Zim elections: Discredit, block
WHAT it’s a name?
The name of the old Triple C activist “beaten” in Murehwa is Morris Seremani. Morris as also the name of one turncoat freedom fighter who betrayed the Liberation Struggle, and led Rhodesian soldiers to ZANU’s rear camp in Mozambique for a wanton slaughter of hapless refugees. The victims of Nyati were too young to bear arms, but good enough fodder for the racist Rhodesian army. In 1980, Morrison Nyati would be accidentally located at Mbare by returning comrades who included survivors of that massacre. He met his swift end, but without deleting this shameful legacy of betrayal which he personified, and which seems to haunt every generation in our Zimbabwe. The name Morris, it would appear, carries an immortal sin.
Only a cast in a pseudo drama
I was, all along quite sympathetic to Seremani and his “beaten” fellow “victims”. But Seremani’s interview with some nondescript online propaganda television channel ZEEMTV which, alongside MEDIAZIM, belongs to Triple C through its dutiful organ, Crisis in Zimbabwe Coalition, has totally changed my view. I now know Seremani and his team as one big cast in a drama meant to milk global pathos. Theirs was pseudo-event enacted by their party, Triple C, for its hearts-and-mind campaign against Zimbabwe, and for propaganda use by its benefactors in the West in their rabid, anti-Zimbabwe campaign.
Fiction cannot endure scrutiny
In hindsight, elements of this pseudo-event are now falling in place. The cast had to involve aged men and women as emotional triggers for their empathetic propaganda value. A cast-within-a-cast took the form of seemingly hostile interrogators who harangued the aged “victims” for cameras. The escalation and climax came by way of an “assault” on these aged “victims”, all to produce a video rich in verisimilitude for viral circulation on social media. That done, the “victims” would be done, to then get swiftly evacuated from Murehwa’s Ward 7 ostensibly for safety and medical attention in Harare. Fiction cannot endure, let alone suffer rigorous scrutiny. So the victims needed quartering in opposition safe houses ran by a consortia of NGOs, again under the umbrella of Crisis in Zimbabwe Coalition. Representatives of western embassies – themselves Triple C’s funders - would then take turns to record sob-tales and take images of distressed faces, thereby having props for a plausible narrative on Zanu PF-instigated political violence.
Total media gag
But something gave the game away. Triple C blocked media access to these so-called victims of political violence. Surprisingly, even the instinctively and habitually pro-opposition NewsHawksLive, itself a George Soros’ Open Society construct built for the Opposition, was also barred. This provoked an angry response through its Twitter thread! Rule One: there is always a chink in the armour of every propaganda effort. A yawning chasm in this case which left the whole act wide open and exposed.
Dead media bait
More holes in the fiction were to follow. Barely 24 hours after this Triple C embargo on media, ZEEMTV, complemented MEDIAZIM and Triple C’s well-known “stick” of uneducated digital warriors, swung into action. Led by one Haruzibgwi who is in self-exile and himself a rabid Triple C digital warrior, Triple C sought to inveigle the media into feeding off a poorly choreographed ZEEMTV propaganda interview with Morris Seremani which broke all rules of broadcast journalism. This was circulated on social media to bait mainstream media. With the exception of a few Triple C-affiliated media outlets, the mainstream media shunned this guided “story” which soon grew anaemic before withering to nothingness. Not helped by a more gripping story of the callous gunning down of three innocent souls by Muvhevhi, an ex-ZRP detective, and his subsequent arrest in flight in Mozambique which made a good distraction. The Murehwa story quickly died. So much about the story here at home!
Enter the British Lords
Abroad, the British House of Lords, led by the captious Lord Jonathan Oates, was initiating a debate on the desirability of Zimbabwe’s readmission into the Commonwealth, following a positive report by the Commonwealth’s penultimate fact-finding mission which had visited the country a few months before. The prime contention of Lord Oates, himself once-upon-a-time temporary school teacher in Zimbabwe’s Eastern Highlands, was that Zimbabwe’s imminent readmission into the Commonwealth Family would cause “severe damage” to the “reputation” of the body which brings together former victims of British colonial imperialism. Such a development, added the British Lord, would undermine the tradition and culture of “human rights” in the Club, quite apart from the fact that Zimbabwe’s readmission would amount to a betrayal of “Zimbabwe’s people’s struggle against tyranny….” The Lord’s nightmare was that the “UK government was not minded to oppose readmission [of Zimbabwe] because it did not want to be isolated on the issue”, more so in view of the fact that the Commonwealth Mission led by its Secretariat had conclusively established that “significant progress [had been made by Zimbabwe] in its journey to rejoin the Commonwealth Family.”
