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Why all Africa needs Mugabe to go
Stephanie Nolen, Globe and Mail (Canada)
April 12, 2008

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In the chaotic days after Zimbabwe's national elections on March 29, I stole an hour to go and visit a friend who lives in a scrappy, struggling slum of Harare. I made my way up the dirt path to her two-room cement brick house, stuck my head around the half-open door and called, "Hello?" There was no answer, so I stepped inside and opened my mouth to call again. But the words died: My friend Prisca was lying on the battered old sofa. I could barely recognize her. She had lost 40 pounds since I had last seen her, a bit more than a year earlier. She'd lost her hair. There were oozing lesions on her raw, exposed scalp. And as she struggled to stand and greet me, I realized she could no longer walk.

Like one in five people in Zimbabwe, Prisca has HIV. She paid an almost unimaginable cost for her infection, losing nearly all her family and living with years of shame and ostracism. She fought back, and pioneered a new openness and acceptance for people with the virus. She is an activist of legendary reputation. A year ago, she terrified me as much as she impressed me, so steely was her will.

Now, she crumpled into sobs at the sight of me. Prisca has progressed to having AIDS. Because of Zimbabwe's political and economic implosion, she can no longer reliably obtain the anti-retroviral medication that kept her healthy. The AIDS support centre where she was a counsellor stopped paying salaries some time ago, when the Zimbabwe dollar passed the point of about five million to one, and it has since folded altogether. She has no money to feed the two AIDS orphans she is raising, no money to send them to school, no money for her drugs. She will not live long, like this.

But two weeks ago, Prisca used two canes and a couple of friends to get to the polling station, voting for Zimbabwe's opposition for the fourth time. Like many of her fellow citizens, she has vivid memories of the brutality of the war of liberation, and they are determined to stick to a peaceful path. For the past eight years, they have tried to improve their lives and bring change to the country through the ballot box.

Prisca is the primary reason why Zimbabwe matters - she and the 12 million people trapped along with her in the nightmare that is life under Robert Mugabe. But this country is important for other practical, geopolitical reasons as well - it has disproportionate significance for a southern African state with a few deposits of copper and platinum, and some once-lovely tourist destinations.

Conjuring up a British menace

Mr. Mugabe, about to enter the 29th year of his rule, is not only sucking the life from his country - "the vampire," they call him, in the neighbourhood where Prisca lives - but also holding back an entire continent.

In his constant railing about colonialism ("We have to keep the country out of the hands of Gordon Brown," I heard Mr. Mugabe say, at campaign rallies before the vote - as if the British Prime Minister were hunched over a map at 10 Downing St., plotting to get his hands on the charred remains of Zimbabwe), he keeps the country and the continent looking backward. Of course, many of Africa's problems can still be traced directly to colonialism, but today, most people would like simply to look forward. "I don't think there's anyone in Zimbabwe or the continent that would deny that we are a product of colonialism, the good and the bad," said Godfrey Chanetsa, once Mr. Mugabe's spokesman, now campaign manager for the independent presidential challenger Simba Makoni. "But I think there's also recognition that much now depends on us and what we are able to do for ourselves. People are looking for a way to move on."

Mr. Mugabe, larger and louder than life, is the chief obstacle.

He is one of the last leaders of a liberation struggle to hold power in Africa, and he regularly invokes those credentials, appearing on the state-owned broadcaster in his fatigues even though it has been nearly three decades since his movement put down its guns, and in any case, Mr. Mugabe never carried one himself. With his incessant reminders to his people of how much he sacrificed for them, he insists on a now outdated reverence for his generation.

The post-independence generation

Yet more than half of the population of sub-Saharan Africa was born after the last of the independence wars; that language is lost on them, their priorities are entirely different. South Africa's Nelson Mandela knew it, and left office after one term, nearly a decade ago. Mr. Mugabe's rhetoric no longer resonates with anyone - except the powerbrokers who stalk the corridors of the African Union in their bespoke suits.

He can seem like a caricature, but he does a superb job of illuminating Western hypocrisy. A few years ago, Britain moved to strip him of his knighthood after his land redistribution campaign violently forced a thousand or so white farmers off their land. But there was no outcry from the West when he presided over a campaign of execution against some 300,000 perceived political opponents in Matebeleland - they, of course, were black.

Mr. Mugabe's use of postcolonial rhetoric is genuinely brilliant. His words may sound outdated in the rest of the world, but there is frustration in much of Africa over unfair global trade deals, foreign aid that strips out as much as it provides, crippling repayments demanded by donor governments for odious debts racked up by ousted dictators. There is genuine and logical resentment of Western imperialism here - and Mr. Mugabe feeds craftily on that sentiment. That, combined with the respect still accorded to him as an
84-year-old and a veteran who supported other leaders in their countries' fights (Zimbabwe was a key front-line state in the war against apartheid), means that he steadily undermines the ability of organizations such as the African Union to stand up for any of the principles of governance they theoretically hold dear.

The AU has taken some good steps in the past few years - denying its presidency to dictatorial Sudan, sending a peacekeeping force to Darfur, and, just last month, invading the Comoros to oust a tinpot colonel from power. But the organization freezes in the face of Mr. Mugabe's bluster, and until it can cope with Zimbabwe, it will not be taken seriously. "The precedent is extremely worrisome," said Sisonke Msimang, program director for the Open Society Initiative for Southern Africa. "Now, when, say, Angola holds an election and refuses to release the presidential results, there is a regional precedent for the Angolans to point to." Mr. Mugabe's worst amendments to the constitution in recent years - restricting media and civil-society groups such as hers, broadening his presidential powers and undermining parliament - have emboldened other leaders who are reluctant democrats, she said, calling it "a copycat effect."

Mr. Mugabe is, of course, also the primary argument held up by all of those in the West who insist that it is useless and wasteful to give more aid to Africa, that the continent as a whole is a basket case, that it is absurd to think there could be transparent government or an end to corruption here. U.S. President George W. Bush, for example, cited Mr. Mugabe as his first reason for his refusal to sign on to the G8 plan for more aid in 2003.

Paying the Zimbabwe tax

Countries from Mozambique to Senegal have had free and democratic elections in the past few years, dictators in Togo and Liberia have been ousted, but the scale of disaster in Zimbabwe (where the currency hit 64 million to one U.S. dollar yesterday) eclipses any progress. Mr. Mugabe's reign of terror, with its skilled use of the props of political theatre such as farm invasions, youth militias and mass home demolitions, obscures the genuine progress made in other places. Tanzania, Zambia, Lesotho and a dozen other struggling democracies pay a "Zimbabwe tax" in their relations in the West, and it will remain as long as Mr. Mugabe holds power.

My once fierce friend Prisca, and the majority of Zimbabweans who, we now know, voted with her for change, continue to be denied by their state and let down by the rest of the continent, the rest of the world. The dearth of meaningful intervention by the West (just some half-hearted bank account freezes and travel restrictions on Mr. Mugabe and his cronies) puts a lie to any claims about intervention to support democracy and preserve human rights.

Meanwhile, the silence from Africa is agonizing.

"Zimbabweans' peaceful pursuit of democratic change forces the continent to hold up a mirror to itself and ask how committed it is to democracy," a long-time campaigner for change told me in Harare last week. "The longer they wait to act on Zimbabwe, the more ugliness there is in that mirror."

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