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President Obama

Perspective Stephen Mpofu
AFRICAN leaders invited to a meeting with the United States president Barrack Obama in Washington next month may already have a sour foretaste of what awaits them.
In the count-down to the August 5 to 6 US-Africa summit, to which our own President was left out, the State Department in Washington earlier this week issued a statement that must have rankled the minds of some if not all of the invited presidents and government leaders, leaving encrusted in the back of their minds this daunting question: “Will it be a dressing down by Obama or a dialogical engagement of mutual benefit to America or Africa?”

An assistant secretary of state “for African Affairs” — as though independent African states were banana republics of the United States — was quoted by the Voice of America radio as telling African presidents not to change their constitutions in order to extend their stay in power. Can it be said with equanimity that the warning to African leaders against perpetuating themselves in office amounts to America’s democratic benevolence, or is a fervent desire for the fulfilment of a grand hegemonic plan not a driving force behind the political godfather warning?

President Joseph Kabila of the Democratic Republic of Congo was mentioned as one of those African leaders who might change his country’s constitutions in order to remain in power. But, surely, does such a political lecture by the government of a foreign country to leaders of independent and sovereign states not boggle the mind at best and at worst amount to interference in the internal affairs of another country by a self-anointed Big Brother?

President Kabila’s government is engaged in a protracted war in the eastern parts of that country against rebels, including Rwandan nationals, who have boasted in the past about “help from friends in the West” in their fight aimed at occupying, and even declaring as independent mineral-rich parts of that country for their Western supporters to have a field day on the mineral wealth.

To begin with, what evidence does Washington possess indicating that President Kabila, or any other African leader for that matter, is intent on manipulating the constitution for him to continue to rule forever and ever?

The DRC is not an extension of America neither is it a former colony of the United States, itself a former British colony, so that it might perhaps have residual interests in that independent and sovereign African state with no historical political linkage whatsoever to the present day super power.

At any rate, if the people who voted President Kabila into power decide to change the constitution to ensure continued unity and security, is it any business of America’s to say the Congolese as well as any other Africans that might allow their leaders to continue in power should kow-tow to Washington whims?

Although no direct mention was made of leaders of revolutionary political party governments continuing in power in Southern Africa, for instance, this pen suspects that America regards as anathema the prolonged stay in power of political parties whose leaders fought and ousted white racist regimes and were effectively condemned in the West as “terror organisations” and “terrorists”.

Their sin, if it can be called that, is that the revolutionary parties and their leaders have made radical changes to the erstwhile status quo of minority regimes of the West’s kith and kin who pushed indigenous people into the shade while fattening themselves on the wealth of African states and carting some of it off to build palaces in the West, as the rightful owners of the land wallowed in grinding poverty and squalor.

Does the West’s regime change campaign with illegal sanctions against Zimbabwe to try to reverse land reform not ring a bell in the minds of the progressive world? And is it not because President Mugabe is excluded from the impending Washington indaba for precisely leading a government that has restored our carte blanche rights to land and is pursuing economic empowerment and indigenisation to complete the revolution’s programme of putting the country back into our own total control.

Those leaders who will rush to sup with Obama must be African enough to tell America they will not be dictated to but that they are prepared to do business, political and economic business, on an equal basis regardless of whether America regards itself as the Mount Everest of the world while writing off Africa as a hillock. The truth is that both Everest and hillock occupy and have the right to do so in God’s universe.

It is for that reason that African leaders should speak in no uncertain terms and in one voice about their insularity to America’s export of homosexuality, that abominable, inverted sex condition to which the West is tying its aid to developing countries including Africa while turning a blind ear and perverted minds to homosexuality as ungodly and so very evil.

But, really, is the West which brought Christianity to Africa ignorant of God’s distaste of homosexuality so that, in purveying it that same West tells Africa a “no” to same sex as promoted by Western civilisation means also a “no” to Western capital much needed for economic and social development by less powerful nations of the world?

President Mugabe’s presence at the Washington summit would have charted a perfect thawing of the icy relations with America over land reform and provided an ideal point of departure towards a restoration of their relations. But no, Zimbabwe remains bracketed out of that meeting, even while America’s Ambassador to Zimbabwe Bruce Wharton said on Tuesday that his country was keen to normalise relations with Zimbabwe.

How, for instance, do you partner a person on a journey in which you are a non-believer, Mr Ambassador Wharton?

Zimbabweans should not be sedated into blissful sleep by Ambassador Wharton’s double speak but should steadfastly stick to their guns to ensure that the revolution is not subverted in any way by anyone anywhere in the world.

The American official also said the Washington summit will also discuss conflicts in Africa, namely Boko Haram in Nigeria, as factors standing in the way of economic and social development on the continent, among other important topics.

It is to be hoped that African leaders will make it known to Obama and other leaders in the West that any support by the West to neo-colonial opposition political parties opposed to democratically elected leaders is, like insurgency, collusion that causes destabilisation to national unity and threatens unimpeded social and economic development on the continent.

Such support, morally or materially, endangers existing relations between African governments and the West because “democracy” should not mean a change of governments at any cost to continued stability and true, not façade, democracy.