Harare — LONG before they come to the next elections, Zimbabweans must be fully aware of what it will mean for the future of the country if they continue to elect leaders of MDC formations into Parliament and local government.

Citizens should consider, for instance, the top cover story for the Standard of November 8, 2009: "GNU Crisis: MDC-T banks on Zuma."

First of all, this is a huge climb-down from the astronomical externalisation of Zimbabwe's internal affairs that the MDC formations have pursued since 1999. MDC-T especially preferred banking on the UN Security Council invoking Chapter 7 of the UN Charter against Zimbabwe.

This would have meant the UN Security Council giving permission to the Anglo-Saxon axis countries to invade Zimbabwe in the name of human rights and rule of law.

Because China, South Africa, Russia and other friends of Zimbabwe stopped that nonsense, the MDC formations still looked to the G8 to intervene in Zimbabwe. When that failed, they still looked to the British Commonwealth. When that also failed, they still looked to the African Union because they said Sadc was biased against them, meaning that Sadc was biased in favour of Zimbabweans being able to deal with most of the trivial issues the MDC formations kept taking to outsiders.

Now we are told that they have climbed down to just one person: Jacob Zuma. And what were the burning issues?

According to both MDC-T and MDC, we are told that Zimbabweans are so lacking in ideas of good governance that from now on they must accept even Press releases as legally binding provisions at par with their Constitution.

We are told that the appointments of our central bank Governor and Attorney-General must not be done in terms of the Constitution of Zimbabwe but according to what MDC-T wants and believes obtains in a Sadc press release.

If this sounds bizarre, it is because it is part of the strange Rhodie burden which MDC formations have carried since 1999. Rhodies have always looked to imperialism for their survival since 1890. Even UDI was prolonged by the Anglo-Saxon countries who pretended to condemn it. So the voters of Zimbabwe must intervene to stop this Rhodie externalisation of our internal affairs through the MDC formations. The Rhodies have always "disengaged" from the interests and aspirations of the indigenous majority. So they are forcing MDC-T to do the same.

The Rhodie core of MDC-T was valued by the Anglo-Saxon powers at the formation of the MDC in 1999 because it was the only group which could muster the emotional appeal which the white racist world needed to employ in order to criminalise the Zimbabwean indigenous reparations movement in the form of the Third Chimurenga.

Precisely because of the emotional appeal of the BBC-CNN-packaged case of the white Rhodies as fronted by the MDC formations, Africans outside of Zimbabwe took too long to realise that what the Anglo-Saxon axis was mounting was in fact a white racist backlash against African rights.

As Mahmood Mamdani demonstrated back in the 1990s, the need within the Anglo-Saxon camp to replace African revolutionary demands with paper rights became acute in 1975-1976. The twin causes were the liberation of Mozambique and Angola and the crisis of apartheid as illustrated in the Soweto Uprisings. In both, Anglo-Saxon imperialism led by the US was deeply implicated as the biggest protector of UDI and Apartheid and the biggest contributor to the brutalisation and dispossession of the African in Southern Africa.

So a modified doctrine of "human rights" was fashioned and a programme unveiled with the singular aim of salvaging white supremacy and, in the words of Mamdani, "paralysing and disintegrating embryonic revolutionary initiatives" in the Southern African region. In other words, the Anglo-Saxon world under the leadership of the US unveiled a "human rights" plan intended to demobilise the African revolution in its infancy and to save white capital and white settlers while appearing to be advancing a form of "human rights" for everyone, a new form of human rights far superior to the demands of the African liberation movements themselves.

As Mamdani demonstrated, "Human rights (as redefined by the Anglo-Saxon powers) summed up the new US offensive (against Southern Africa) in the new situation (after 1975-1976.)"

The Anglo-Saxon strategy was to split the African concept of liberation and revolutionary justice into two apparently opposed clusters of values: popular power, sovereignty, justice and reparations were to be cut off from "human rights, good governance, rule of law, reconciliation, forgiveness and national healing." Since then, our people have been victims of this binary thinking.

The first set of values were seen as a weapon pointed at white capital, against imperialism, and against settlerism and white supremacy. The second set of values were seen as protecting corporate interests and preserving the white racial and class structure. In fact this set (when cut off from popular power, national sovereignty, equality, justice, reparations and empowerment) was bound to rehabilitate apartheid and settlerism. Not only did it lead to the granting of Nobel Peace Prizes to F W De Klerk, Desmond Tutu and Nelson Mandela on the same platform -- but it also led to the false conversion of the former white racist settlers into human rights activists some of whom now form the Rhodie core of MDC-T.

This conversion has been so widespread that most of Africans are now aware of Jenny Ellis, Peta Thorncroft, Peter Hain, Mike Auret, Georgina Godwin, Gerry Jackson, Cathy Buckle, Roy Bennett and so many other former white settlers emerging in the 1990s as champions of human rights and press freedom for Africans. These are the newly recruited frontline troops for white soft power.

When military and other forms of physical violence fail to stop revolution, imperialism resorts to what Naomi Klein calls the "love shack" treatment in The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism or what the Latin American theologian and scholar Juan Luis Segundo in Our Idea of God calls "pure violence."

Pure violence, then, would be egotism: that is the total relativising of others (Africans in our case) so that they are seen and used only in terms of one's own advantage."

The MDC formations and those NGOs allied to them are the main conduits through which money and goodies intended for the "love shack" of charity must follow (after the terror of illegal economic sanctions). All the Anglo-Saxon powers have sworn that they will not deal with any genuine African liberation channels in Zimbabwe. They will employ mostly NGOs and state agencies such as USAID, NORAD, SIDA, DANIDA and CIDA.

The purpose for this gigantic manipulative infrastructure has always been clear since the days of chattel slavery and the abolitionists.

As Mamdani showed:

"Ideologically, human rights had a dual significance. In the post-Soweto tempo that marked development in the period that followed the independence of the Portuguese colonies, the (Anglo-Saxon) emphasis on human rights was an attempt to displace the discourse on (African) power with that on (paper) rights."

For the African majority and the liberation movements there was no separation between the two, and, the imperialist agents in charge of this ideological project made sure that the packaging of human rights created the illusion that everybody was talking about the same thing, when in fact that was not the case.

"The historical significance of this (Anglo-Saxon emphasis) should be clear if we realise that power is to popular sovereignty as rights are to the rule of law. It was thus a rearguard action that sought to displace the discourse of revolution with that of reform."

But the effect of the Rhodie core of MDC-T on Zimbabwean politics has gone far beyond cutting off the demand for popular power, national sovereignty, equality, justice, reparations and empowerment from the demand for human rights, good governance and rule of law.

The Rhodie core of MDC-T has criminalised and demonised the African majority's demand for popular power, national sovereignty, equality, justice, reparations and indigenous empowerment.

Unlike reparations movements in the African Diaspora, the Zimbabwean reparations movement in the form of the Third Chimurenga has avoided demands for payment in cash, even though such payments can be demanded and justified following more than a whole century of white racist looting and exploitation of African labour and resources.

The Third Chimurenga has instead focused on immediate action which it can direct and control: that is the indigenous reclamation and redemption of stolen land.

This modest and popular African move is what the MDC formations were set up to demonise on a global scale, by depicting it as a barbaric and vindictive assault on human rights and a violation of property rights.

The MDC formations have done this despite the fact that the popular indigenous demand has been quite modest, requiring the white settler only to share prime farmland with the dispossessed African peasant at the direction of the state.

Because the MDC formations adopted the Anglo-Saxon and white settler view of the Third Chimurenga, they have since 1999 been associated with most insulting, most humiliating stories intended to demonise the liberation movement and land reform.