This raises the question: Is the US jittery because the Southern African Development Community and the African Union have roundly condemned sanctions against Zimbabwe and have expressed solidarity with the country? Or is it because SADC and AU are not buying the hype that sanctions affect only 83 individuals but have publicly stated that they are not only affecting the ordinary Zimbabweans but the southern African region as a whole?
Maybe the US is trying to gratify itself because Freire says: “with this false generosity (the oppressor) attempts not only to preserve an unjust and necrophilic order, but to buy peace for himself.”
Surely, why should the ambassador boast that the US has given Zimbabwe US$3.5 billion when sanctions have cost the country 15 to 30 times that?
Besides, studies have indicated that for every dollar the United States gives as aid, 99 cents goes back to the United States.
Study after study has repeatedly shown that aid is hurting Africa, so why not stop that aid and lift sanctions and allow Africa to grow on its own?
Honest accounts 2017 said that African countries received US$161.6 billion in 2015 –mainly in loans, personal remittances and aid in the form of grants but US$203 billion was taken from Africa, either directly – mainly through corporations repatriating profits and by illegally moving money out of the continent – or by costs imposed.
So no Western country should have the audacity to tell Zimbabwe that it is doing the country a favour.
More importantly, Zimbabweans, especially the media, should not swallow the hogwash.
As Ngugi wa Thiong’o says, “it is the final triumph of a system of domination when the dominated start singing its virtues”.
That is exactly what the private and online Zimbabwean media is doing.
“The very fact that what common sense dictates in the literary practice of other cultures is being questioned in an African writer is a measure of how far imperialism has distorted the view of African realities,” Ngugi adds.
“It has turned reality upside down: the abnormal is viewed as the normal and the normal as the abnormal.
“Africa actually enriches Europe: but Africa is made to believe that it needs Europe to rescue it from poverty.
“Africa’s natural and human resources continue to develop Europe and America: but Africa is made to feel grateful for aid from the same quarters that still sit on the back of the continent.
“Africa even produces intellectuals who now rationalize this upside-down way of looking at Africa.”
Shame!
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