| |
Back to Index
Zimbabwe
is finished
George B.N. Ayittey
July 08, 2008
http://news.google.com/news?btcid=b2e36825779fbe3
Nothing coming
out of Zimbabwe makes sense. The country is now a certified "coconut
republic," where common sense has been butchered and arrogant
insanity rampages with impunity. A loaf of bread costs 6 billion
Zimbabwean dollars and one U.S. dollar exchanges for one trillion
Zim dollars. The rate of inflation is over 3 million percent -
whatever that means. Even African villagers laughed off the June
27 coconut run-off election, in which President Robert Mugabe, the
sole candidate, won a "landslide victory." Morgan Tsvingirai,
his rival and leader of the opposition Movement for Democratic Change
(MDC) withdrew
amid escalating violence, beatings, torture and assassination of
opposition supporters. Over 90 members of the opposition have been
killed since the March 29 elections. Even babies have not been spared
of the insane brutalities - as if they have anything to do
with Western colonialism and imperialism. Meanwhile, over 200 opposition
supporters have sought sanctuary on the compound of the U.S. Embassy
in Harare.
Zimbabwe is
a tragedy in more ways than one. It is a despicable disgrace to
Africa and reinforces the racist notion that black Africans are
incapable of ruling themselves. We took over from the departing
white colonialists and in country after country we ran our economies
into a sump and ruined our countries. The exceptions are few. Ian
Smith, the former and late prime minister of Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe,
must be dancing in his grave. This hurts and cuts deep into my African
pride.
The crisis took
long to unfold and I repeatedly warned of the impending implosion
in Zimbabwe after my visit there in 1990. In my book, Africa Betrayed,
I wrote this: "It would be wise for Mugabe to retire now,
after running the country for 10 years, rather than to stay on to
fall from grace to grass." A liberation hero I once admired,
he has transformed himself into a murderous despot.
In May 1999,
I attended a conference organized by the Mario Soares Foundation
in Porto, Portugal, to address conflict and security issues in the
Central and Lake Regions of Africa (Rwanda, Burundi, Zaire). I opined
that the response of the international community to Africa-s
crises had been woefully inadequate. It waits until an African country
implodes before rushing in blankets, tents and high-protein biscuits
to cater for the refugees. Prevention is better than cure, I intoned.
I stunned the audience when I warned them that, as they seek to
resolve the crises in the Central and Lake Regions of Africa, they
should be aware that there were other African countries standing
in line ready to blow. Specifically, I mentioned Ivory Coast, Togo
and Zimbabwe. But few paid heed.
Barely six months
later after the Porto Conference, General Robert Guie seized power
in the Ivory Coast in December, 1999, unleashing a chain of events
that led to a civil war. The country is still divided between the
Muslim north and the Christian south. Zimbabwe started to unravel
after the Feb 2000 referendum and I warned in a PBS interview with
Bill Moyers (Wide Angle) that the country faced the grim prospects
of a military coup or civil war. Togo imploded in 2005.
Zimbabwe-s
economic situation started to deteriorate by the late 1990s. The
country had been rocked by a wave of strikes by workers, nurses,
teachers to protest rising food and fuel price hikes. In 1998, even
doctors went on strike to protest shortages of such basic supplies
as soap and painkillers. And while the urban poor were rioting about
food prices, the Mugabe government ordered a fleet of new Mercedes
cars for the 50-odd cabinet ministers while 77-year old Mugabe himself
and his wife and his 36-year-old wife, Grace, attended lavish parties
and conferences abroad. In 1999, President Mugabe further angered
voters by tripling and quadrupling the salaries of his ministers.
Rampant shortages
of basic commodities -- such as mealie meal, the national staple
diet, bread, rice, potatoes, cooking oil and even soap -- kept inflation
raging at more than 110 percent. Zimbabwe-s gross domestic
product dropped from US$8.4 billion in 1997 to about US$5 billion
in 2001, a fall of around 40 per cent"(The Times of London
On Line, March 06, 2002). With the flight of investors and closure
of businesses due to attacks by militants -- more than 30 businesses
were attacked in May 2001 alone -- jobs became scarce, pushing Zimbabwe's
unemployment to nearly 60 percent. In 2000, 400 companies closed
and some 9,600 jobs were lost.
