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Is Mugabe misunderstood or a despot gone worse?
The West has imposed and maintained sanctions against Zimbabwe for reasons other than the land redistribution programme being unfair to their own. Besides, President Robert Mugabe is not a dictator, argues HARRISON KINYANJUI
IS THERE ANOTHER SIDE TO THE crisis facing Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe? Is he a victim of a Western conspiracy or villain gone out of control? It would appear there is a little of both, but the besieged and increasingly paranoid head of state is not doing himself any favours by ruthlessly clamping down on the opposition.
The latest crisis in the Southern Africa state started after the government violently disrupted a "prayer rally" on March 11 convened by the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) party. Morgan Tsvangirai, leader of MDC and Zimbabwe's leading opposition leader, was battered and arrested by police. That incident, among others has, recently placed Zimbabwe under international scrutiny.
Against a backdrop of bold self-tags as a "freedom fighter" mandated to "liberate" Zimbabwe from President Mugabe's "tyranny" and "authoritarian, despotic dictatorship," Tsvangirai has gradually overshadowed other Zimbabwean opposition figures in the unfolding political drama in the country.
His faction of the MDC chants the mantra of stiffer economic sanctions against Zimbabwe (which are orchestrated by Western governments), even imploring generally sympathetic independent sources to halt all economic subventions and ancillary assistance to the country. Regardless of the counter effects such sanctions have on an already bad situation, Tsvangirai and his team view them as a fundamental tool in coercing President Mugabe to leave office.
The economic situation in Zimbabwe is an unhappy one, and no one should pretend that a simple solution exists, packaged in a new political leader, in lieu of Mugabe. The economy has so far endured the concerted flailing and vicious assaults from Western powers mainly on account of Zimbabwe's land reform programmes.
At the core of Zimbabwe's crises is land ownership. How did two per cent of Zimbabwe's population (Caucasians, mostly British) end up owning over 50 per cent of the land?
Britons' occupation of Zimbabwe can be traced to the last half of the 19th Century when Cecil Rhodes, leader of British South African Company (BSAC), duped Lobengula, Matabeleland leader then, into signing over to the British vast concessions of land under his chieftainship, ostensibly to exploit mineral and natural resources in exchange for a mere 1,000 rifles, a paltry 100 British Pounds, and ammunition to boot. Lobengula never imagined he was in the process parting with the land of his ancestors!
Following this deal, hundreds of British "settlers" settled on Lobengula's domain. This so infuriated Lobengula that he confronted Rhodes. But Rhodes informed him that the document he had signed had actually assigned the territory over to the BSAC.
Lobengula then took this case to the Privy Council, and predictably, lost. The land was gone, and with it political and economic power. As a result, the poisoned justifications of legality spun by the Privy Council became a cloak to seal Rhodes' theft and conclusively formed the foundation to perpetuate the colonial domination of Zimbabwe by Britain. The chief became a stranger in the land of his ancestors, and ever since, Zimbabwean Africans have been made to feel, and treated like aliens in their motherland.
AT THAT NASCENT STAGE, none of the so-called civilised nations that are now imposing sanctions on Zimbabwe using "human rights abuses" as a convenient smokescreen intervened to right this grand theft, even though its notoriety was known to them. Yet in a self-righteous posture (and being the chief architects of Zimbabwe's economic decline), they are now incessantly pontificating about Mugabe's failed governance as being the prime cause of Zimbabwe's melt down.
Take the US government, for instance. On December 21, 2001, President George W. Bush signed into law Zimbabwe Democracy and Economic Recovery Act of 2001 with the aim of cutting off all financial aid to Harare, including all debt cancellations that Zimbabwe would otherwise have been eligible to! This piece of legislation was sponsored by Senator William Frist and co-sponsored by four others including Senator Hillary Clinton.
How could this deliberate freezing of grants and aid not have negatively impacted Zimbabwe's financial standing, even marginally, within a global economy? With such measures, should it then surprise anyone that Zimbabwe would churn out the highest inflation rate in the world? By contrast, would the British economy survive under similar sanctions and assault?
In their silent complicity with the colonising powers of Lobengula's time, the Western powers, as it were, sabotaged universal justice in much the same way they have done to Zimbabwe's economy under the guise of "targeted economic sanctions" perpetrated by their multinational corporations and financial institutions.
They have done these not because they question the land redistribution programme as inherently unfair, but because the ultimate losers within the programmes' framework are their kin. Had the US been so objectively concerned with "human rights abuses" across the world, it would have passed similar legislation before the Rwandan genocide spilled out of hand.
In the 21st Century global economic situation that is racially-inclined, Mugabe's Zimbabwe presents a classical case of the bleak odds confronting a black-led African nation struggling to survive against the relentless onslaught of the West's economic might.
Clearly, the target of the economic sanctions is the crippling of his government, as though Zimbabwean "problems" lie with Mugabe himself. Perhaps they do. But this reasoning deliberately fails to differentiate between the government and its policies, managed by Mugabe on the one hand, and the Zimbabwean economy on the other, which is manned by a heterogeneous mix of actors, majority of whom have completely no say in, and are actively removed from engineering his policies.
Even at a mundane level, not all Zanu-PF functionaries are beneficiaries of the tokenism that Mugabe is accused of, yet they remain targets of the sanctions. The targeted economic sanctions impacts the nation of Zimbabwe as a whole, and these innocent actors within the country's economy become the real casualties of the battle. This amounts to an infringement on their right to earn an honest and just economic reward for their labour, free from external pressures.
