PRIME Minister Morgan Tsvangirai’s support for public uprisings against the Egyptian government are akin to “a baboon laughing at another’s forehead”, a senior Zanu PF official said on Tuesday.
Tsholotsho North MP Jonathan Moyo said Tsvangirai’s expressed desire to see similar protests on Zimbabwe’s streets to force out President Robert Mugabe was a “pipe dream”.
The MDC leader, Moyo claimed, is funded and supported by the same governments that have been propping up Hosni Mubarak’s regime in Cairo.
“It’s a case of one puppet laughing at another puppet and not seeing the irony,” Moyo told New Zimbabwe.com on Tuesday. “He is claiming it will happen in his own country. If it does happen in Zimbabwe, surely the puppet would be the target.”
Moyo said massive street protests as witnessed in Egypt since last week “will never happen on behalf of a puppet”.
“Not in our lifetime, not ever,” Moyo, a former Zanu PF spokesman, said. “But against a puppet and running dogs of imperialism, it is almost an assured reaction.
“The American and their western allies are nervous in that whole region, they have been responsible for that system, and they are the ones that have propped up those regimes from Egypt through Tunisia to Yemen.
“It is the Americans’ desire to have these puppet regimes throughout Africa, hence their support for Tsvangirai.”
“To me when people take their rights and start demanding more rights, there is nothing wrong with that including in Zimbabwe. That was the whole purpose of our struggle for the last 10 years,” he said, adding: “The aspect of incumbents leaving power to their children, dynasties, as we may call it, that is very resented by the people.”
But his Zanu PF opponents say Tsvangirais is trying to prize power in Zimbabwe on the back of American support – and his fate would just be the same as the Egyptian experience.
“American created governments have no life,” Moyo said. “If Tsvangirai wants to know an assured outcome of massive hand-holding by the Americans, it’s what’s happening in the Middle East.
“He likes talking about roadmaps, and he must look no further than Egypt, Yemen and Tunisia to see the roadmap for puppets.”
Moyo claimed the American government and its allies were trying to “create an Egypt and Yemen in Zimbabwe” through their financial and political backing of Tsvangirai – recently confirmed in secret diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks.
Moyo added: “Look at Cuba, it’s anti-American but only 90 miles away. The Americans have failed to impose their puppets there because the Cuban regime is rooted in the people and the people are anti-West. They have resisted to be reduced to a puppet satellite state like Tunisia, Egypt and Yemen.”
The United States gives Egypt close to US$1,7 billion a year in military aid, and even as pressure mounted for Mubarak – who has been president for 31 years -- to step down on Tuesday, US Vice President Joe Biden urged him to stay put.
Biden described the unrest as an expression of "middle-class folks" looking for "a little more access and a little more opportunity."
Biden said Mubarak has been a U.S. "ally" on "a number of things," praising him for being "very responsible" in normalising Egypt's relationship with Israel and aiding in Middle East peace talks.
"I would not refer to him as a dictator," Biden said on PBS' NewsHour.
Suggesting Mubarak's regime would weather the storm, Biden nudged the longtime Egyptian president to respond to the protests, peacefully, by being "more responsive to some of the needs of the people out there."
"I hope Mubarak ... is going to respond to some of the legitimate concerns that are being raised," he said.