The state treasury
stood empty, pillaged by kamikaze kleptocrats and drained at the
rate of $3 million per week by some estimates by a mercenary involvement
in Congo's war (The Washington Post, March 3, 2002; p. A20). Cabinet
ministers, army generals, relatives of President Robert Mugabe,
prominent figures in the ruling party and a score of the well-connected
launched lucrative business ventures to plunder Congo-s rich
resources: diamonds, cobalt and gold. Plunder of Congo's mineral
riches and lucrative deals kept Zimbabwe's army generals fat and
happy. Accordingly, the commander of the defense forces, General
Vitalis Zvinavashe, warned in February 2002 that the country's military,
police and intelligence chiefs would not accept a "Morgan Tsvangirai"
as a national leader if he won the March 9 election since he was
not a veteran of Zimbabwe's independence struggle.
Mugabe angrily
rejected criticism of his government for the economic crisis. He
always blamed British colonialists, greedy Western powers, the racist
white minority and the IMF, which he denounced as that "monstrous
creature." But Zimbabwean voters knew better. When Mugabe asked
them in a February 15 2000 referendum for draconian emergency powers
to seize white farms for distribution to landless peasants, they
resoundingly rejected the constitutional revisions by 55 percent
to 45 percent. Paranoid and desperate, Mugabe played his trump card.
He sent his "war veterans" to seize white commercial farmland
anyway.
To be sure,
there is basic inequity in the distribution of land in Zimbabwe.
Whites account for only about 1 percent of Zimbabwe's population
of 12.5 million, yet 4,500 white farmers continue to own nearly
a third of the country's most fertile farmland. But the land issue
has become a political tool, ruthlessly exploited by Mugabe at election
time to fan racial hatred, solidify his vote among landless rural
voters, to maintain his grip on power and to divert attention from
his disastrous Marxist-Leninist policies and ill-fated misadventures
in the Congo.
Race, however,
has little to do with the crisis in Zimbabwe. Robert Mugabe himself
did well in the beginning after independence in 1980 and a handful
of African countries, such as Benin, Botswana, Ghana and Mali are
doing well. Neither does British colonialism, American imperialism,
ethnicity, religion or gender have anything to do with Zimbabwe-s
crisis. The most singular cause has been the stubborn refusal of
the leadership to relinquish or share power when their people are
fed up with them. This has been the gruesome post-colonial African
road to implosion that was religiously taken by Liberia (1990),
Somalia (1993), Rwanda (1994), Burundi (1995), Zaire (1996), Sierra
Leone (1999), Ivory Coast (2000) and Togo (2005). Terrified of their
own failed policies and the prospect of rejection at the polls,
the leadership always cited some bizarre reason why they would never
allow the opposition to win power.
The
African Vampire State
The
source of Africa- s perennial crises can be traced to the
alien system of governance imposed on Africa by its leaders after
independence in the 1960s -- in particular, defective political
and economic systems that were blindly copied abroad and imported
into Africa: The political system of "one-party state"
system with "presidents-for-life" and an economic system
of dirigisme or state interventionism. These systems are alien to
Africa-s own indigenous institutions. The traditional African
system of governance was confederacy and participatory democracy
based upon consensus-building under its chiefs. The ancient empires
of Africa - Songhai, Ghana, Mali and Great Zimbabwe -
were all confederacies, characterized by great devolution of authority
and decentralization of power.
The traditional
African economic system was free market and free enterprise. In
contrast to the West, where the individual was the basic social
and economic unit, the extended family was the economic unit in
traditional Africa. It acted as a "corporate entity,"
owned the land on which food was produced for consumption. The surplus
was sold on village markets. There were markets in Africa before
the colonialists stepped foot on the continent. Timbuktu, Salaga,
Kano, Mombasa and Sofala were all great market towns. Prices on
Africa-s traditional markets have always been determined by
bargaining. Chiefs do not fix prices and market activity, especially
in West Africa, has always been dominated by women.
All these suddenly
changed after independence. Markets were suddenly portrayed as "western
institutions" to be controlled and even destroyed. And democracy
suddenly became a western luxury Africa could not afford. In their
places were erected the "one-party state system," where
opposition parties were outlawed and one buffoon ran for president,
always won 99.9999 percent of the vote to declare himself "president-for-life."
No such nonsensical system existed in traditional Africa. Chiefs
were chose, OK? And if they did not govern according to the will
of he people, they were removed. No African chief declared his village
to be a "one-party state" and himself "Chief-for-Life."
The "one-party
state" was a political system that concentrated a great deal
of power in the hands of the head of state. Any political system
that concentrates a lot of power in the hands of one individual
ultimately degenerates into tyranny, regardless of the geographical
area where it is established. As Lord Acton once said: "Power
tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely."
Similarly, the economic system of state interventionism, under the
guise of socialism, concentrated enormous economic power in the
hands of the state.
Very quickly
after independence, the head of state and government officials discovered
that they could use the enormous power vested in the state to enrich
themselves, punish their rivals and perpetuate themselves in office.
