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What chance a wise fool to call Mugabe's bluff?
Hopewell Radebe, Business Day (SA)
July 22, 2005

http://www.businessday.co.za/articles/topstories.aspx?ID=BD4A72152

IF “FOOLS are everywhere”, as author Beatrice K Otto once wrote, President Robert Mugabe desperately needs a talented and courageous one to offer the kind of criticism not forthcoming from his cabinet ministers or advisers.

He needs someone who can give the Zanu (PF) bigwigs insight into the miserable lives of the people of Zimbabwe. What is needed is a court jester willing to face the odds and knock some sense into Mugabe.

The scale of the destruction of people’s lives in Zimbabwe by its one-time revolutionary leader and hero, Mugabe, has reached proportions last witnessed in southern Africa in 1827, when King Shaka kaZulu’s beloved mother, Queen Nandi, died. This sparked a ruthless and bloody mourning. It is estimated that 5000 Zulus were immediately slaughtered. Pregnant women were put to death along with their husbands, and all cows were killed so that even calves would experience the loss of a mother. No crops were planted for a year to embitter mother nature and force the Zulu nation to fast.

It took one brave man of the Gwala clan to confront Shaka before the carnage ended.

Zimbabwe’s problems have deteriorated from being about Mugabe’s drastic land-reform policies, to being about youth militia that have raped, maimed and killed fellow citizens.

The matter has grown beyond President Thabo Mbeki’s deliberate refusal to condemn his neighbour over the forced seizure of white-owned commercial farms. It may be argued that Mbeki’s restrained responses were informed by the conventional wisdom that the land question, particularly in this former colonial region, was more emotive than western governments were prepared to admit.

The matter has gone beyond the many simplistic excuses in Mugabe’s defence. And yet people continue to try to excuse him. Former Zambian president Kenneth Kaunda recently told The Post newspaper in Lusaka that the world would serve history better if it demonised those who had cheated Zimbabweans, and not Mugabe, who had respected the promise he made to the British in the Lancaster House agreement for the independence of his country in 1979.

Kaunda said the British government — through Margaret Thatcher — had pleaded with the Zimbabwean delegation to avoid discussing the land issue for 10 years to enable her government to find funds for land reform.

“So Mugabe and his colleagues did not talk about land in respect to the British government’s promise. But 10 years down the line, the British did nothing. Come 1990, people were tired of lies and false promises,” Kaunda said. “This led to the problem of land in Zimbabwe. So how can you blame Mugabe?”

Kaunda’s argument, among others advanced by Africa’s leaders, symbolises the sentimental values that still cripple attempts by civil society and labour organisations in the southern African region as well as the opposition in Zimbabwe to translate the moral outrage over Mugabe’s excesses into a concerted public uprising against him.

Mugabe has been able to extend his terror campaigns, which are a crackdown on those who have dared to forget his sacrifices in the anticolonial struggle.

Since he continues to ride on a strong show of support from millions of Africans within Zimbabwe, SA, Kenya and Namibia — where much of the anticolonial struggle was waged — he has successfully launched the callous Operation Murambatsvina (Shona for Operation Drive Out the Trash). Also referred to as Operation Restore Order, it poses as a crackdown on illegal trading and illegal housing in Harare, Bulawayo and other urban areas.

Opposition political parties claim it is an attack on the urban-based opposition. United Nations estimates suggest that more than 200000 Zimbabweans have been left homeless by the crackdown.

Zimbabwean opposition parties and the international community have condemned the clearances.

People whose homes are being demolished are being told to return to previous homes in the countryside or face further action from the police and the dreaded Central Intelligence Organisation. Many have been forced to live on the streets during some of the coldest nights of the year. Others have moved in with relatives in unaffected areas.

Outside the urban areas of Harare and Bulawayo most of the destruction has been limited to illegal market stalls rather than homes. However, there is mounting evidence that the operation is responsible for demolishing ordinary homes and buildings, including a Catholic orphanage run by nuns.

Children, some of whom were HIV-positive and had lost parents to AIDS, were given 12 to 24 hours to leave. Last month, two children were crushed to death as their homes were destroyed.

The descendants of the Gwala family still relate to their children the story of their courageous ancestor who stopped Shaka from destroying the mighty Zulu nation after the death of his mother. Is there no gallant soul who will challenge Mugabe and deliver the nation from him?

*Radebe is deputy political editor.

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