𝗙𝗢𝗥𝗘𝗜𝗚𝗡 𝗘𝗫𝗣𝗘𝗥𝗧𝗦 𝗪𝗛𝗢 𝗙𝗔𝗜𝗟 𝗚𝗘𝗧 𝗣𝗔𝗜𝗗 𝗕𝗨𝗧 𝗟𝗢𝗖𝗔𝗟𝗦 𝗪𝗛𝗢 𝗦𝗨𝗖𝗖𝗘𝗘𝗗 𝗗𝗢𝗡’𝗧.

Rutendo Matinyarare, ZUAUWS and ZASM Chairman at SADC anti-sanctions march 25 October 2019.

 1.⁠ ⁠Between the time sanctions were imposed on Zimbabwe and now, our government has paid US lobbyists over $4 million, and those lobbyists failed to remove sanctions.

 2.⁠ ⁠They paid PR agencies over $1 million to gain Zimbabwe support on Capitol Hill, but the Americans didn’t pay attention. In Africa, no one believed that Zimbabwe was under sanctions. Instead, most governments and people thought the Zim economy was failing, and Zimbabweans were fleeing to neighboring countries due to ZANU PF human rights violations, corruption, and misgovernance.

 3.⁠ ⁠Then ZUAUS/ZASM came and began skillfully telling the sanctions story. Through social media, we defined the sanctions and characterized them as crimes against humanity. Our videos went viral, and we were invited for interviews on international TV stations, narrating the sanctions and human rights violations visited upon Zimbabwean civilians by the West for their imperialist agenda.

 4.⁠ ⁠We even wrote letters to the UN decrying the crime against humanity being visited on civilians by illegal sanctions.

5. The UN heard us and came to do an impact assessment of sanctions, confirming that Zimbabwe was indeed under illegal Western sanctions that were destroying the economy and violating civilian human rights.

6. On the back of this report, ZASM went to court against financial institutions that were implementing the illegal sanctions, while lobbying the South African government to see Zimbabweans as refugees displaced by sanctions.

 7. The South African government had carried out its own sanctions impact assessment and had not acted upon it. But after the UN Human Rights Council report and our case in SA courts, that country, SADC, and the AU began believing Zimbabwe was under sanctions.

 8. The South African government championed the fight against Zim sanctions in the UN and every bilateral meeting with the west.

 9. South Africa postponed deporting Zim refugees, and the ANC lost elections for not deporting Zimbabweans.

 10. The Zim government regained standing in Africa and the region, with the South African government dismissing claims of rigged 2023 Zim elections, stating that no free and fair elections would happen until sanctions were removed - these sentiments were the ANC Secretary General echoing the ZASM Chairman’s words on how sanctions rig elections in favor of the opposition.

11. Through our U.S. government contacts, we got Congress to assess US sanctions on Zimbabwe, which generated a Congress report asking Biden to remove executive order sanctions. This led to the removal of the executive order sanctions by Biden in March 2024.

12. As Zimbabwean citizens, ZASM successfully won the sanctions narrative. We convinced the South African government to champion the fight against sanctions as the actual obstacle to progress, after years of them feeling that Zimbabwe needed political change because ZANU PF was the problem.

13. They postponed their deportation of Zimbabweans before elections and eventually sanctions were removed.

Nonetheless, after all this, ZASM and the South Africans never got any recognition for the successful anti-sanctions campaign.

In fact, today I, as the Chairman of ZASM, am paying the remaining legal bills from this fight. Our government couldn't even commit to paying the young black lawyers who undertook this fight despite them prompting us to start the case on the pretext that they would provide the financial resources.

However, failed Western lobbyists and PR firms got paid millions for failure. How does Africa succeed when African governments don't compensate their own professionals?