Gradually in post-colonial Africa, "government," as
we know it, ceased to exist. What came to exist is a "vampire
state" - a government hijacked by a phalanx of unrepentant
bandits and vagabonds, who use the machinery of the state to enrich
themselves, their cronies, tribesmen and exclude everyone else -
the politics of exclusion. The richest people in Africa are heads
of state and ministers. Quite often, the chief bandit is the head
of state himself.
Billions of
dollars in personal fortunes have shamelessly been amassed by African
leaders while their people wallow in abject poverty. At an African
civic groups meeting in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, in June 2002, Nigeria-s
President, Olusegun Obasanjo, claimed that "corrupt African
leaders have stolen at least $140 billion (£95 billion) from
their people in the decades since independence" (The London
Independent, June 14, 2002. Web posted at www.independent.co.uk).
Robert Mugabe has amassed a personal fortune of more than $100 million
in Malaysian banks while his people suffer. But he is not alone.
The African Union claimed in an October 2004 report that corruption
alone costs Africa $148 billion a year, which is 6 times the foreign
aid Africa receives from all sources in a year.
The fortunes
of African heads of state were published by French Weekly (May,
1997) and reprinted in the Nigerian newspaper, The News (Aug 17,
1998):
- General
Sani Abacha of Nigeria 120 billion FF (or $20 billion)
- President
H. Boigny of Ivory Coast 35 billion FF (or $6 billion)
- Gen. Ibrahim
Babangida of Nigeria 30 billion FF (or $5 billion)
- President
Mobutu of Zaire 22 billion FF (or $4 billion)
- President
Mousa Traore of Mali 10.8 billion FF (or $ $2 billion)
- President
Henri Bedie of Ivory Coast 2 billion FF (or $300 million)
- President
Denis N'guesso of Congo 1.2 billion FF (or $200 million)
- President
Omar Bongo of Gabon 0.5 billion FF (or $ $80 million)
- President
Paul Biya of Cameroon 450 million FF (or $70 million)
- President
Haile Mariam of Ethiopia 200 million FF (or $30 million)
- President
Hissene Habre of Chad 20 million FF (or $3 million)
Name one traditional
African leader who looted his tribal treasury for deposit in Swiss
banks. Said Kwame Toure (Stokely Carmichael), former founder of
the Black Panther Party in the United States, "[Modern] African
leaders are so corrupt that we are certain if we put dogs in uniforms
and put guns on their shoulders, we'd be hard put to distinguish
between them" (qtd in The Washington Post, April 8, 1998;
p.D12.)
The vampire
state does not care about nor represent the people. It sucks the
economic vitality out of the people. Eventually, however, it metastasizes
into a coconut republic and implodes. The implosion nearly always
begins with a dispute over the electoral process: A refusal to hold
elections or the results of outrageously rigged elections. Blockage
of the democratic process or the refusal to hold elections plunged
Angola, Chad, Ethiopia, Mozambique, Somalia, and Sudan into civil
war. Hard-liner manipulation of the electoral process destroyed
Rwanda (1993), Sierra Leone (1992) and Zaire (1990). Subversion
of the electoral process in Liberia (1985) eventually set off a
civil war in 1989. The same type of subversion instigated civil
strife in Cameroon (1991), Congo (1992), Kenya (1992), Togo (1992)
and Lesotho (1998). In Congo (Brazzaville), a dispute over the 1997
electoral framework flared into mayhem and civil war. Finally, the
military's annulment of electoral results by the military started
Algeria's civil war (1992) and plunged Nigeria into political turmoil
(1993).
The political
crisis starts when public furor, protests and violence erupt over
election disputes. A gaggle of politicians and stake-holders scramble
to resolve the crisis. They talk endlessly. The country is paralyzed.
Frustrations mount. Several scenarios become possible.
Opposition leaders
may be bought off and co-opted to join the errant regime. A "government
of national unity" may be attempted. But even before the ink
on the agreement is dry, squabbles erupt over the distribution of
ministerial positions. Neither side is satisfied with what they
get and hostilities resume. The regime may resort to brutal repression
of the opposition (Ethiopia, Eritrea, Zimbabwe) or even extermination
with the macabre logic that if the opposition doesn-t exist,
then there would be no one to share power with (Burundi, Rwanda,
Sudan).
But sooner or
later, the people come to see through the political chicanery and
posturing. The public loses faith in the electoral process and the
ability of politicians to resolve the crisis. Some group then decides
it is no use talking and the only way to remove the tyrant in power
is by force. The group then takes "to the bush" and
that is how nearly all rebel insurgencies start in Africa. Charles
Taylor of Liberia launched his rebel insurgency in 1989 after losing
faith in the ability of the then president, General Samuel Doe,
and opposition leaders, Gabriel Baccus Matthews and Amos Sawyer
to resolve it. Similarly, Laurent Kabila of Zaire (now DRC) in 1996.
