The Sunday News
Teddy Ncube, Sunday News Correspondent
CIVIL society has been an almost purely Western concept. It is historically tied to the political emancipation of citizens from former feudalistic ties, monarchies, and the state during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Other notions of civil society (those that might have existed in other regions or at different times) barely surface in the international debate about civil society. As a result, there is still much debate over whether Western concepts of civil society are transferable to non-Western countries or other historical contexts with different levels of democracy and economic structures.
This article will use a contribution by Hon. Cain Mathema in a book publication called “I defend the Zimbabwe defence and security forces” to unpack the possible implications of having a western oriented civil society structure in Zimbabwe.
The article will deliberately focus on the negative side of having western funded civil society organisations and how this funding is used to set the western agenda in Zimbabwe’s body politic.
By way of clarification, I should state that this article does not in any way undermine the legitimate development initiatives pursued by some legitimate Civil Society Organisations (CSO).
However, the article seeks to explore the darker side of the CSO space which if not debated may derail Zimbabwe and Africa from the path of sustainable development.
Professor Dambisa Moyo, Professor Slavoj Zizek and Prof Dinesh Joseph D’Souza etc have all written about this as well.
I mention these prolific scholars to advice some intolerant self-appointed trustees of democracy (who label anyone analysing the operations of liberal institutions as an enemy of democracy or some agent of a Gestapo cause) that there is an academic debate about the operations of civil society organisations globally and Zimbabwe should not be left behind.
In essence, what we are saying is that some NGOs operating in Zimbabwe are not only spy organisations sponsored by our detractors, but they are actually participants in the regime change agenda in Zimbabwe.
They are out to keep Zimbabwe a neo-colony, they are out to make sure that Zimbabwe forever remains a country that produces raw materials and nothing else for the West and buys the very expensive goods manufactured by the West using Zimbabwe’s raw materials as was the case during the days of British colonialism and racism.
That is why the West is not only creating the NGOs, but it is also funding them and controlling them.
The NGOs are here to make our people suffer from the dependency syndrome, to make them not believe in themselves.
NGOs make our people dance to little things, when what our people want are genuine family and individual businesses in agriculture, tourism, mining, manufacturing, and services sectors of the economy based on them owning the means of production in the country, particularly land on which they will engage in agriculture, manufacturing and services and from whose belly they will extract minerals, each of our communal families need assistance in turning their farms into commercial farms.
We do not need NGOs to teach us how to vote and when! After all, we are the ones who brought independence and democracy to this country, not them or their masters who colonised, tortured, massacred, exploited, impoverished and raped us for 90 years.
Let us remember that in the independence elections of 1980, no NGO taught our people how to vote for liberation parties.
Neither do we need them to teach us how to pray and dance.
A genuine NGO is the one that will assist us empower ourselves and assist each of our rural homes to have piped metered water which they will use for commercial irrigation and to engage in commercial animal husbandry.
For Vision 2030 to be meaningful, government must audit the works of the NGOs.
