By Godobori Godobori

THE West won’t leave Africa alone because it is Africa’s resources that sustain its people’s high standard of living.
This explains why the West went on a sustained campaign to fund rebel groups and civil wars on the continent in the 80s as colonisation was coming to an end.
Promoting civil wars and banditry was aimed at proving that the black governments of newly independent countries lacked capacity to govern thus providing justification for the continued white presence.
This was, in turn, meant to justify a diplomatic campaign executed through the United Nations (UN) aimed at introducing a new form of colonialism through Africa’s education system.
The new colonialism would be achieved through subverting Africa’s education curriculum to produce an elite with a Western mindset that can be used to reverse the achievements of the nationalist era.
Waving the red card of ‘wars and instability in Africa’, Western countries pushed the United Nations to go on a continent-wide campaign to convince African governments, universities and security institutions to agree to the introduction of Peace Studies which would, supposedly, create a pool of experts with the skills to resolve situations of conflict and war.
In Zimbabwe the campaign was led by characters like Muchadeyi Masunda, Walter Kamba and others.
The workshops to sell the introduction of ‘Peace Studies’ in institutions of higher learning were high pitched as participants came from the Cabinet Office, the Ministry of Higher Education, universities, the Military and the Police.
By year 2003 almost all African governments had embraced ‘Peace Studies’.
The programme may appear innocent, but it is part of an arsenal generally referred to as ‘Soft Power’.
The objective of Soft Power is to inculcate in the ‘victim’ with the view that the West’s intangible resources, such as culture and level of development is what to dream and yearn for.
This is not only an ideological war against the African culture, but also a serious threat to Pan-Africanism and the African World View.
In this respect, Peace Studies is a serious liability to the African way of life as it seeks to disparage the African culture, governance systems, and traditional systems of resolving conflicts while promoting Western culture as the only basis of good governance and human rights.
‘Peace Studies’ is funded by the West’s most notorious institutions of destabilisation in Africa, namely, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) of the United States, the Westminster Foundation for Democracy (WFD) of Britain and George Soros.
It is these institutions, through George Soros’ Open Society Initiative for Southern Africa (OSISA), a member of the NED family, which direct operations in terms of the training of the teaching staff, the development of the curriculum, the choice and production of the books used for the various courses offered.
George Soros has vowed to remove Robert Mugabe from power for championing indigenisation.
Through trickery, Africa has embraced in its institutions, a study programme designed to enable a new form of colonialism which is targeted at the mind.
We have been tricked exactly the same way in the creation of the International Criminal Court (ICC).
In some of our institutions, ‘Peace Studies’ has become a mandatory course.
For instance, at the National University of Science and Technology (NUST) in Bulawayo, no student, even if they are pursuing a degree in the natural sciences, can graduate unless they pass a first year course in Peace, Leadership and Governance.
To the contrary, not one university in our country has found it necessary to introduce a mandatory course in ‘African Studies’ that is designed to raise greater awareness of African issues.
The Western-inspired curriculum that Africa has been tricked into adopting in our universities aims at alienating the student from his culture, his identity, his national and traditional leadership and his people.
It seeks to transform the black student into a keen admirer and, therefore, puppet, of the whiteman.
The significance of education as a tool of regime change and a channel for promoting Western interests in Zimbabwe was highlighted by Richard Dowden soon after the MDC was mauled by ZANU PF in the 2013 election.
Dowden made the humiliating admission that the election was, “the biggest defeat for the United Kingdom’s policy in Africa in 60 years.”
According to Dowden, the last time Britain “got it so wrong” and suffered comparable defeat was in 1951 when the British authorities released Kwame Nkrumah from prison to form a government in Ghana.
While lamenting Britain’s loss in 2013 and its waning influence on the diplomatic front, Dowden observes that, “one thing Britain has that Africa needs is education.”
Education is the one window that remains open for the British to exercise influence in Zimbabwe.
Dowden’s analysis is that “education would not only be a good earner in the short term but, in the long term, would create relationships far into the future.”
Richard Dowden is the Director of Royal Africa Society (RAS), the man who, in January 1999, was assigned the responsibility by the British government to craft strategies to remove President Mugabe from power.
He came up with four strategies including the formation of the MDC which all failed dismally.
The fact that Dowden views education as the remaining window for continued destabilisation of the country means we have to take a thorough audit of our educational programmes and take appropriate action.
Apart from a bad curriculum, some of our universities have employed pseudo academics from the non-governmental organisation (NGO) sector who specialise in publishing skewed articles for European and Asian journals based on propaganda material published in so-called independent newspapers which were established in the country to promote the regime change agenda against ZANU PF.
The pseudo academics, donning the garb of university teachers, engage in the crime of laundering propaganda into scholarship.
We shall expose some of these in this series over the next few weeks.