It only takes a small band of determined rebels to start an insurgency,
wreak mayhem and utter destruction. Yoweri Museveni, now president
of Uganda, started out with only 27 men. Charles Taylor of Liberia
with less than 200 and Laurent Kabila with about 150.
The insurgency,
always mounted by politically-marginalized or excluded groups, always
starts from the countryside. Rebels don-t set out to redraw
artificial colonial boundaries. Nor does ethnicity have anything
to do with the insurgency. Somalia is ethnically homogenous; yet
it imploded. The insurgency is about capturing POWER, so the rebels
head straight towards the capital, where political power resides.
Along the way, they pick up recruits and their ranks swell with
unemployed youth (child soldiers). Government soldiers, sent to
crush the rebels, often defect, bringing along their valuable weapons
(Ethiopia, Liberia, Sierra Leone and Zaire). Eventually the despot
flees into exile (Generals Mobutu Sese Seko, General Siad Barre,
General Joseph Momoh of Sierra Leone) or is killed (General Samuel
Doe, General Juvenal Habryimana).
Since 1990,
one African country after another has imploded with deafening staccato:
- In 1990,
Liberia was destroyed by the regime of General Samuel Doe,
- In 1991,
Mali by the regime of General Moussa Traore,
- In 1993,
the Central African Republic was destroyed by the military regime
of General Andre Kolingba,
- In 1993,
Somalia was ruined by the regime of General Siad Barre,
- In 1994,
Rwanda by the regime of General Juvenal Habryimana,
- In 1995,
Burundi by the regime of General Pierre Buyoya,
- In 1996,
Zaire by regime of General Mobutu Sese Seko,
- In 1997,
Sierra Leone by regime of General Joseph Momoh,
- In 1999,
Niger by the regime of General Ibrahim Barre Mainassara,
- In 2000,
Ivory Coast by the regime of General Robert Guei.
- In 2005,
Togo by the regime of General Gnassingbe Eyadema.
Note the frequency
of the title "General". The paucity of good leadership
has left a garish stain on the continent. More distressing, the
caliber of leadership has deteriorated over the decades to execrable
depths. The likes of Charles Taylor of Liberia and Sani Abacha of
Nigeria even make Mobutu Sese Seko of formerly Zaire look like a
saint. The slate of post colonial African leaders has been a disgusting
assortment of military coconut-heads, quack revolutionaries, crocodile
liberators, "Swiss bank" socialists, brief-case bandits,
semi-illiterate brutes and vampire elites. Faithful only to their
private bank accounts, kamikaze kleptocrats raid and plunder the
treasury with little thought of the ramifications on national development.
In the case
of Zimbabwe, the final chapter has already been written. The country
is finished. It has followed the same post-colonial African road
to implosion. Robert Mugabe is no longer in charge. He is just a
"hostage president." A "Joint Operations Command"
(JOC) is in charge, after a "military coup" in April
2008. Ominously, JOC is led by these military generals: Constantine
Chiwenga, Perence Shiri, and Philip Sibanda.
Reshuffling
at the top, however, amounts to reshuffling on the deck of the Titanic.
It won-t save nor restore credibility to the dying regime.
People have already lost faith in the leadership and the political
process. Over 200 Zimbabweans have sought refuge on the compounds
of the U.S. Embassy in Harare. Over 4 million Zimbabweans have fled
the country. A group of them will return from exile - with
bazookas. But that won-t be the end of the Zimbabwe-s
or Africa-s saga.
First, there
are other African countries that are also standing in line:
- Angola: President
Jose Eduardo has been in power since 1979;
- Burkina Faso:
President Blaise Compaore since 1987;
- Cameroon:
President Paul Biya since 1982
- Chad: President
Idriss Derby since 1994;
- Egypt: President
Hosni Mubarak since 1981;
- Equatorial
Guinea: Teodoro Obiang since 1979;
- Gabon: Omar
Bongo since 1967;
- Guinea: President
Lansana Conte since 1984;
- Libya, Moammar
Ghaddafi since 1969;
Second, Africa-s
post-colonial story also shows that rebel leaders who seize power
are often no better. They are themselves "crocodile liberators,"
exhibiting the same dictatorial tendencies they loudly condemned
in the despots they removed: Charles Taylor versus General Samuel
Doe and Laurent Kabila versus Mobutu Sese Seko. As Africans often
say: "We struggle very hard to remove one cockroach from power
and the next rat comes to do the same thing."
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.
TOP
|
