Thebe Mabanga
The general secretary of the Pan Africanist Congress, Thami ka Plaatjie, has reiterated his party’s support for Robert Mugabe, and attacked the media and “right-wing liberals” for exaggerating the Zimbabwean president’s woes.
The PAC’s support for Zimbabwe’s ruling party has been unwavering since early last year when Ka Plaatjie told news agency Reuters that if land in South Africa was not distributed as speedily as necessary, it would spark a revolt “that will make what is happening in Zimbabwe look like a Sunday picnic”. The rand plunged.
Ka Plaatjie said this week: “We think there is a lot of hypocrisy, especially in the media, which has a deliberate desire to distort, misrepresent and misinform the public about the situation in Zimbabwe.
“The liberal media fails to understand that Britain’s refusal to provide funds for land reform is the cause of this problem”.
Ka Plaatjie acknowledges that Mugabe has invariably invited criticism from the media, but the criticism is “from right-wing liberals, like [Democratic Alliance leader] Tony Leon, who are protecting Anglo American interests and colonial gains in Zimbabwe.”
Mugabe and Ka Plaatjie this week found themselves another ally in African National Congress national executive member and KwaZulu-Natal firebrand Dumisani Makhaye. In the Herald, a Zimbabwe government-controlled propaganda sheet, he wrote: “The West wants to impose a president on the people of Zimbabwe. It is in this context that the reluctance of Zanu-PF to accept monitors from Western powers must be located and assessed.
“The West has a policy of building strong opposition parties to counteract governments of former national liberation movements in Southern Africa. In the last elections in Mozambique, Zimbabwe and Namibia, some Western monitors were openly campaigning for opposition parties of Afonso Dhlakama, Morgan Tsvangirai and Ben Ulenga respectively.
“The negative report of the recent fact-finding team from the European Union to Zimbabwe, which differed fundamentally from the report of the team of the [Southern African Development Community], is a reflection of this problem.