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[HCDX] SW Radio Africa - Singing for Supper



SW Radio Africa - Singing for Supper
http://allafrica.com/stories/printable/200712100279.html
The Herald (Harare)

OPINION
10 December 2007
Posted to the web 10 December 2007

By Mabasa Sasa
Harare

SOMETIME in late 2001, a lady by the name Gerry Jackson set up 
something anomalously called SW Radio Africa in London and began 
beaming her anti-Zimbabwe propaganda into the country.

A month after the radio station had started its operations, the UK Guardian 
paper reported that a shady department of the United States International 
Development Agency was pouring millions of dollars into the propaganda 
tool as part of Washington's wider illegal regime change agenda.

This was hardly surprising. We all knew that Gerry Jackson, fired by ZBC a 
few years earlier, simply did not have the money to run the station and that it 
was costing around £100 000 every month to relay her vitriol into the country 
via short-wave.

Everyone knew that there was a malicious hand that was dropping pennies 
into her pockets and that the station's entire editorial policy was hardly 
Zimbabwean and totally unAfrican.

The Guardian reported that there was evidence linking SW Radio Africa and 
Usaid's Office of Transition Initiatives: a body that has experience in 
destabilising nations -- particularly in the former Yugoslavia where they 
funded the printing of over four million newspapers and magazines and 
establishment of radio and TV stations ahead of Nato's brutal invasion.

This writer also has it on good authority that the BBC was heavily involved in 
training SW Radio's workers and to date, the American government has 
neither confirmed nor denied that it funds the anti-Zimbabwe station.

Among those trained by the BBC and paid by OTI is a certain Violet Gonda, 
one of the black faces roped in to try and give SW Radio an air of "African-
ness'.

Truth be told, as a journalist, Violet is neither bright nor dull. She is 
somewhere in between, gamely trying to do her bit to justify the money she 
gets from the US government and, of course, as a sign of gratitude for the 
fellowship she got for some much-needed study at Stanford University in the 
US.

(The same Stanford University that gave the world Condoleezza Rice and 
her protégé and former US ambassador to South Africa and now assistant 
Secretary of State for African Affairs Jendayi Frazer.)

Violet is the host of a programme on SW called Hotseat in which, typical of a 
person trained by the BBC, she tries to emulate HARD Talk and dismally, 
and predictably, fails to do.

Of course, we thankfully do not get SW Radio's broadcasts and once in a 
while we come across a transcript of Hotseat on the Internet.

Without fail, the transcripts paint a picture of not so much as an interview 
between an able journalist and her subject.

Rather they regularly have the hue of two lost souls commiserating with 
each other on how the opposition is letting them down and how Zanu-PF 
appears unstoppable.

There was the classic case of the interview with Brian Kagoro, which can 
only be described as an affective interview in which Kagoro's undeniable 
intellect far outpaced Violet's pouting at the opposition's disintegration and 
the un-likelihood of Tsvangirai ever being addressed as "His Excellency".

Recently, we were treated to another one of Violet's pedestrian attempts at 
ruthless interviewing when she hosted the equally jejune Peta Thornycroft.

Where the Kagoro interview was saved by what one writer called "good 
expression and honest bafflement", the Thornycroft interview has no such 
saving graces.

The two appear to cry onto each other's shoulders and Violet gives off her 
traditional air of hopelessness while Thornycroft does not have the intellect 
with which to proffer any incisive sound bites beyond betraying her own 
exasperation with the MDC's total failure to morph into a serious political 
party. What is interesting about Thornycroft's performance on Hotseat is the 
acceptance at last by one member of the embedded media that the MDC 
was dead from the start and the botched attempt to fast-track into power in 
2000 is the closest the opposition in its present form will ever come to 
winning an election.

Had she been someone else, with a different value system and a better 
appreciation of Africa and Africans, her confessions about the state of 
expiration of the MDC would have been heart-rending.

She says: "Well, I think one has to really go back to the beginning of the 
MDC as journalists and look at how we covered the MDC, certainly how I 
covered it from July 2001. I'm afraid to say I was very neglectful of looking at 
the MDC.

" . . . but I bitterly regret that I didn't do more work in finding out about the 
various fault-lines in the MDC, which I have subsequently discovered were 
there right from the very beginning and I was totally unaware of it. I had no 
idea until I think it was July 2005. I had no idea."

