The Sunday News
Richard Runyararo Mahomva, Global Politics and the Missing African Perspective
The absent African being in the global matrix of power has often taken the simplistic stigma of a people without their philosophy, writing, memory, development and today we are epistemologically postured as a people without democracy, good governance and human rights.
With this constant erasure of our existence in many aspects, it becomes critical for our academics to break the normalcy of this marginality. As such, the writing by Vice President Chiwenga is instructive of Africa to reassert her existence beyond the linear extermination of her intellectual and ontological base.
With the precision of revolutionary thought, Goose or Gander — The United Nations Security Council and the Ethic of Double Standards tackles head-on the global designs of power informing the reproduction of racism through subtle and illegitimate institutional technologies of imperialist hegemony. As a result, this writing challenges the hypocritical moral fundamentalism of this false equality masquerade by the so-called international institutions.
While it is easy to diagnose realism and pursuit of selfish national interest in discussing global power inequalities, the African thinker must be constantly cognisant of the fact that colonialism has reproduced itself through mass-scale institutional frameworks.
As a microcosm of the uneven global power, the post-colonial state is a site of the vestiges of the grotesque legacy of colonialism. Beyond the zone of the border, multilateral institutions are transplant hubs of neo-imperialism.
Therefore, the role of imperialist actors in global institutions should be a reminder of the continued subtle agendas of colonialism. Global colonialism which we are experiencing today can be noted through international advocacies which promote the control and manipulation of non-Western people, their ideas and aspirations. The same pro-West development supremacy backings have advanced the continued perpetuation of the docility of our intellectual rigour to Western domination.
However, it brings so much pleasure to have a text such as this one by Vice President Chiwenga as it unmasks the folly of Western domination in the sphere of global power.
As the post-colony breaks away from the colonial centre there must be a deliberate turnaround in foreign policy-making decorum of the post-colonial state. One of the most decisive routes to pursuing this agenda must be seen in the way African countries disentangle Western supremacy in all its manifest terms. On that note, Vice President Chiwenga’s bold attack on global power imbalance facilitates the need to also rationalise the importance of realigning discourse of democracy, human rights and international security issues with African interests.
This is part of an important cause to exterminate Africa’s socio-political, economic and ideological dependence on the imperialist Western powers. This is important in establishing principles that will stimulate equality within the international system.
This way global diplomacy will be premised on authentic, mutual and fraternal interaction as pitched through Retired General Dr Constantine Chiwenga profound research.
Through his academic input, Cde Chiwenga encourages a global frank talk among academics and policy-makers that not only the United Nations Security Council needs reform, but every other multilateral organisation founded to guide global moral benchmarks of governance should reform. Meanwhile, pursuant to Emperor Haile Selassie’s call for Africa to consolidate her independence, Dr Chiwenga is reminding Africa that the failure to organise is an ingredient to agonise.
One cannot ignore that an academic discursive continuum from the Mudenges and Shamuyariras of yesterday has reincarnated itself in the Second-Republic. Thanks to the leadership of His Excellency President Mnangagwa which has unlocked the space for open intellectual dialogue in Zimbabwe. Meanwhile, Vice President Chiwenga’s crossover from being a politically pragmatic anti-colonial practitioner into the academic space sets a new trend for the Zimbabwean national question to be analysed from a redemptive ideological standpoint.
Challenging the Global
Imperialism
Chiwenga (2020)’s Goose or Gander — The United Nations Security Council and the Ethic of Double Standards is important in angling the Global-South’s justification to interrogate the moral credibility of multilateral institutions like the United Nations. First, the book challenges the structural inequality of the global power ecosystem and calls for the repositioning of perennially marginalised ‘’Third-World’’ states to the centre –away from their peripheral fate.
The historical tenacity of the text exposes the irony of having an organisation that was founded to contain the more than five decades conflict in the West being the central decision-making body for all nations. Against this background the call for the reform of the UN organs is even more logical.
The bold thrust of this submission fills in the gap for the absent authoritative critique of the asymmetrical order of global power. The text not only tackles the unequal decision-making in the United Nations Security Council, but it exposes that the normative notion of belonging within the international system is characterised by superficial balances of power.
