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President Mugabe

Perspective Stephen Mpofu
WilL a billion Africans finally, and truly, free their leaders from humiliation with impunity by the International Criminal Court in The Hague for alleged war crimes at the behest of the ICC’s Western financiers?
This question is gaining loud currency among neo-pan Africanists in response to calls for the African Union to set up a tribunal dealing with crimes that are at present the preserve of the ICC.

Such a criminal court of justice, as proposed by African proponents, is thought to be the proper mechanism by means of which the continent can extricate itself from the ICC as the legal harness with which imperialists wish continually to direct governance in Africa along their own desired path which appears steeped in hegemony.

To date only African political leaders, notably Heads of State, have been indicted by the ICC for “war crimes” or for “crimes against humanity.” The presidents of Sudan and Kenya, respectively, are wanted for trial by Western noose bearers, the ICC, but the African Union is opposed to those leaders and any other Africans indicted parading themselves, like hapless slaves before a court set up by masters whose own horrendous war crimes are reduced to nothing less than military picnics in less powerful countries of the world.

Examples of the down-playing of crimes against humanity by the West, which stand out like sore thumbs, include the invasion of Iraq in 1992 which led up to the execution of Iraqi president Saddam Hussein, and much later to the murder of Libyan president Muammar Gaddafi by Western sponsored forces because he was viewed as a nemesis in the West.

Saddam’s crime, if it really amounts to a crime against humanity, was that he annexed Kuwait, America’s oil swimming pool, thereby incurring the wrath of Big Brother.

As a result the US and her allies sited phantom “arms of mass destruction” to unleash their vengeance on the poor Arab nation — which remains completely destabilised to this day — without recourse for consent to the world body, so that for the United Nations the invasion became a fait accompli.

There remains no guarantee that no further African presidents or other heads of government will be spared as long as the continent remains subservient to the West through the ICC whose roughshod-riding of African leaders makes it the West’s policeman on foot patrol on the continent.

Clearly, the ethnocentric manner by which African leaders are being treated by the ICC is a very loud wake-up call for Africa to seriously consider embracing Kwame Nkrumah’s spirit of pan Africanism which, paraphrased, would mean Africa for Africans with no interference in its internal affairs by foreigners be they former colonisers or aspiring postmodern colonial masters. But sadly, me, this pen, thinks, and under the circumstances fears that pan Africanism as a value for a continent that has come of age could continue to recede, like a mirage. But why?

To begin with, the West as mother of the ICC is most likely to come out with economic and political guns blazing to try to quell the idea, noble and novel though it might be, with a point of departure in this regard a potential move to divide and weaken countries.

Economic and political retribution might be threatened, quietly or behind closed doors, such as during the forthcoming American-African Summit in Washington on August 5 and 6 and to which our own President Robert Mugabe has been excluded.

It is questionable that those African presidents invited to the Indaba by US president Barrack Obama will all stick their heads together, and not be swayed by the lure of the American buck in a he-who-pays-the-piper-calls-the-tune, so that the African tribunal idea remains a damb squib.

Ironically, Africa happens to be the richest continent in the world in natural resources, and in wildlife, a magnate for tourists.
That being the case, why cannot African process its own rich natural resources, beneficiate them and earn much-needed capital from exports to finance their own economic growth as well as the mooted tribunal?

Surely, the continent can call on its all-weather friends, the progressive countries that supported Africa’s struggle for independence and the armed revolution — to avail their expertise in exploiting the continent’s God-endowed resources to maximise earnings for self support, in the process leaving the West holding its sometimes dirty capital in sweaty hands?

One might go so far as to suggest that, in spite of their abundant wealth, Africans remain poor not only on account of being under developed erstwhile by colonial powers; African countries need to shoot themselves in the foot for their abysmal failure to co-ordinate their act as a people, hence the current fragmentation of regional economic groupings that sometimes operate like a span of oxen and donkeys, each of those beasts pulling this way or that way rather than continuing resolutely along the same furrow of Africa’s renaissance and the fulfilment of the true aspirations of independence, freedom and total self reliance.

For instance the Southern African Development Community seems the only regional grouping that has come up with part of an African standing military force for intervention against destabilisation by recalcitrant forces, while other regions drag their feet or remain non believers in the AU journey of a continental stand-by force to shoot trouble makers, foreign sponsored or driven by insatiable hunger for power.

The time is now for Africa to close ranks and work with countries that share the same dream of emancipation from poverty by just means and not by holding poor nations to ransom by attaching homosexuality to foreign capital which is then denied to those who oppose same sex marriages.

Moreover, aid is not a one-directional charity; it is business with mutual benefits to both donor and recipient.
It is a quid pro quo affair and so no strings should ever be attached to direct foreign aid, for instance.

It is to be hoped that the African leaders will not allow themselves to be reduced to a grand parade of puppets by their host. Our President was not invited to the Washington palaver probably because it was feared that he who calls a spade by its real name, The Spade, might upset the applecart with his no-holds-barred frankness in matters of life and death so that  the economic sanctions on Zimbabwe become a handy excuse for leaving our own leader out of that summit.