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canvass for support in his bid to become the vice-president of the International Cricket Council.
The nichodemous visit by Howard carried a strong air of irony, if it was not stinky enough of and in itself.
Howard is the man who in 2007, when he was still premier, barred his country’s cricket team from visiting Zimbabwe over what he called safety concerns.
Of course, that decision had everything to do with his country’s anti-Zimbabwe politics adopted in solidarity with Britain after the former was slighted by Zimbabwe’s land redistribution programme that benefitted around one million Zimbabweans who were formerly prejudiced by former British colonial land tenure systems.
So, not sated with imposing economic sanctions on Zimbabwe, which his country did along with other Western countries, Howard imposed sanctions on the sport of cricket, even if it meant having to incur millions of dollars in fines for forfeiture.
However, when time came that he wanted to become a top official in the game, Howard came to Zimbabwe to court support from the very country whose cricket suffered from his and his friends’ isolationist and racist machinations.
Whether he had to humble himself to do so or was unashamed and arrogant is a matter of conjecture.
However, his action showed deep conceit and selfishness, which was duly repaid by the rebuttal of his bid by Zimbabwe and other countries making the ICC.
Many ordinary people and analysts were not at a loss to explain this development.
Writing on a site called countercurrents.org, writer Dr Gideon Polya, exposed Howard in an article “Warmonger, Cricket Fan and Former Australian PM John Howard Rejected for ICC Post”.
He said in part: ” . . . whatever the machinations of the ICC it is important to see why Caribbean, African and Asian countries would have objected to this cricket watching, non-cricket playing, extreme right wing former PM of apartheid Australia, a country that has participated in all post-1950 US Asian wars and which variously applies race-based laws and regulations against indigenous Australians as well as Afghan refugees and Tamil refugees”.
“John Howard has had extraordinary double standards on apartheid South Africa and Zimbabwe’s Mugabe”, he wrote.
“According to the ultra-conservative newspaper The Australian: ‘Howard’s political past caught up with him. His opposition to sanctions against apartheid South Africa, believing they would do more harm than good, and support for selected sanctions and travel bans against Zimbabwe’s Mugabe regime, which included Zimbabwe Cricket president Peter Chingoka, were held against him'”.
In a word, Howard was as unwanted in Zimbabwe as elsewhere because of his country’s and personal attributes.
However, Zimbabwe has had another John Howard in such a short time.
This time it is one Susan Page, United States of America Deputy Assistant Secretary of State.
As did Australia, the US bought into the bilateral land issue of Zimbabwe and Britain and they supported their kith and kin in the latter.
America imposed sanctions on the southern African nation in 2001, which sanctions have caused, as they were meant to, immense suffering on the people of Zimbabwe whose Government’s lines of credit have been frozen and companies restricted.
Lately, with the discovery of diamonds in Zimbabwe, the United States and its Western allies have sought to bar the country from selling the gems on the international market.
Zimbabwe is said to have the largest amount of alluvial diamonds in the world and capable of satisfying a quarter of the world market.
Needless to point out, these riches, if Zimbabwe is able to exploit and enjoy them; make the country one of the richest on the continent.
And they will be able to trash the sanctions that the West has imposed on the country.
With such dynamics in mind, the West has been trying to bar Zimbabwe from the enjoyment of her God-given resource, to the extent of bending the rules when it comes to dealing with the African State.
This desperation was demonstrated when Western participants, seeing that Zimbabwe’s gems were not “blood” or “conflict” diamonds – used to finance rebel wars and unseating constitutionally elected governments – fruitlessly tried to smuggle issues of alleged human rights abuses to stop Zimbabwe’s certification by watchdog, the Kimberley Process and Certification Scheme.
The ill-intentioned determination by the West to bar Zimbabwe also saw a shameless situation in which the same countries tried to rubbish the findings of monitor Abbey Chikane, an industrialist and founding chair of KPCS.
In all this the United States played a central role, with regime change in mind, leading to Zimbabwe’s Attorney General Johannes Tomana – who attended a KP meeting in Israel last November – remarking that while KP tried to stop illegal regime change by rebels, the West tried to effect regime change in Zimbabwe by denying it the right to export diamonds freely.
And Susan Page, US Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for African affairs has been the point person of the United States in its diamond war against Zimbabwe.
Her March 1-4 visit, to canvass for support, which she apparently never got, is strongly redolent of John Howard’s unwanted visit.
Yet there are lessons to draw from it, apart from the obvious lessons in Western conceit and arrogance.
Chiefly, it demonstrates that Zimbabwe is an important world player, being rich in resources both human and natural.
The West can only admit to this grudgingly.
In light of this, Zimbabwe’s participation in world affairs is key and can determine who rules the world.
This should teach Zimbabwe to be confident, and act like a leader, buoyed by its own possessions and potential.
Related to this, the country must not be cowered by the big names of the world as ultimately the latter will come on bended (and perhaps arrogantly not so bended) knees for a slice of Zimbabwe’s fortunes.
This entails that Zimbabwe sees its real value not the demoralising picture that its detractors would want to project: whether dealing with the East or West Zimbabwe should take its true pedestal and staid.
After a decade of attempts at isolating Zimbabwe, Western interests are steadily knocking on the country’s doors, where they traditionally were at home.
On the other hand, the East is steadily eyeing the jewel in Zimbabwe’s crown.
Government has decided to empower locals and let them participate in the economy from which they had been excluded.
The stakes are high; but in the end Zimbabwe and Zimbabweans should be the ones to win.
All this makes Page’s visit an eye-opener, even in its detestability and futility.
So when she has the chutzpah to say that her country “remains committed to working with the people of Zimbabwe to achieve our common goal of seeing a more stable and prosperous Zimbabwe”, her intentions are well known.
It is everything to do with her country’s insatiable appetite for resources, at the expense of other people, which at times leads the United States to be militarily and economically aggressive as in Iraq and Zimbabwe (among others), respectively.
For that, it is clear that there is nothing particularly common between an imperial power and a victim of the same.
As an African country, Zimbabwe knows the West, and the United States in particular, by the scars and the chains of sanctions among other imperial, racist machinations.
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