In other words, coloniality of power continues to manifest in more structural terms which posture insincere advocacy for equality within the global system. VP Chiwenga’s proposal for the reform of the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) forms the fundamental basis of the Global-South intelligentsia’s long-ignored call for the democratisation of the international system.
In challenging the moral credibility of the UNSC, the writer is interrogating the integrity of the United Nations (UN) and its purported role in prefecting peace, good governance, and delivery of human rights and advancing other key aspects of global-development. In terms of interrogating conservative global diplomacy, the publication lampoons the hypocrisy of international diplomatic decorum and protocol discourses.
In Bismarkean terms, the writer has reasserted that ‘‘. . . the problems of the day shall not be resolved through speeches and resolutions. Instead, the book spells out the crisis of pretentious courtesy which has legitimised the perennial oppression of the Global-South.
Through its breaking the silence approach, Goose or Gander — The United Nations Security Council and the Ethic of Double Standards sustains the polemic global subaltern/ global periphery/third-world call for equality. Instead of subscribing to the normative pro-western globalist rhetoric, Dr Chiwenga is unapologetically unrelenting in exposing the pitfall of the structural imbalance of the UNSC.
Writing from a Zimbabwean point of view, Cde Chiwenga affirms the symbolic role of Zimbabwe as a think-tank and a model for decolonising politics. With the late former President Robert Mugabe’s consistent narrative of championing horizontal diplomacy within the community of nations, this publication posits a continuity of a stubborn Zimbabwean ideological contest against the UNSC power structure.
While the focus of the book is on the functional outline and the hierarchical construct of the UNSC, the book provides a well-argued case for decolonising power through interrogating the hegemony of the West at a time we should be aligning our democracy beyond the normative of being post-colonial. As a foot soldier of the anti-colonial movement and a sovereign integrity preservation expert, Cde Chiwenga has demonstrated that the Chimurenga philosophy is inherent in submitting the Zimbabwean political culture inclination against the egos of imperialist manoeuvres to keep Africa subjugated.
The pan-Africanist thematic angling of the book underscores that the authentic proof of being ‘’post-colonial’’ must manifest in methodologies of power’s interaction with the principle of equality. The failure to establish a cordial nexus between power and the universal principle of equality naturally generates conflict.
The gap between the decolonised and the neo-coloniser; as well as the First World and the Third World, substantiates the evident existence conflict in human nature. Moreover, the UNSC epitomises the eminent conflict between former colonisers and the erstwhile colonised.
Consequently, this undermines the very claims of the abolishment of slavery, colonialism by the same powers which have institutionalised neo-colonialism through multilateral organs like the UNSC. As a result, Goose or Gander — The United Nations Security Council and the Ethic of Double Standards proffers a sufficient interrogation of the double standards within the functions of the UNSC substantiated by the marginalisation of Africa in the decision-making status of this body. With this book, the Vice-President has triggered an important, but missing debate within the body of political science.
Africa Must Speak Now
This book serves as a rational response to the conflictual global structures well-grounded for over 400 years courtesy of imperialism. With the juridical, negotiated and economically devoid process of decolonization, African philosophy must negotiate for alternative liberation. Africa’s second liberation is well secured when African academics and key decision-makers rally around the cause of narrative change. In a quest to fulfil that obligation, Goose or Gander —
The United Nations Security Council and the Ethic of Double Standards systematically migrates political logic from its Western essentialist construct towards an Afrocentric dimension.
African voices have spoken and continue to speak, true to this given reality, this book is validated by the fact that Africa continues to be subjected to the injustice of multilateral belonging. As Grosfoguel (1998) has stated, the post-colony only transitioned from a period of “global colonialism” to the current phase of “global coloniality.” The erosion of territorial colonisation has not seen independent nation-states, particularly in Africa not benefiting from much as expected from the remittances of independence. The bedrock of colonial hegemony remains institutionally enshrined.
Coloniality is also inherent in the politics of knowing. Failure to unearth this coloniality on the part of the African scholar brings normalcy to this anomaly. In response, the bold submissions of this book invite Africa to a true realisation of global structure inequalities. The book amplifies the African voice in the discourse of global political dynamics.
Richard Runyararo Mahomva (BSc-MSU, MSc-AU and MSc-UZ) is a Political-Scientist with an avid interest in political theory, liberation memory and architecture of governance in Africa. He is also a creative literature aficionado. Feedback: [email protected]
