The Sunday News
Makhosini Hlongwane
ON 12 December 2022, on the eve of the US-Africa Leaders Summit, the US government imposed further Unilateral Coercive Sanctions on Emmerson Mnangagwa Junior pursuant to Executive Order 13391 “for being an immediate family member of the Zimbabwean President”.
Mr Nqobile Magwizi of Sakunda was also sanctioned as well as Mr Kuda Tagwireyi’s wife Sandra Mpunga. Mrs Tagwireyi was sanctioned pursuant to “Executive Order 13469 for being the spouse of Tagwireyi”. They also sanctioned Mr Obey Chimuka of Fossils Agri as well as Fossils Contracting and Fossils Agri itself.
According to the Americans, “Fossil Agri and Fossil Contracting were designated pursuant to Executive Order 13469 for providing material, logistical or technical support to the Government of Zimbabwe”
This year 2022 marks 22 years since this act of aggression Zdera visited Zimbabwe from the Americans. Sanctions on Fossils Contracting betray the true intention of Zdera and of the Americans, to forestall and deny Zimbabweans their right to development. Black-owned companies that have stepped up to the plate to work with Government to construct roads, to build dams, to rehabilitate infrastructure destroyed by 20 years of American Unilateral Coercive Sanctions have now been punished, in the clearest demonstration yet that the intention of the Americans is to kill the Zimbabwean economy, in order to promote surrogate and client politics in the form of the local opposition, the triple C.
These companies have been sanctioned for the very work they are doing to assist Zimbabwe develop itself. These companies accept Government payment terms which are not always generous and charitable given the crippling effect of American sanctions on the Zimbabwean fiscas.
Fossil Agri is involved in agriculture, in fertiliser, in agricultural chemicals and agricultural contracting while Sakunda is involved in fuel for the agricultural sector among other commercial activities.
Zimbabweans should realise that since 1980, their country has been “independent” only for 20 short years, from 1980 to 2000. The Unilateral Coercive Sanctions are an act of aggression against Zimbabwe and are a furthering of Smith’s war against Zimbabweans. The objectives are the same, principally being the fact of keeping our land in the hands of the colonial master and the minority settler population. Zdera is not ambiguous on this point.
Since the end of the Second World War, the US has unilaterally sanctioned over 100 countries, making it the most aggressive country in the world. The US has done this in relentless pursuit of global geo-political primacy, global hegemony, subjugation, global conquest and global domination at the expense of global leadership, engagement and co-operation and a deep understanding of the diversity of peoples of the world.
This culture of conquest and global domination has led to painful subjugation of peoples across the world, of cultures and civilisations as the US seeks to Americanise everyone everywhere instead of allowing global diversity, political pluralism and geo-political multi-dimensionality to thrive.
In its quest to win all, to get all, and to become the global political identity, the US created a steeply vertical global power architecture which concentrates power in itself (The US) and a few institutions while reproducing itself through a system of allies across the Atlantic. For about a hundred years, this system has not seen the need to distribute global power among other peoples of the world.
To enforce the aspiration of global control, domination and subjugation as opposed to global leadership, diplomacy and co-operation, the US relies on its weapon of choice, unilateral coercive sanctions against other States to elicit behaviour change and therefore compliance to the effect of total submission.
Luckily for a resilient people like Zimbabweans, the global geo-political power curve is flattening, migrating away from the self-serving steep verticality created by the Americans and their surrogates, to multi-polarity, multi- dimensionality and co-operation. Notwithstanding all these challenges, His Excellency has continued on the path of engagement, choosing courage over fear, choosing truth over lies, choosing engagement over isolation and choosing co-operation over aggression. He has refused to honour imaginary binaries between us and the Americans created only to subvert our political and economic systems. Thank you Your Excellency.
Your Excellency as you valiantly pursue this noble objective of engagement, let us relentlessly chase other source markets. The BRICS countries for example represent 42 percent of the total global population standing at 3,6 billion people. If Argentina, Iran, Saudi Arabia and others are accepted into the BRICS formation, their population will be over 50 percent of the global total representing a huge market.
The total Gross Domestic Product of the BRICS countries is at US $24 trillion while they represent 27 percent of the gross world product. The BRICS countries occupy 27 percent of the total world’s land surface and they account for 26 percent of global oil output. Due to the continued weaponisation of the US $ through sanctions, BRICS countries are now establishing a reserve currency backed by the gold standard and are trading in their own currencies.
Zimbabwe must create trade opportunities in other currencies to hedge against the severe impacts of unilateral coercive sanctions by the Americans. As I conclude, I want to tell a story about Guatemala.
In 1995, Guatemala elected President Jacobo Arbenz Guzman, a reformist who set out to engage on a land reform programme. At this time only 2 percent of the population owned 72 percent of all land in Guatemala and most of it was in the hands of an American Company, the United Fruit Company. In 1952, President Arbenz got Parliament to pass Decree 900 which ordered the expropriation of 570 000 hectares of land with compensation for redistribution to landless local populations.
The United Fruit Company was making profits twice as large as the revenues of the Guatemalan government and was the largest landowner in the country. In 1953 after intense lobbying by the United Fruit Company in Washington where they spent over half a million dollars, the American administration granted a budget of about US$ 7 million for what they called psychological warfare and political action. This included the following:
They created operation PB Success to remove the democratically elected government of Guatemala. They sent a very hostile ambassador John Peurifoy to Guatemala in 1953. They made contact with a number of church leaders to preach anti-government messages to their congregations. They created and funded an anti-government radio station, the Voice of Liberation, on May 1 1954 based in Miami, in the US but claiming to be located in the jungles of Guatemala, broadcasting anti-government messages aimed at demoralizing the Guatemalan masses. They created a narrative that the Guatemalan government was Communist. They stopped Guatemala’ s purchase of arms from Canada, German and Rhodesia. They targeted Guatemalan government officials with threats through a psychological warfare campaign to instil fear and cause defections. They identified and heavily sponsored a young man Castillo Armas who later became President after a CIA-led armed insurrection. In 1954, Castillo Armas became President through undemocratic means, reversing the land reform and sparking a 36 year long civil war led by peasants who had benefited from the land reform. To date, land reform has alluded Guatemala.
I thank you!
The paper was presented at the 2022 National Thanksgiving Conference in Bulawayo last week.