The other side of the Atlantic
Even far abroad in the US, the State Department decided to resurrect its own report alleging human trafficking of Zimbabweans to Kuwait. Noteworthy is that this report is a 2016 one which the State Department decided to rehash a good six years later, significantly timed to coincide with 2023 when Zimbabwe goes for Harmonised Elections, even then under the Second Republic which only came into being a year after the alleged offence! To refresh this decidedly stale report, the US State Department claimed Zimbabwe Government’s reluctance to act on its Report oh human trafficking, blaming this on “corruption by authorities manning the borders [of Zimbabwe]”! That way, alleged occurrences in the distant past were made current in order to convict an Administration which wasn’t extant at the time of the alleged offence which, in any event, the US State Department wanted handled in a specific way in order to placate the Biden Administration into exonerating Zimbabwe under the Second Republic! This, dear reader, is the setting both at home and abroad, which we now need to knead into a coherent causal narrative to lay bare the whys and wherefores. Here we go.
Making up for lost propaganda ground The connecting thread between the saga in Murehwa and developments on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean as Triple C and its proxies, principally Crisis in Zimbabwe Coalition and its media mouthpieces. Except this was an amateurish, rearguard action by Triple C which went to sleep when it should have staged pseudo-events on violence in the run-up to the fact-finding visit by the Commonwealth Secretariat. That did not happen; much worse, Chamisa who met with the Club’s Secretariat made an appalling presentation which left the fact-finding Mission deeply unimpressed and urging Zimbabweans -read opposition - to have commonality of purpose.
Relying of fugitives
It was a disaster both for Chamisa and his British masters who would have wanted the fact-finding Mission blunted by a sprite presentation by the opposition. Worse, it created a new situation where Zimbabwe’s readmission became a virtual fait accompli, given that the majority of Commonwealth member states are already inclined to readmit Zimbabwe. Options for the United Kingdom, Australia and Canada - the ABC or white Commonwealth - thinned down to overruling majority member states in the Club, thus laying themselves to charges of open racism and old colonial mentalities, a double baggage they long reaped from history! This is what is triggering all this desperation, including bringing into the cast fugitives from justice like Netsai Marova!
Americans coordinate pledges
There is a pledging meeting which the American Embassy here in Zimbabwe convened, to which the British Embassy were invited.
The purpose of the meeting was to raise money for Triple C ahead of polls, and this after the Zimbabwe Government ejected several teams of Americans surreptitiously brought into the country for purposes to laying groundwork for disputed and discredited 2023 harmonised polls. In panic, both the US and UK embassies here realised their options were daily narrowing, leaving generous funding of Triple C as the only way to salvage an already bad electoral situation, so late into the election calendar year. Not helped by the passing of the PVO Bill, and the threat of yet another, the Patriotic Bill, which would render Zimbabwe hermetically sealed from external subversion through foreign funding of Triple C. Of course foreign monies already in the region, would have come in through conduits provided by political NGOs which now stand outlawed by the PVO Act, and also made insuperable by several political NGOs which in fright, have since re-located to different countries in the region.
When Britain undid itself
That pledging meeting attended by several characters from political NGOs - we shall have occasion to name them as time goes by - including Crisis in Zimbabwe Coalition, saw a substantial amount being pledged by the Americans in support of Triple C’s various, election-related structures, principally those to do with the monitoring of elections. Even more interesting was a panicky response from the British, who went as far as outdoing themselves in their pledges to Triple C. Again figures shall be provided when the time comes.
Thinning options
Except both the US and the UK governments are under no illusion that Triple C is set to be trounced by the ruling Zanu PF. That they know as a foregone conclusion, thanks to the confusion and divisions in their poorly-led project, and of course the monumental ground covered by Zanu PF in recovering the Economy and blunting sanctions.
The pressure by the US government to despatch observer missions - disguised as NDI and IRI - well ahead of proclamation of elections and well before invitation by the Zimbabwe at once revealed the panic and the huge stakes the US government has in the forthcoming plebiscite. That this option has since been dashed means the US Government has no option but to destabilise the electoral process variously, including through a faulting-minded local election observation Mission. To that end, huge sums have been pledged, including for staging pseudo-events on election violence such as we saw in Murehwa.
Discredit and block
On this goal, the US and the UK are united, albeit for different aims. While the US Government seeks to de-legitimise the forthcoming polls in order to justify its illegal sanctions, which are more threadbare than ever before, and which have united Africa, the UK Government is investing in discrediting the plebiscite to block the readmission of Zimbabwe into the Commonwealth, itself a muajor foreign policy setback for the British Govt, whichever party is at the helm. Should it happen that Zimbabwe runs an election adjudged to be free, fair and credible, nothing short of unilateral action by white Commonwealth/ABC would stop Zimbabwe’s re-entry!
Such a development would trigger a revolt in the Commonwealth, precipitating either its disintegration or severe weakening. The UK is ready for neither eventuality, more so at a time when there is a new King in Buckingham Palace and when the Royal Family is embroiled in a nasty fallout. So for both US and UK, the goal is to discredit and, through it, block Zimbabwe’s escape from illegal sanctions, and readmission into Commonwealth.
It is vitally important for Zimbabweans to know this, lest the diplomatic value of re-joining the Commonwealth is not understood for what it does for us. More critically, it is important for all Zanu PF cadres and supporters to know this so nothing reckless is done to aid and abet the combined US-UK strategy on Zimbabwe.
I leave it to humans; I am only a braying donkey.