How to kill a country: Bob Mugabe

How to kill a country: Bob Mugabe

By Mondli Makhanya
Sunday Times - Johannesburg, RSA

At some point it just stopped being funny. The ranting and raving of one Robert Gabriel Mugabe, that is.

There was a time when the Zimbabwean leader's penchant for outlandish rhetoric could elicit a giggle and a bemused headshake.

Ever the great orator, Mugabe would respond to criticism by unleashing a torrent of anti-colonial and anti-Western bile. He would tell Tony Blair to "keep his Britain and we will keep our Zimbabwe", and accuse Western nations of wanting to recolonise his country. He would rant about how self-sufficient Zimbabwe was and how it did not need a leg-up from anybody.

But it stopped being funny as Mugabe intensified his destruction of the very country whose birth he had midwifed.

Over the past half-decade or so he has given us the definitive ABC on how to kill a country.

Although the signs of decline were present then, the Zimbabwe of six years ago was a functional republic.

There were sporadic fuel shortages, but with patience and at a monetary premium you could fill up your car.

The economy was teetering but the factories worked and the bourse ticked along. The currency was heading south but it was still nowhere near the Weimar republic denominations you see today.

And even though Mugabe and Zanu-PF were showing clear disdain for human rights and democracy, Zimbabweans were optimistic that their country would soon turn the corner.

There was hope and expectation in the air. The vibe on the streets of Harare, Bulawayo, Gweru and Victoria Falls felt a little like South Africa in the late ’80s.

All of that has been replaced by misery and hopelessness.

In six years the world has witnessed a phenomenon rarely seen in modern history ­ the unravelling of a society.

Those who know the Zimbabwean landscape will tell you the rot started to set in around 1997 when Mugabe, desperate for popular acclaim, caved in to the demands of rebellious war veterans and gave 50,000 of them an unbudgeted-for pay cheque of nearly US$3000 each.

Zimbabwe never recovered from that audacious raid on the treasury and the economy went into sharp decline. By 2000, as the Zimbabwean economy was about to be admitted to the casualty ward, the people started grumbling loudly. They rejected Mugabe's constitutional reform proposals and made it clear they would throw their weight behind the newly formed opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) in that year's parliamentary election.

It was the thought of losing to this upstart party that unchained the Godzilla.

Mugabe first went for the white farmers ­ the very people who had feted his party and helped build its Harare headquarters. In an agricultural society where white farmers still hogged the most arable land, to many they represented the last vestige of colonial rule. They were an easy target.

War veterans led the charge and before long the Zimbabwean countryside was a lawless mass.

Commercial farming, the backbone of the country's economy, was destroyed.

Once the virus of lawlessness had set in, spreading it was easy.

The veterans turned on Zanu-PF's political opponents. Beatings, abductions, rape and torture became normal political conduct.

Looking back, it is not difficult to understand how Zimbabwe arrived at the precipice it is on today. One thing was always going to lead to the next as the country struggled to maintain its fabric.

Once the government had decided to allow rule by violent mobs, it was only logical that those sectors of society most threatened by the lawlessness would fight back using the only instrument available to them ­ the law.

The farmers, media, civil society organisations and the abused turned to the courts for relief.

Zimbabwe's judges, having built a culture of jurisprudence in the post-independence era, almost without fail ruled in favour of order and orderliness.

Then they were in the firing line. Judges were harassed, forced into retirement and the Bench was packed with Zanu-PF sympathisers.

With the opposition crushed, the media and the judiciary under siege, the economy destroyed and poverty rampant, Zimbabwe will enter 2006 officially in the category of basket case.

When United Nations (UN) head of emergency relief Jan Egeland pointed out the dire state of the country’s people after a visit to Zimbabwe the other week, Mugabe responded in typical style by dismissing the envoy as a "Norwegian ... (who) couldn't speak proper English" and accused him of being a Blair pawn.

"When he left the country he said nasty things about us," Mugabe thundered. "I am going to tell the (UN) secretary-general not to send us men and women who are not his own but are agents of the British. We don't trust men from his office any more.”

And it just wasn't funny any more.

Sunday Times
Jan 1, 2006