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Time to rescue Zimbabwe
This Day (Nigeria)
August 21, 2007

http://allafrica.com/stories/200708220360.html

In the heat of the crackdown on the opposition in Zimbabwe in March this year and the worldwide condemnation that followed, President Robert Gabriel Mugabe declared to his traumatised compatriots and a bewildered global audience: "Nothing frightens me. I make a stand and I stand on principle here where I was born, here where I grew up, here where I fought and here where I shall die."

That statement of finality encapsulates the place of President Mugabe in both the making and undoing of his own country, his desperation in clinging to power against superior judgment and the fixation that could further jeopardise the chances of the southern African country for redemption from its present despicable state.

The reversal of Mugabe's role in the life of Zimbabwe is indeed unfortunate. Before ex-South African president, Nelson Mandela, was released in 1990, the 83-year old Mugabe was the continent's undisputed freedom icon of the anti-apartheid crusade.

For fighting vehemently to end white rule in the then Rhodesia, the government of his predecessor, Ian Smith, imprisoned the former schoolteacher and he won the world's sympathy when he was refused permission to attend his first son's funeral who had died at the age of four years. And on assuming the presidency in 1980, the charismatic, well-educated Mugabe (he holds seven academic degrees) mobilised his sterling leadership qualities towards taking his country out of its racially segregated past and guiding it along the path of self-rediscovery, socio-economic emancipation and true nationhood.

The state-sponsored massacre of mainly 20,000 civillians in Matabeleland in the 1980s notwithstanding, his image as an independence hero continued to soar. Even when he embarked on his most controversial policy to date - reclaiming land from white commercial farmers and redistributing it to native Zimbabweans- despite the concerted propaganda from the west in particular, he still garnered support from the rest of Africa and beyond.

Sadly, however, by applying savage methods to perpetuate himself in office and inevitably preside over a country that has descended into ruin, the "madala", Shona word for old man, has since lost the legitimacy and goodwill that had once made him the toast of freedom lovers and fighters around the world. This ugly situation is responsible for Zimbabwe's current ignoble record on two major fronts, namely human rights and economic progress.

A report released the other day by the Harare-based Human Rights Forum, an umbrella body for 16 non-governmental organisations (NGOs), authenticates the apprehension over the magnitude of Zimbabwe's predicament. With 5,307 rights violations from January to June, 2007 alone, compared with 2,868 cases within the corresponding period last year, there is no doubt that the country is firmly under a despotic spell.

Assault, torture, illegal arrest and detention and sometimes death - courtesy the dreaded secret police, the Central Intelligence Organisation (CIO)- have become daily realities in Mugabe's Zimbabwe. The battering of Morgan Tsvangirai, leader of the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), and some other comrades not long ago announced to the civilised world yet again that that country's salvation would not be achieved with mere diplomatic engagements. Neither would the reluctance of Afrcan leaders to take on their Zimbabwean colleague frontally help matters.

To compound this troubling scenario, the scope of violent suppression of opponents and activists has been widened to include journalists. Zimbabwe is in the grip of fascism. Add that profile to the unprecedented collapse of the nation's economy and a failed state emerges.

Statistics validate this. Unemployment rate stands at 80 per cent. Loans, foreign investment and aid have virtually ceased. Three out of the 13 million Zimbabweans have fled their fatherland to neighbouring countries, particularly South Africa, in search of livelihood. The saddest aspect of this social and economic meltdown is the inflation figure which officially stands at 4,500 per cent- readily the world's highest. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has even forecast its rise to 100,000 per cent by the end of the year. This shameful picture has clearly rubbished Mugabe's earlier credentials as a frontline national liberator and pan-Africanist.

So, African heads of government should not continue to compensate him for his past feats. At stake at the moment are the survival and destiny of a nation that had once been the most prosperous on the continent. The international community should, therefore, provide the democratic forces in Zimbabwe the necessary support to enhance their capacity to effect the political change that the country desperately needs. For, without that, other transformations would be hard. The world should not watch on hopelessly and allow what has been described in informed circles as the megalomania of one man to irreversibly crush the spirit and potential of the entire nation.

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