On December 12, 2022, on the eve of the US-Africa Leaders Summit, the US government imposed further unilateral coercive sanctions on Mr 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 Agro, as well as Fossils Contracting and Fossils Agro itself.
According to the Americans, “Fossil Agro and Fossil Contracting were designated pursuant to Executive Order 13469 for providing material, logistical or technical support to the Government of Zimbabwe”.
The year 2022 marks 22 years since this act of aggression, ZDERA (Zimbabwe Democracy and Economic Recovery Act), was visited on Zimbabwe by 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, build dams and rehabilitate infrastructure destroyed by 20 years of America’s unilateral coercive sanctions have now been punished.
It is 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 — CCC.
These companies have been sanctioned for the very work they are doing to assist Zimbabwe develop itself.
These firms accept Government payment terms, which are not always generous and charitable given the crippling effect of American sanctions on the fiscus.
Fossil Agro is involved in agriculture, fertiliser, 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 (Ian) Smith’s war against Zimbabweans.
The objectives are the same, principally being to keep 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. This makes 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 cooperation, 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, including 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 that 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 cooperation, the US relies on its weapon of choice — unilateral coercive sanctions against weaker 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 cooperation.
Notwithstanding all these challenges, President Mnangagwa has continued on the path of engagement, choosing courage over fear, choosing truth over lies, choosing engagement over isolation and choosing cooperation 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 (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) 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. Currently, the total gross domestic product of the BRICS countries is US$24 trillion, which represents 27 percent of the gross world product.
BRICS countries currently occupy 27 percent of the total world’s land surface and account for 26 percent of global oil output.
Due to the continued weaponisation of the US dollar 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 in 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 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, the US, but claiming to be located in the jungles of Guatemala, broadcasting anti-government messages aimed at demoralising 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 benefitted from the land reform.
10.To date, land reform has eluded Guatemala.
Your Excellency, Sir, suffocating and dying under the knee of a white supremacist police officer in 2020 in the US, George Floyd said: “I can’t breathe.”
Indeed, the sanctions are a knee on our neck, we are suffocating and dying slowly as Zimbabweans, for “we can’t breathe”.
I thank you!
This address was made at the National Thanksgiving and Dedication Service in Bulawayo on Friday. Makhosini Hlongwane is a ZANU PF member and former Cabinet Minister. – The Sunday Mail
