The likes of Mugabe impede 'Imperial Grand Strategy'

Posted by Madibeng Kgwete: 04 August 2008

In one of his brilliant books, Hegemony or Survival: America’s quest for global dominance, author Noam Chomsky exposes America’s “grand imperial strategy”, which, he says, is aimed at ensuring America’s permanent dominance of the global political and economic landscape.

Chomsky says the aim of the “imperial grand strategy”, designed in 2002, is to “seek to construct a world system open to US economic penetration and political control, tolerating no rivals or threats.”

According to Chomsky: “A crucial corollary [of the strategy] is vigilance to block any moves toward independent development that might become a ‘virus infecting others’.” In other words, efforts by small or poor countries to inspire economic independence from the US must be blocked.

Another dominant player in global politics and economics is Europe , which had its equivalent to the “imperial grand strategy” in the form of the slave trade during the early years of the colonial period.

Walter Rodney, in his book, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, details Europe ’s power to make unilateral decisions within the international trading system. “An excellent illustration of that,” writes Rodney, “is the fact that the so-called international law which governed the conduct of nations on the high seas was nothing else but European law.”

Rodney notes that: “Africans did not participate in [the] making [of this international law], and in many instances African people were simply the victims, for the law recognised them only as transportable merchandise.”

Things should be different today because the whole of Africa is independent; but, unfortunately, Africa ’s political freedom has not brought much change to ordinary Africans. In many instances, Africans are poorer than they were in the colonial period.

Some will blame Africa ’s present-day socio-economic situation on corruption by the political elite, forgetting that, in every corrupt transaction, there is the corruptor and the corrupted. Not much is said about the fact that many of Africa’s stolen assets are stored in foreign banks in so-called modern democratic states, mostly in Europe .

It is only when they refuse to cooperate in campaigns aimed at advancing the “imperial grand strategy” that members of Africa ’s political elite invite upon themselves the heavy hand of the self-appointed guardians of “international law.”

The Zimbabwean situation is hard to ignore. President Robert Mugabe was the darling of the West when he ensured that former Prime Minister Ian Smith is not prosecuted for previous atrocities committed under his leadership and when he made sure that white farmers maintain property rights to Zimbabwean land.

It is only when he started to roll out the controversial land reform policy that Mugabe irked the West. Before the land reform programme, no one seemed to demand justice for the victims of the Matebeleland massacre. The West was too busy conferring unsolicited honourary degrees and doctorates to the Zimbabwean leader.