Africa Advocacy & The Zimbabwe Factor

Based on the African experience should we trust media that is so egregiously wrong on Iraq and historically has never acknowledged immoral and illegal imperialist government agendas? Right now this media are complicit in hushing up the blatant double standard in the US’ undeclared asylum for notorious terrorist Luis Posada Carrilles and its unjust imprisonment of five courageous men (a.k.a. The Cuban Five), whose only crime was attempting to thwart the terrorism by the likes of Posada. Yesterday, this regime change was directed at Ghana, Congo, and Vietnam to name only a few. Today it’s Cuba, Venezuela, Bolivia, Iran, North Korea and Zimbabwe to name another few. Anywhere such an agenda is in place, a critical thinker knows to believe none of what we read or hear and only half of what we see.

“On 6 February 2002, The Zimbabwean Independent carried an article titled, My Ordeal as Mugabe’s Prisoner, written by Basildon Peta. In the piece, Peta claimed that Zimbabwe’s State security agents had wrongfully jailed him. The article was subsequently reproduced in many other newspapers in the West and elsewhere. It later turned out that the Zimbabwe police or state security agents had never arrested Peta. The fictitious article, in which Peta described vividly his “holding cell,” an imaginary blocked toilet and the coarse behavior of Zimbabwe’s security agents, was in fact the result of his fertile imagination. Yet he did not seem to feel any shame for having passed this off as truthful, fair and objective journalism. When his lies were exposed, Peta was dismissed from his job as a “special projects editor.”

Now let us compare Guinea and Zimbabwe, both countries having a head of state who has been in power since early-mid 80’s; Lansana Conte in Guinea and Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe. Conte, however became leader through an imperialist backed military coup following the death of the democratically elected, Pan-Africanist President Sekou Ture. Mugabe on the other hand was democratically elected after earning his place as a freedom fighter in the struggle against British settler colonialism. But only Mugabe receives a heavy degree of patent denunciations for being “in power too long”. Not blind idolizing but a point of fact.