.

Even the World Health Organisation now admits that the response to the Ebola epidemic, when this finally came, was too little too late.
The reticence in world responses to both the Ebola and Boko Haram menace would seem to suggest that, but for some vested commercial interests on the back of political stability and as a follow up on the slave trade Africa’s total stability is to global world powers no more than  an afterthought.

It is for this reason, so this pen humbly believes, that leaders who are up to scratch, concerning continental issues, by virtue of their long experience and also by having gone through the baptism of fire in the liberation struggle, as Cde Mugabe did to refine them, like gold, ought to be given space every now and then to try to lead Africa out of its various woods and along a path to a braver future.