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Africa is changing, but not Zimbabwe
*Peter Godwin, Newsweek International
March 2005

http://msnbc.msn.com/id/7244593/site/newsweek/

Madhuku is the only man to have beaten Mugabe

March 28 issue - A month or so ago I found myself at a dinner in a New York loft with Lovemore Madhuku, a Zimbabwean pro-democracy activist (and head of the National Constitutional Assembly), who was here to collect the prestigious Northcote Parkinson Civil Courage Prize "for steadfast resistance to evil at great personal risk." He and I share a common background. Both Zimbabweans, one black and one white, we grew up in the eastern highlands there, on the border with Mozambique. Both of us went to Cambridge University in England to study law.

Madhuku is a slight, straight-backed man in his mid-30s, softly spoken and self-effacing. He sat silently, smiling, while various guests debated the conduct of the recent U.S. elections. One guest, annoyed at having recently been stopped by police for bicycling the wrong way around Washington Square Park, lamented that America was becoming a police state. "Have you ever been arrested?" our hostess asked Madhuku, trying to coax him into the conversation. He cocked his head and thought for a moment. "Eleven—no, 12 times." Several resulted in torture. After the last one he was so badly beaten by pro-government thugs that he was left in the bush for dead. The table fell silent.

Madhuku is no firebrand. He is a law professor at the University of Zimbabwe who happens to believe in the transforming benefits of representative government. But as such he's considered a mortal threat to the 25-year regime of Zimbabwe's aged president, Robert Mugabe. Next week Zimbabwe goes to the polls. But if it were up to Madhuku, democratic agitator that he is, the main opposition party, the Movement for Democratic Change, would boycott the ballot, so grotesquely skewed is the electoral playing field. Zimbabwe enjoys almost none of the freedoms necessary for meaningful elections; it doesn't have freedom of the press, of assembly, of movement.

Madhuku is the only man ever to have beaten Mugabe at the polls. It was a 2000 referendum to increase presidential term limits—and Mugabe, free from opposition for years, was caught off guard when the country voted against him, at the urging of the National Constitutional Assembly. Soon after, Mugabe ordered the seizure of commercial farms, and agricultural production collapsed. Hyperinflation, the flight of foreign capital, the collapse of infrastructure, in fact the world's fastest-shrinking economy: these are now the headlines of Mugabe's management resume. An estimated 70 percent of the country's adult workforce (nearly 3.5 million people) have fled to South Africa, Botswana, the U.K., North America, the Antipodes. Those who have left include the citizens the country needs most—the talented and the educated. Now Harare aircraft engineers work as nurse aides in Birmingham, and Mugabe says scornfully of them: "Some of our people are running away to wash the bodies of the elderly people in England."

This flight works to Mugabe's electoral benefit. Most of the migrants are opposition supporters—and since he forbids absentee voting, they've been effectively disenfranchised. It's also to his short-term economic advantage, as each of us outside the country supports an extended family back home. The country has become an emittance economy—with people its only real export.

U.S. President George W. Bush has called South African President Thabo Mbeki his "point man" on Zimbabwe. Zimbabweans like Madhuku find this deeply dispiriting. Mbeki has positively colluded with Mugabe's stratagems for self-preservation. If he wanted, Mbeki could straighten out Mugabe in a matter of weeks. His distaste for doing so may have something to do with the common political DNA shared by his ruling ANC and Mugabe's ZANU-PF. Both were liberation movements with guerrilla wings that saw off white rule.

Africa has been gradually democratizing since the end of the cold war. When there was an attempted coup recently in Togo, the West African community of nations, led by Nigeria, promptly nixed it and forced the putative dictator to stand down and make way for real elections. That's a fine example of the change in Africa's political dynamic—one that South Africa would do well to emulate in its own sphere of influence. But Mbeki shows little sign of doing so. Almost immediately after a South African government observer mission landed in Harare last week, its leader was announcing that the Zimbabwe elections would be free and fair.

So after Robert Mugabe's likely victory, spare a thought for Lovemore Madhuku and the members of his National Constitutional Assembly, putting themselves back in the line of fire in the pursuit of real democracy. They do not have oil. They may not threaten to blow up your cities. But that does not make their cause any less deserving.

*Godwin is the author of a memoir, "Mukiwa—A White Boy in Africa."
© 2005 Newsweek, Inc.

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