More damning, Thornycroft tells Violet -- who probably does not want to hear 
such a thing because she carries out a similar function for OTI and hence 
the US government -- that the private media's job has been mindlessly 
propping up an MDC that does not have a political spine of its own.

"Nevertheless," she continues, "if we'd been on our toes, a bit smarter and 
not so anxious and longing for the end of Zanu-PF we would have and 
should have seen that the MDC was in trouble almost from the day it was 
launched."

And then it gets even uglier.

"The MDC is a source of some kind of employment and resources over the 
last seven years when there had been no jobs and no resources . . . So it's a 
job, it's a resource.

"As it is for the MPs -- they've got jobs and clearly what we're seeing now is 
this jockeying for positions ahead of the elections next year. It's about jobs. 
It's not about ideology, it's about jobs and I think that's the shock to us. 
Perhaps we were just naive."

And the behaviour of a good many opposition parliamentarians points to this 
fact that many have often said at pain of being called a mindless Zanu-PF 
supporter -- the MDC has not been concerned with nation-building as much 
as it has worried itself with protecting petty personal interests.

This is something that has been said for so long it really is surprising that 
there were still some within our midst who had not realised this.

But like all opposition supporters, Thornycroft is still hampered by the 
inability to fully accept that Zanu-PF is a formidable party that has a solid, 
reliable support base far outstripping that of the MDC and that is why come 
election time, more or less the same majority turns out to vote for the ruling 
party.

Furthermore, she still hankers after Western interference in the country even 
though she coyly tries to assert to Violet that the West is no longer a factor 
in Zimbabwe's politics.

Britain and her allies are as central in our politics as they were when Cecil 
John Rhodes got his Royal Charter and commissioned Colonel Pennefather 
and friends to create a Pioneer Column.

As long as sanctions remain in place and Tsvangirai continues to appeal to 
foreign constituencies rather than my voting, land-tilling grandmother in 
Uzumba-Maramba-Pfungwe, Britain remains an undesirable element that 
has to be excreted out of the system.

The MDC is as Occidental as slave-trading and apart from Tsvangirai's 
black face and biological roots in rural Buhera, there is nothing within the 
party that can have resonance with progressive Zimbabwe, Sadc and Africa.

Hence, Thornycroft's whining about the MDC not campaigning in Accra and 
Cairo is really immaterial. There is no way that the lands of Kwame Nkrumah 
and Anwar Sadat can have any kinship ties with an organisation that has its 
origins in the ideologies of the people who assassinated their most 
outstanding leaders and founding fathers.

In this sense, Tsvangirai is right to campaign in Europe, Australia and North 
America: his party is North Atlantic and he is simply reporting back to his 
financiers at Westminster and the National Endowment for Democracy, et 
al.

For Thornycroft, it is not as much a problem for the MDC to be a Western-
backed party as it is for this fact to be openly admitted and that is why she 
takes issue with Tony Blair for admitting in 2004 that his government was 
working with the opposition to effect illegal regime change in Zimbabwe.

Finally, Thornycroft despite attempts at lucidity, she is an incurable 
daydreamer who believes there has been no progress on the South African 
facilitated talks.

She is dreaming up scenarios that she would love to be true and she parrots 
them so much she ends up believing them.

For her, this false immobility in the talks is not so much about convincing the 
electorate that Zanu-PF and the MDC are not agreeing on anything as it is 
about convincing herself that the Western white factor still directs political 
developments in the country.

In the same way, she predicts voter apathy because that is simply what she 
would like to see happening.

Unfortunately for her, the writing is on the wall. If hundreds of thousands 
from all corners of the country turn up for a rally addressed by President 
Mugabe, how many more are going to vote for him in 2008? 

              Zacharias Liangas , Thessaloniki Greece 
    email:  greekdx_@xxxxxxxxxx  web: www.geocities.com/zliangas 
Pesawat penerima:  ICOM R75 , Lowe HF150 , Degen 1102-3,Tecsun PL200 , 
                    Chibo C300/c979, Yupi 7000 , 
       Antenna: 16m hor, 2x16 m V invert, 1m australian loop 

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