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Mugabe's
spurious Africanism
Chido Makunike
May 05, 2005
http://www.newzimbabwe.com/pages/chido9.12602.html
ZIMBABWE has been
in the news all over the world a lot in the last few years. An odd phenomenon
of the associated high profile of its controversial president Robert Mugabe
has been the deeply disparate passions he rouses in different audiences.
The recent general
election his ruling ZANU-PF won, though not without a lot of controversy,
showed that the rural areas are largely where his support base remain,
from the heady days of 1980 and soon after, when the whole country was
behind him. The urban areas that are traditionally thought to be the locus
of the intelligentsia of a country continue to be repulsed by the man,
his party and their message and performance, a trend that began in the
last few elections.
A central part of Mugabe's message is that even if there has in recent
years been widespread decline in all sectors of performance, wiping out
many of the
impressive early gains of the post 1980 Independence era, there are still
important reasons nationalists and Pan-Africanists should continue to
support him. Those reasons, the argument continues, include the fact that
he and his government are under siege from a hostile, racist western world
that has not forgiven him for seizing farmland from "their white kith
and kin," who dominated productive farmland up to 2000.
According to Mugabe, those western countries have spared no effort to
make the country suffer for his radical deeds at sudden land re-distribution
from 2000 onwards. The country's hyper-inflation, reduced hard-currency
earning capacity as all productive sectors experience decline, the shortages
of many basic goods, hyper-inflation and the many other indices of decline
under his tutelage are all somehow linked to this purpoted diabolical
western conspiracy.
While many Zimbabweans have rejected this as absurd scapegoating for failure,
this is a message that has found a receptive audience in many parts of
the black and developing worlds. To many present or recently past victims
of group discrimination and marginalisation, Mugabe comes off like a towering
hero.
How many leaders, particularly in a donor-dependent Africa struggling
to find its feet in the world, dare to tell off US president George Bush
or British Prime Minister Tony Blair the way Mugabe does? And he not only
does so fearlessly, but eloquently and using examples of these countries'
marauding tendencies that one cannot fault. Their pretext for going into
Iraq and razing that country to the ground is one such example that Mugabe
uses to point out how his harshest critics are far from paragons of virtue
in their own conduct.
As such Mugabe has successfully cast himself in the mould of a great Africanist,
and at least rhetorical defender of larger developing world interests
against the depredations the powerful western countries would like to
visit upon them. Many people all over the world obviously feel there is
a vacuum in that regard, and Mugabe would seem to fill it very nicely.
Allegations of human
rights violations, stolen elections, corruption and economic mismanagement
can then all be dismissed as nothing more than the expected propaganda
of that hostile western world Mugabe is bravely challenging. Or even if
true, the truth of the suffering that Zimbabweans experience at the hands
of Mugabe somehow pale in importance to the greater "good" he is doing
being a spokesman for the downtrodden of the rest of the world!
The many reasons that
Africans and many others across the globe have a mixed, love-hate relationship
with the western world are obvious and many. As a Zimbabwean who once
greatly admired Mugabe but have little respect for him any more, it is
not difficult for me to understand his emotional appeal to an African
who listens to his rhetoric from afar and does not have to live under
his ruler ship.
But our standard for our leaders must be much higher now than how well
they articulate our many resentments at past and present, real and perceived
mistreatment from the West. It might have been largely enough to rally
us to support the continent's various liberation struggles many decades
ago, but today the challenges are quite different. Among them are unemployment,
HIV/AIDS and many other chronic health issues, development of human capital
and physical infrastructure, agricultural and industrial productivity,
unfair trade terms and so on.
The solutions to these
great challenges will continue to elude us as long as we allow ourselves
to be mesmerized by rulers who appeal more to emotions over past wrongs
and their present effects, than they do to what concrete plans they have
to deal with those challenges. Twenty-five years after the old (81) and
now very westernized, comfortable and bourgeoisie Mr. Mugabe came into
power as a scrappy guerilla leader, he has rhetorically reverted to a
role he is no longer fit to play!
Instead of merely telling us about the great structural inequalities of
the world, he should be using his power to show us his ideas for strengthening
Africa for its future generations to have a chance not to be the permanent
marginalised of the world. Instead the crafty old Mugabe talks "radical"
as his promising country crumbles from lack of inspired leadership and
ideas.
The man who scores a lot of points among many sectors all across Africa
and beyond for "telling off the white man" builds a lavish personal mansion
in Harare at a time of deep hunger and deprivation among his fellow citizens.
He spends millions of dollars in hard currency to buy fighter jets from
China when many companies are operating sub-optimally or closing down
because the country does not have enough foreign currency to import essential
raw materials, worsening an already critical economic situation.
For the same reason,
fuel queues unheard of in many poorer countries have been endemic in Zimbabwe
for more than six years. Pictures of that embarrassing situation have
been beamed all across the world again in the last few weeks that fuel
has virtually dried up. He, his fashionable youngish wife and their large
entourages still somehow find the wherewithal and justification in this
environment of deprivation to make trips to the shopping capitals of south-east
Asia, having been banned from the Western capitals that were their first-choice
playgrounds. Despite the travel ban imposed on him and his cronies by
many western countries, many of them find ways to continue their close
ties to countries they have been coached to attack as the source of all
our problems.
The "land" that he makes such a hullabaloo about having reclaimed from
the whites, which reason some in Africa and beyond still respect him for,
despite
his many sins and failures, becomes less productive every year because
of the many associated effects of widespread economic implosion, further
impoverishing those he pretends to wish to empower. The rhetoric that
sounds so "radical" from outside Zimbabwe has cost the country incalculable
goodwill way beyond the western countries it is directed at. African leaders
who cynically cheer Mugabe's populist rantings in public would never think
of following his ruinous example.
Much is made of his "look east" (Asia) policy in response to his being
spurned by the west, but many other African countries who do not need
to look particularly in any one direction have just as good or better
relations with south-east Asia, while also having mutually beneficial
relations with much of the rest of the world. They have those good relations
without needing to be virtual captives, second-generation colonies like
is happening with a Mugabe with precious few options. A country with a
chronic forex crunch will be indebted to this new colonizer for years
to come. This is not the conductof a smart African leader!
However emotionally appealing Mugabe's rhetoric and antics may appear
to someone listening to and observing them from outside Zimbabwe, we should
all wish for and agitate for a far higher standard of leadership from
Africa's rulers than has been provided by the likes of Mugabe. The Africanism
he spouts so eloquently and romantically, stirring the hearts of many
of us who are still wary of the west for its treatment of us in recent
centuries, is totally spurious. For Africa to stand on its feet and stop
sliding behind the rest of the world by every measure, we need far more
from our leaders than the likes of Mugabe are able to deliver.
It is time to admire African leaders based on problem-solving abilities,
rather than merely on how well they articulate resentments whose origins
may are easy to understand. But their articulation not only does not at
all help us move forward, but actually keep us feeling sorry for ourselves;
wallowing in stagnation or regression, as Zimbabwe under Mugabe is doing
while some people cheer him on for his impoverishing, hypocritical rhetorical
"heroism."
*Chido Makunike can
be contacted at chidomakunike@yahoo.com
Please credit www.kubatana.net if you make use of material from this website.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License unless stated otherwise.
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