American general elections 2016 vs poor little Zim

By The NewsDay | Nov. 7, 2016 | 5 Min read

Tomorrow, November 8, the American people go to elect a new President for the next four years.

OPINION: DR TIMOTHY STAMPS

Former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill once said democracy is the worst form of government, but the only one which is universally accepted.

There are two other forms of government, monarchy and dictatorship.

Currently, the best known monarch is Queen Elizabeth II, who turned 90 this year.

Dictators like Soviet Union’s Joseph Stalin and German’s Adolf Hitler were the other form of government of dictatorship.

British journalist, businessman, and essayist, Walter Bagehot, in 1856 said the duty of a monarch are three things, while observing what is going on: to advise, guide and warn.

Former Irish statesman, Edmund Burke, in 1650, said: “Those who choose not to remember history are doomed to repeat it.”

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One of the candidates, Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump, will win the outcome.

But the two candidates are the most unpopular for almost 200 years when Andrew Jackson, with no agenda, became President of the United States of America.

Since I live in Zimbabwe, I’m not concerned specifically with who wins, but I am concerned about America’s effect on poor little Zimbabwe.

I shall, therefore, attempt to outline the policies in America which shall eventuate and how that affects Zimbabwe. Stalin, a strong Soviet leader, wept in 1932 when his wife shot herself dead with a pistol he gave her as a Christmas present.

His colleagues said to him: “Why does this one death concern you so much when you can kill thousands at random without even knowing their names?”

And Stalin replied: “One death is a tragedy, a thousand deaths is a statistic.”

The truth of that saying persists today for each and every Zimbabwean especially concerning the latest hero, Cephas George Msipa, whom the whole nation, from President Robert Mugabe to the lowest member of our society, mourned when he passed on, even though he differed in some respects with our President and our policies.

Let me now turn to how international statistics affect Zimbabwe.

America, by universal agreement, is the authority on the statistical measure for every aspect of human life, including health.

For example, take the statistic and the method of calculating it, on human pregnancy.

They deliberately kill one third of their foetuses, but ignore that in calculating the statistical number of successful deliveries of living babies.

Yet, surely, the object of a statistical analysis of pregnancy is the successful outcome of each pregnancy by delivery of a normal, healthy child about nine months later.

To arrive at the statistical result, they ignore the aborted foetus, which, as I said, are about one third of all pregnancies, and only compare the end result. Is that a fair analysis?

Therefore, in my view, the statistical analysis is fundamentally flawed.

Take another statistic: homosexuality. They have emphasised the sanctity of a marriage of being a man and woman joining together in a holy union and to this extent under George W Bush, they have put a law named The Defence of Marriage Act.

Yet under a newly-invented word, they defend unnatural unions between people of the same gender, and call people like us, homophobic.

I think that word is new, but it originates from Greek or Latin I think. Thus, we are pilloried for “being behind the times” in not accepting unnatural human behaviour.

Irish playwright, novelist, essayist, and poet, Oscar Wilde, called it “love which dare not speak its name”.

Taking another example, the so-called MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction) by nuclear war.

They ignore or treat as trivial the threat of a weaker country like North Korea or Russia starting the process, because in the words of both leading candidates for the current general election in America, “the possibility is remote and easily arrested before the actual event”.

In this respect, they still have no concern about Zimbabwe and any input we might give — on moral grounds at least.

Take another example. We are currently grappling with our economy, trying to get it back on track with the help of the SMP (Staff-Monitored Programme) of the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

Yet the IMF were the ones who initially got the whole of Africa into trouble with the Esap (Eternal Suffering for African People).

So, it is a body like a blind buck shot in flagrante delicto — the blind leading the blind.

Are we, in Zimbabwe, to use the people who got us into the mess at the outset (25 years ago before we accepted Esap [Economic and Structural Adjustment Programme], the Zimbabwe economy was doing well).

Are we, therefore, doomed today to retrace our steps through the same shit as we have already been through? Is there no other way forward.

I aver that there is, but we have to have the confidence, nationally, that we can find a way forward on our own.

Our Shona people, before the English stole their land, believed that Mwari was the owner of the plateau.

When the English came in the form of a man called Cecil John Rhodes, they called Mwari with a different name, who had similar powers.

So we accepted that alternative name, thereby being diluted into losing our freedom and what Roman law called usufruct, whereby an owner was able to give space to what would now be called tenants.

The end of Isaiah 66 says: “In the new Jerusalem, the lion (an image of the West), will lay down with the lamb (an image of Zimbabwe) and a little child shall lead them”.

I believe this means the youth will set us free. One thing I cannot understand about our leaders at present, is their devote discipleship of Cecil John Rhodes, where skin colour matters as though it can be changed.

In any case, black is not black, it is 50 shades of brown. True black is a medical condition called haemosiderosis, where iron is deposited in the skin.

It also indicates heavy drinking from an iron pot. Similarly white people can become bronzed in the sunshine, but people with albinism have got to be sheltered from the sun because of the damage it causes to their skin.

So I do not understand that issue. It is a matter of the past when the country was illegally colonised in 1890 and yet it remains the same today, only in reverse.

Dr T J Stamps is a health adviser to the President and Cabinet of Zimbabwe