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Robert Mugabe Not For Sale
By Mukazo Mukazo Vunda
Imagine the millions of dollars Mugabe stands to gain if he turned his back on his own people and sold them down the river into slavery. Imagine the ease with which he could do this, and the obvious advantages: the open bank accounts abroad, the flows of cash from investors, from diamond smugglers, etc. Mugabe, today's most outspoken African leader, is actually, evidently not for sale. He is definitely not dancing to a foreign beat. He is his own man, setting his own rules in his own country.
Even if there are many bad ends to this story, I would rather put my welfare in this man's hands than in many of the leaders who preside over the lives of many Africans today. I am a conscious African, and I know that this world gives us very little choice. I know why I am not afraid to talk like this.
We live in strange times. The criterion for being an enemy of the system is strange, to use a euphemism. There are instances when two individuals saying the same thing receive different reactions. They silence one, while they tolerate another. One man will get blasted for demanding change, while another will not, even if his words and actions are damaging to more people than can be considered sane.
Yes. You guessed it: double standards.
This fact alone explains the reason many countries decide to gag their press.
Rather than resort to this uninformed move and bequeath our own people with a disadvantage, we should look at how others are maintaining a relatively free press, and enjoying the advantages of this, simultaneously using it to protect their own interests, of which maintaining a free press is an integral part.
I should set the record strait here before I start sounding like a man condoning despotism. I am too enlightened to make such an error and can tap myself on the back for this. I thank God I am not as blunt headed as many who cannot see the connection between the misery in which they live and the unenlightened despotism that rules their land, without looking at the whole picture that also affects the depth of this.
Having said this, I should remind those fighting for a democratic Zimbabwe to look around at other countries on the continent that have "democratised", countries which removed leaders who were much the same as Robert Mugabe and ended up with worse leaders than they hoped for, nor deserve.
Better the devil you know, people.
Rather than call for change for the sake of change, Zimbabweans should look at the examples of failed democracies, on the continent and beyond, and realise that their search for a democratic future can get hijacked, or is actually initiated and powered by foreign interests. Too much is involved in this issue.
The trick is to sit down with Mugabe, and, using the resources he has, create a system which cannot be abused in this way. I think that Mugabe is a sensible person and will see the reason in this, if we keep in mind that he is his own man, and has the interest of the people at heart. The man is mortal, and will have to go eventually. This is the only chance he has to give unto his people the gift which matters most: stable governance which is democratic, and meritocratic.
Rather than a campaign to democratise, Africans should be launching campaigns of prevention. The welfare of people cannot be an issue of dice throwing. No prosperous country allows the kinds of leaders and regimes we get in African countries to preside over their welfare. This is counter intuitive. Most leaders in these countries are cultivated for the post, so to say. Most, if not all, have a long history of holding similar positions in society, which prepares them for this demanding post of authority. Zimbabweans should not allow themselves to wake up tomorrow and find that they have contrived to create a hopeless situation, and worse, they are pathetically helpless to do a thing about it.
Here, I feel that it is essential to go down memory lane to make a point. I hope that your long term memory is intact enough for you to empathise with me.
Remember the days of Idi Amin Dada? There is one aspect of my memory of the era that puzzled me until recently, which I have managed to pin down with words, thanks in large part to the Mugabe incident.
At the time of Idi Amin's rise to power, I was a child just learning to read and write. I can still remember some caricatures of the man in newspapers, the only images I, and I believe many children who could read, understood and looked forward to, including cartoon strips of Garth, etc. In these occasional caricatures and cartoon strips in my country, Idi Amin would feature, mostly depicted engaged in rough, bully like activities. One such caricature depicted him in a fit of mirth, rolling on the ground laughing at a distraught Mobutu whom he had just pulled a nasty prank on.
The curious thing about the whole episode is that, unlike the more informed adults, children in my country admired Idi Amin, and I would be surprised if this was not so in the rest of Africa. If a poll had been cast among my age mates at the time, then the majority would have voted in favour of Idi Amin, as opposed to other leaders.
I know that many will jump to the opportunity here, and say, "There! You see! One of their own is admitting that they are naturally savage cannibals," in much the same way that many jumped to a similar conclusion in the past by accusing a writer of admitting that Africans are naturally lazy.
Reports of cannibalism, rape, murder, etc. were readily available to our young eyes and ears, but then a situation where children, many of whom cannot even harm a fly, admire an evidently evil man deserves more scrutiny. Something else was at stake here. Something that Idi Amin did which fit into what we expected of an African leader, which we felt was missing in all the others.
Do not forget that a child does not know that its welfare is linked to how competent a ruler is. A child does not know the importance of role models in society. What a child can readily recognize is oppression and the resulting inferior status. As Africans in times when this should have been a relic, we were happy that someone was doing something about this, albeit the wrong way. Still, we did not know better.
Idi Amin had nerve, more nerve than even the most demonic of African leaders, genuine too because it was not restricted to a particular group or race, and this is what we responded to. He seemed, to our young eyes, to be the only African leader who dared to do what mattered to us most. He stood up to the man, faced him strait in the face, and down, and though we understood that he did not have the might to fight an outright attack from the man, he won, to our young eyes, in a way that mattered most.
When we looked around with our young eyes, we saw African leaders with a proclivity for tears, and others who persecuted and murdered what to us seemed like defenceless opponents. We then witnessed these same leaders grovel when the man turned up, and lost faith in them. This was evidence that their tough stance and image at home was not genuine. A tough man does not have a master. We realised that their tough image was mere desperate attempts to preserve the land the man had given them, in the way the man wanted. We knew this fact, and knew too that these men were cowards after all.
