Norton Independent Member of Parliament Temba Mliswa says Zimbabwe has been careless in allowing a sophisticated superpower ‘China’ to build a Parliament for her.
He says Zimbabwe risks being spied on by the Chinese.
“The Americans spent more than 15 years guarding a vacant piece of land in Harare where they eventually built their embassy, they obviously know a lot about espionage.
“On the other hand Africans are naively allowing a sophisticated superpower to build parliaments for them,” says Mliswa.
Meanwhile, Mliswa says Zimbabwe risks being exploited by China because the country does not have a strategy.
“In our relationship with China, we simply have one country (China) which has a strategy and the other (Zimbabwe) is simply being led by the nose as it does not have a strategy. Such kind of partnerships lead to exploitative tendencies by the country that has a strategy.
“As it stands in China we have an advanced country in terms of development and stature on the world stage, coming to Africa and Zimbabwe in particular, to help us build non revenue generating projects such as the defence college, the Chinese Mall and the Parliament building,” says Mliswa.
He adds that China does not mean good for Zimbabwe.
“While I see some naively singing loud praises about China being a good partner, I see the Chinese as not being sincere. We need to ask ourselves what is China’s strategy and why are they donating these?
“In the case of the defence college, which was built for close to $100 million via a Chinese loan, the Chinese were given diamond mining concessions,” adds Mliswa.
He goes on to say:
“If China was a sincere development partner, wouldn’t it have encouraged our government to build a state of the art Diamond cutting and polishing center for the same $100 million so that all the diamonds that we mine in Zimbabwe will be exported as finished products?
“Why encourage us to build a defence college? Who are we fighting? Why make so much investment in studying defence when you are failing to defend the leaking of your precious minerals?”
“The Chinese know that if they encourage us to build a state of the art cutting and polishing center they won’t be able to manipulate us so they divert our attention by creating an imaginary enemy and an imaginary war and urge us to build a defence college.”
Zwnews
