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How we we-ve let down Zimbabwe
Mangosuthu Buthelezi
April 11, 2007

http://www.theindependent.co.zw/viewinfo.cfm?linkid=21&id=10387&siteid=1

The Zulu people have a saying which I believe crisply captures what is happening in Zimbabwe today: "Akukho silima sindlebende kwabo". It translates as "Even a fool whose ear is disproportionate to the other ear is not regarded as such within the family". I find it interesting that African leaders all seem to subscribe to this saying: that for the sake of "African solidarity" we should not allow those regarded as "outsiders" to criticise one of our own. I experienced this first hand whenever the issue of Zimbabwe came up for discussion at Southern African Development Community meetings as minister of home affairs.

I remember one such discussion in Angola after the US had made it clear that President Robert Mugabe would not be welcome at a meeting of, I think, the G-7. The general reaction in that meeting of the council of ministers was that the US had no right to make such a ruling. I gingerly raised the issue of the help we needed for the New Partnership for Africa-s Development (Nepad), which we expected from countries such as the US. I enquired whether my African brothers did not think that such people had a right to express their views, if we expected them, at the same time, to help us.

During the tea break some foreign ministers congratulated me for raising the issue in the manner I did. Yet not one of them did so in the plenary sessions. In fact, in the next plenary session in which I wanted to speak, my colleague, the foreign minister, told me I had to tell her first what I wanted to say, as she was the leader of the South African delegation. Mugabe, in view of the above, might be justified for believing that he enjoys widespread support among ordinary Africans. The man and his record are, of course, far more complex than the one-dimensional African Hitleresque caricature: hero turned villain. Boasting impeccable struggle credentials, Mugabe is still something of a folk hero to many Africans. It is difficult for observers in the west to comprehend the conundrum this presents Mugabe-s fellow African liberation leaders in terms of censuring him.

The entire Mugabe phenomenon, cemented in stereotypes as it is, is baffling. Some in our ruling party and outside of it lead us to believe that the fiercest opposition to the Mugabe regime comes from the west, its alleged stooges in the Movement for Democratic Change and the dispossessed white farmers. Few black South Africans would acknowledge that the main victims of the regime-s misrule have increasingly been ordinary black Zimbabweans. It seems a lifetime since Mwalimu Julius Nyerere, former president of Tanzania, recalled to me how he plaintively told Mugabe at his inauguration in 1980: "You have inherited a jewel. Don-t do what I did in Tanzania. Don-t destroy it!" If only Nyerere-s form of socialism, ujamaa, was the worst that would have happened to Zimbabwe over the next quarter of a century.

In fact, for a time it seemed that Mugabe-s peculiar domestic mix of doctrinaire socialism and semi-free enterprise economy could work as it brought relative prosperity and social progress in the form of health care and education to the black population in the 1980s. Since our northern neighbour slipped into chaos in the late 1990s, Mugabe-s tottering government has been buoyed by considerable populist support of the rawest kind. As the latest issue of The Economist put it, "many Zimbabweans, paradoxically, both despise and admire him". And not just Zimbabweans. That is why I think, in this context, it is wrong to single out President Thabo Mbeki for blame.

Mugabe has skillfully justified his authoritarian misrule within a discourse of legitimate redress for colonial injustice and imperialism. These sentiments have resonated across Africa. Large numbers of Africans feel marginalised by the global economy and its mighty supranational institutions and remain wedded to the Marxist narrative of the liberation struggle. I watched Mugabe receive rousing plaudits from many African delegates at the World Development Summit in Johannesburg in 2002 — the same conference at which he launched a scathing attack on Tony Blair and Britain-s colonial past.

Two years later, at Mbeki-s inauguration, he received an equally rapturous welcome. I have seen this spontaneous outpouring of affection for a bankrupt African leader before. I recall watching the heady welcome that Idi Amin, the former Ugandan dictator, received from crowds of Kenyans when he arrived at the Nairobi Hilton as chairman of the Organisation of African Unity in the 1970s. I remember on one occasion being rebuked by some of my fellow black leaders in The Sowetan for daring to speak against the self-styled "King of Scotland". This, particularly, leads me to recall the Zulu saying that I quoted at the beginning.

And so it is with Zimbabwe today. Many senior African National Congress officials are genuinely concerned about the crisis, even though few of them would care to admit it in public. And this is it. This is where we all have blundered. This is where lies our — South African — complicity in the failure of Mugabe-s regime. We have let the situation in Zimbabwe deteriorate so fast and so far without as much as a word of concern. Yet, all along, at home we have celebrated human rights, promoted reconciliation and respected the rule of law and the political opposition. Given these obvious double standards in my own country, as an African I feel I am obliged to take some of the blame for Mugabe-s belief that he is right to hang on. Let-s look beyond the denialist Mbeki. He is not the only one to blame. We are all culpable.

*Buthelezi is an MP and president of the Inkatha Freedom Party.

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