Zimbabwe, the Scandal of Africa

David Aikman

The average American—or average Irishman or Frenchman, for that matter—could be forgiven for not knowing the answer to the following question: which country in the world has inflation of more than 15,000 percent, unemployment of 80 percent, and the lowest life-expectancy rate in the world (age 37 for men)? The answer—Zimbabwe—is not only the scandal of Africa today, but also the current scandal of world politics.

The immediate crisis in Zimbabwe is that the country’s president, Robert Mugabe, seems quite determined not to permit opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai to assume political power in the country. In an initial election March 29, Tsvangirai, leader of the political party Movement for Democratic Change, won 47.9 percent of the vote, to Mugabe’s 43.2 percent. The election results, however, were not released until May 2, however, leading the opposition to charge that Mugabe’s party, ZANU-PF (Zimbabwe African People’s Union—Patriotic Front), had suppressed the results.

Trouble was brewing even before the election results were released and a run-off date of June 27—required because no candidate had secured an outright majority of the votes—was announced. ZANU-organized militias began a systematic campaign to kill, rape, and intimidate opposition political activists. By the third week in June, more than 70 oppositionists were said to have been killed by the militias, and dozens had been beaten up or raped. Diplomatic observers from the US and the UK were even harassed or had their vehicles forced off the road by Mugabe’s thugs as they sought to monitor what was happening in Zimbabwe. “The MDC will never be allowed to rule this country—never ever,” Mugabe told local business people recently in Zimbabwe’s second city Bulawayo, referring to the opposition Movement for Democratic Change. “Only God who appointed me will remove me—not the MDC, not the British.” The MDC Secretary-General Tendai Biti was arrested in mid-June after returning from South Africa. He currently sits in a jail in Harare potentially facing the death penalty for treason.

It certainly looks as if the Almighty’s help will be needed in removing Mugabe from power. Robert Mugabe, 84, has ruled Zimbabwe in an increasingly brutal style since assuming control as president 28 years ago. He came to power on a wave of black African nationalist euphoria after forcing an illegal white-minority regime to sue for peace in the face of fierce international economic sanctions and a guerrilla war. (The regime was “illegal” because its leader, Prime Minister Ian Smith, had declared independence unilaterally from the British colonial rulers of what was called Rhodesia in 1965).

Under a power-sharing agreement brokered by Zimbabwean moderate political leaders, the white minority of two percent, who owned the best agricultural land in the country, were initially protected against land expropriation by resentful ZAPU politicians. The well-run white farms were lucrative foreign-currency earners for Zimbabwe, gaining the country the reputation as southern Africa’s breadbasket. A UK-financed program to enable Africans to buy more of the good agricultural land from whites, called “willing-buyer-willing-seller,” did bring more black Africans into the successful farming economy, but wasn’t going fast enough for Mugabe. He ratcheted up pressure on white farmers. Under a forcible land reform program initiated in 2000, militia groups—often comprising former anti-white black guerrilla leaders—intimidated white farmers off their land and out of the country, sometimes murdering them in the process.

Mugabe already had plenty of experience in political intimidation. During the early 1980’s he had launched a campaign of murder against the minority Ndebele tribe in the south of the country. He organized an infamous “Fifth Brigade,” trained by North Koreans as a sort of personal military hit-squad independent of normal lines of command in the army, to carry out these killings. Thousands of Ndebele supporters of ZAPU (Zimbabwe African People’s Union), a rival political party, were murdered by the Fifth Brigade before the killing stopped in 1987. There are many observers of Zimbabwe who believed Mugabe should be tried for crimes against humanity.

In 2005, Mugabe sent out his militias again on Operation Murambatsvina, a purported effort to crack down on black marketeers in the shanty towns that had sprung up around Zimbabwe’s cities, and to move the inhabitants of the shanties into new housing. The crackdown was brutal, but the new housing never appeared.

Meanwhile, with agriculture devastated because of the farm takeovers, Zimbabwe’s economy deteriorated and life expectancy from the 1990s declined to the lowest in the world. Infant mortality rose to from 51 to 81 deaths per thousand births, which puts it at about the rank of 182nd amongst global nations. The number of people infected by HIV-AIDS is about 1.8 million. Unemployment rose to 80 percent.

Mugabe’s long survival in power must at least in part be attributed to the apparent unwillingness to criticize him of other African leaders. What may have been the proverbial straw breaking that solidarity may have been Tendai Biti’s arrest several days ago. The presidents of neighbouring Botswana and Zambia have openly criticized Mugabe. Tanzania recently broke diplomatic relations, and its foreign minister said that there was “every sign that the elections [scheduled for June 27] will never be free or fair.” Former UN Secretary-General Kofi Anan, two former secretary-generals of the Organisation of African Unity (before it turned into the African Union) have called for a free election in Zimbabwe and an end to the violence. Perhaps the most outspoken critic of Mugabe has been UK prime minister Gordon Brown, who said that Zimbabwe was being led by a “cabal of criminals.” But the key to any international effort to pressure Mugabe to relinquish power will probably be South Africa’s president Thabo Mbeki, whose friendship with Mugabe has obviously so far inhibited him from making any harsh criticism of Mugabe.

To explain Zimbabwe’s descent into destitution and brutal despotism, one ought to look at the personal experience of Mugabe himself, who spent ten years in prison in Rhodesia during the 1960s and 1970s when it was ruled by whites. Though South Africa’s Nelson Mandela overcame his own personal bitterness towards whites after 27 years of imprisonment and led South Africa into a miraculously harmonious transition to black majority rule in the 1990s, the bitterness in Mugabe at his treatment by whites seems only to have deepened over the years.

Britain, moreover, might not be entirely blameless. When the controversial Clare Short was made secretary of state for international development in Tony Blair’s Labour Party government in 1997, she said in a letter to Zimbabwean agricultural officials that she felt Britain no longer had “any responsibility to meet the costs of land purchase in Zimbabwe.” She went on to write, “We are a new government from diverse backgrounds, without links to former colonial interests. My own origins are Irish and, as you know, we were colonised, not colonisers.”

In other words, because Short, as someone with Irish connections, despised British colonialism, she would recommend that Britain no longer help finance the “willing-buyer-willing-seller” program that was leading to a gradual improvement of black-managed agriculture in Zimbabwe. In the 1979 Lancaster House talks in London negotiating the terms of Rhodesia’s transition to Zimbabwe, considerable financial commitments to Zimbabwe had been made by the British government. Three years after the Clare Short letter, Mugabe’s intimidation of white farmers began.

In the second half of June, MDC political leaders were split on whether they should boycott the June 27 run-off election or contest it. It seemed to be Hobson’s choice. A boycott would leave Mugabe in power without restraint, whereas an election almost certainly would not be free and might enable Mugabe to stay in power through the power of thugs. Either way, the ordeal of Zimbabwe remains the scandal of Africa.  

Dr. Aikman, a Senior Fellow of the Trinity Forum, was for many years senior correspondent for Time.

Columns, David Aikman, Global Culture, Good and Evil, Leadership, War and Peace, Tue 24 Jun 2008