We were children, but defeated ones. We carried our heads low, and the behaviour of our adults did not help this. We knew that things were at their worst when we saw our own leaders grovel to the man in this way. They sent out a clear message of whom we were, and how we should behave in the presence of the man, and we hated this. Even leaders who were quite well rounded like Kenneth David Kaunda, who barked against the home and foreign front, did not appear to go all the way, to our young eyes, like Idi Amin Dada did when he appeared on the scene.
Before then, we looked longingly at the white heroes passing by in expensive cars, waving at them all the time as if to share in their glory; we looked with sad expressions and blank eyes at the lenses of western cameras, knowing that they had come to film our miserable state. This reaction contrasts sharply with the joy we felt when Idi Amin Dada made a group of westerners carry him through the streets, and proves my point.
Adults underestimate the importance that children attach to some truths about life. We view our children as little people oblivious to reality as we experience it, who merely react to the world in their own childish way, more emotion than reason. Usually we are right, but often we are wrong, and this is largely due to memory. Our busy adult lives prevent us from looking closely at our childhood years, from realising how important some things were to us, and how conscious we were of the realities the adults experienced.
My very first memories of this are images of children crying when they misspelt words or failed to add things up correctly on the blackboard. This crying seems to adults to be nothing more than a childish reaction to failure, a feeling sorry for the self restricted to the moment of failure. But it is much more than this. We know in those tender years what education means to our lives. We know why some drive expensive cars and others do not. Being kids, untested yet, we do not know what the future has in store for us. What separates us from this knowledge is the chalk in our hands, and the blackboard in front of us.
This is how seriously we take the issue of education and the status that comes from success in it, which also opens up a whole range of other opportunities. This is why the tears flow so abundantly, why it is so painful when we discover that we cannot do it properly. This is why we hide our failures from the rest, why we loath those moments when we are forced to share this secret.
The best knowledge of the day has discovered that these tender years turn out to be the formative years of our personalities. Already, at the time, we can read the signs of the present, and project from this an attainable or non attainable future. We can rebel from the system when we figure success in it is not reserved for us, and refuse to trade respect and obedience for a promise we will never get fulfilled anyway.
Right now, there is study going on in England based on this fact. Here, they discovered that black boys start off well, even better in school than their Asian and White counterparts, female or male. Later, they start lagging behind, the majority eventually falling out completely. As they turn to the streets, embracing street culture and the baggy trousers, their female counterparts continue to improve.
This study, led by a female MP of Carribean origin, blames this on the fact that the system, and the products of this, including most of the teachers, black or white, are prejudiced towards our more mentally and physically energetic boys. Unable to relate with this boisterousness, it is seen as a danger to society rather than a gift to it. Rather than work on it to improve the state, they try to dam it, tending to equate it with hyperactivity or the violence equated with black males generally. Using the white child as a model, they try to shape our boys to fit his shoes, creating a negative response since the boys obviously end up feeling misunderstood and rejected.
The Idi Amin incident is in many ways repeated in the story of Robert Mugabe. This time, the people caught up in the controversy are adults who know better. There is at base a very valid claim, and around this are other, complicating factors which tend to make Mugabe untouchable. There is general inactivity on the part of Africans because of this.
The issue of land reforms happens to be a valid position, something that was inevitable, if you think about it. Knowledge of the mentality of Zimbabweans and the zeal with which the movement was embraced also reveals that the man was under pressure to move that way for a long time, but held out, a fact that can also be used against him.
The situation is made more complex when the issue of democracy is inserted. The fact that the man has stayed so long in power, this itself not a bad thing if one looks at the arrangement of Zimbabwean politics to date, an inevitable inheritance from a more oppressive UDI system, and a world of double standards, complicates matters further. Accusations that Mugabe is raising the land issue to prolong his reign are also a step into more complex waters, not to mention the ugly, violent and murderous developments we have witnessed to date.
Before we allow ourselves to be sung to sleep, as we always are around such issues, we should know that the questions clouded over by recent developments are still the ones to which we should be trying to find answers.
When is it right to raise this issue, and when is it not? Which country on this planet would not have done the same, even earlier than Zimbabwe has done, if they were in the same shoes? Who stands to loose, and who will gain if the land issue is taken to its conclusion?
Should we sympathise with the white farmers who lose their land, or with the black people of the country now living in squatters, most of them descended from people who lived in these very fertile regions, whose ancestors survived the genocide that preceded the seizure of these lands by white settlers?
It is time for the world to accept the simple fact that the land issue cannot be wished away. In fact, attempts at this by constriction of the country through sanctions, or removing Mugabe, will have to include performing a lobotomy on the entire country, a thing that has been done in other countries, and lays the stage for a worse situation in the near future in which the reclaiming of the land will be more vicious when this forced distraction is seen for what it is. Rather, the entire world should step in and contribute to efforts to solve a very real problem, to see how they can appease both the white farmers, and the embittered black population, who actually have a right, as all human beings, to land.
Let us remove all the complicating aspects and remain with the land issue alone. Rather than look at this in the context of Zimbabwe, we should look at it in the context of the history and present of the entire world if we are going to get a better picture of the whole.
The people of Zimbabwe won their independence. One of the many things they fought for, and many died fighting for, is the land. It is simple. There is no special time when they can claim this, no special set of circumstances that need to apply before they can do this (democracy here); there is no particular type of leader under whose rule such demands can be made, and, since good leadership is essential for any similar movement, a good, conscious leader is a necessity. A connection between these things does not need to be sought, except, suspiciously, the last.
Talk about the reparation for slavery movement and the alleged impossibility of establishing guilt, and here you have an issue where guilt can easily be established, and the property taken by force is still there for all to see, and the world has the nerve to paint Mugabe in evil colours.
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