In the circumstances, one is tempted to inquire: Given the prevailing situation in Zimbabwe, would a new leader handle the land reform programme in a differently especially in light of the obligations within the pre-independence Lancaster House agreements of 1979?
More specifically, would such a leader reinstate the inequitable ownership of vast tracts of land in the guise of "ameliorating" the suffering of ordinary Zimbabweans resulting from the sanctions?
Theoretically, with a change of government, it would be simplistic to hold all things equal, especially policy issues but it is safe to surmise that practically, were such a new Zimbabwean leader sympathetic to West's (specifically Britain's) interests, he/she would likely abandon, or altogether reverse the land reform programme now being pursued by Mugabe.
The result would be no better a situation than Lobengula found himself in – meaningless fiefdom with no land. In the end, the clamour for the ouster of Mugabe that preoccupies Western governments is a thinly veneered clamour for the resumption of the old order of land distribution and proprietorship in Zimbabwe. It was an order that bore them maximum economic benefit at a minimum cost.
Often, land repossession in Zimbabwe is described by the Western media as land seizures, akin to some violent robbery perpetrated against the hitherto occupiers.
HOWEVER, THESE ARE ISsues more complex in fact than often presented, requiring radical solutions that may be unpalatable to the former Zimbabwe colonists. Nevertheless, the unhappy outcome is a biased perception of Zimbabwe that bankrupts the reservoir of the unspoken goodwill any nation enjoys among reasonable men. That is precisely the intention of Western governments: to demonise Mugabe's governance of Zimbabwe and deprive his government of any kind of assistance from rational governments around the globe.
Land as an economic asset and a tool of political and economic power has been a universally explosive issue between the subdued and the subduing powers. For Zimbabwe, 20 years have proven inadequate to solve the issue primarily due to lack of goodwill from the former colonial powers. The result is what we have to date.
Britain reneged on its commitment to underwrite the land redistribution process, provoking Zimbabwe government to proceed in the manner it did. This has met with hostility from the West, particularly Britain. Europe has gone further and declared Mugabe a persona non grata, allegedly because he is a dictator. Whether Mugabe is a despot is open to debate, though some of his actions are an affront to democracy and good governance but the verdict remains in the province of the Zimbabwean suffrage.
Unfortunately, the sovereignty of Zimbabwe has been enmeshed with the land redistribution issue, to the point that his legitimacy as a leader is being questioned and correlatively, a reluctant and fragmented opposition is being propped up by the West to challenge Mugabe.
Mugabe is a president of Zimbabwe though questions still linger about the process through which he has sustained himself in office.
Dismissing Mugabe's leadership as dictatorial merely because his land reform programme is unfavourable to the West is unhelpful. For, were Mugabe's chief opponent — Tsvangirai as popular as he has been portrayed by the West, he would have won the 2002 elections even with the process heavily tilted in favour of the incumbent a la Kenya.
At a moral level, two issues emerge: first, if the 2002 national elections were as badly flawed as Tsvangirai alleged, the most honourable thing for him (and perhaps as the most potent protestation at the alleged electoral larceny), would have been to abdicate his parliamentary seat. He failed to do so. Meanwhile, he has left to the Zimbabwean justice system the tedious task of judging the unfairness of Zimbabwe's electoral process.
If Tsvangirai strongly believes in the democratic process as a just means to oust a totalitarian regime, then he ought to await the next elections in Zimbabwe to employ the enfranchisement process to effect the change he passionately espouses.
More importantly, however serious the injuries inflicted on Tsvangirai after the prayer rally on March 11, the issue of where to place the blame still needs to be cleared.
In Kenya, for instance, when Rev. Timothy Njoya was attacked in a similar fashion at a political rally outside Parliament buildings, he neither blamed nor exonerated the then President Daniel arap Moi of the attack. To his credit, Njoya singled out a specific culprit for the brutal attack – a policeman, who was subsequently arraigned in court.
Remarkably, Rev. Njoya ultimately chose to forgive the perpetrator, who on his part never alleged that President Moi gave instructions to beat Rev. Njoya. In that case, it became self evident that the police officer was liable at a personal level for overstepping the established legal mandate to maintain law and order.
At face value, there is apparently no difference between the beating of Rev. Njoya and Tsvangirai's recent experience, yet President Mugabe is being cast by Western news media as the merciless and tyrant villain, harshly wielding the brutal force of State power against a perceived martyr who is engaged in a relentless pursuit of the freedom of his people from the oppression of the unyielding despotic tyrant on a suicidal mission to thrust an entire nation into economic doom.
To the West, the person to halt this maddening plunge of Zimbabwe into economic and political abyss is, for the time being, Morgan Tsvangirai, leader of one of MDC's factions. But he too needs to undergo the same litmus test that Mugabe faces. Is he that at all, or is he their unwitting pawn, playing into their schemes? Beyond opposing and ousting Mugabe, what compelling vision does he, and indeed all the other Zimbabwe opposition figures, hold of Zimbabwe's land ownership order and of disentangling Zimbabwe from its deepening economic morass?
Would they be any better than Mugabe? Ultimately, Zimbabwe's fate lies in how the land issue is tackled. It cannot be reversed nor can it be accelerated without completely destroying the badly damaged agricultural sector. Herein lies Zimbabwe's ultimate dilemma and Mugabe's fate.
Harrison Kinyajui is an advocate of the High Court of Kenya
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