Africans a-liberate
Zimbabwe
I'n'I a-liberate Zimbabwe.
So sang the late, great, Jamaican reggae star, Bob Marley in
1979, just a year before the country was finally won its independence from
white rule. Today, with Robert Mugabe forced to resign as President after being
fired by his party and with Zimbabwe inaugurating a new leader, the
questions many will ask is whether this is another moment of liberation – only
this time liberation from the erstwhile liberator of 1980- and what a
post-Mugabe future might look like.
Soon we’ll find out
who is
The real revolutionary
For the last 37 years, under Mugabe’s Presidency - who at 93
was the world’s oldest head of state and second only to Teodoro Obiang Nguema
of Equatorial Guinea as its longest serving non-royal ruler- Zimbabwe has gone
from being southern Africa’s bread basket to the region’s basket case. Mugabe
himself, once an icon of anticolonialism and, with his seven degrees, great
hope of African renaissance, has become the butt of continental jokes.
The path the country and its former ruler have trod is
depressingly familiar. An independence hero who proceeds to govern his country
as a personal fiefdom, enriching himself and his family, destroying all
internal opposition, impoverishing the population and committing many of the
same abuses the anti-colonial struggle was meant to put an end to.
In his early years in power, initially as Prime Minister,
Mugabe was widely praised for expanding social services, including building
schools and hospitals. However, like
others across the continent, his government failed early on to deal with
the legacy of the country’s colonial past and the issue of whether to reform
the state they inherited or whether, as Panashe Chigumadzi put it in her
article for the New York Times, “conform to the historic compromises that
brought them into power”.
Again, like his counterparts, Mugabe opted to shelve the
issue and concentrate on consolidating his own grip on power. Facing internal
dissent, he launched a brutal crackdown in the predominantly Ndebele speaking
region of Matabeleland, most of whom were supporters of his rival Joshua Nkomo,
in which according to some estimates more
than 20,000 people were killed.
The unresolved colonial legacy - especially over the starkly
unequal distribution of land - would prove a useful tool in later years. In the
1990s, he would successfully divide the opposition by offering veteran of the
independence war tracts of land and demonizing civil society and labor unions,
as tools of the West.
It was a strategy he employed again in the late 1990s and
throughout the 2000s to buff up his revolutionary credentials by launching a
disastrous land redistribution programme which targeted the country’s tiny land-owning
white minority. Officially sanctioned land invasions, violence and continued
government threats forced most large scale white farmers off the land and agricultural
production plummeted. The country went from being a net
food exporter to requiring food aid.
As the average Zimbabwean has continued
to suffer the effects of economic decline, there has been continued
splurging on a small coterie of officials and ruling party loyalists. Last
year, the government reportedly
spent $800,000 on festivities to mark Mugabe’s 92 birthday and his family has
done very well for itself over the years. His wife,
40 years his junior and who has earned the nickname “Gucci Grace” for her lavish shopping sprees, made no secret of her desire to keep the
presidency within the family when he eventually passed on.
And I don't want my
people to be tricked
By mercenaries.
Will the intervention by the Zimbabwean military -the coup
that was no coup- change this? Not
likely, despite the military’s declaring
its intention is to “pacify a degenerating political, social and economic
situation”. It claimed to target, and has been rounding up “criminals around [Mugabe]
who are committing crimes that are causing social and economic suffering in the
country in order to bring them to justice”. Yet the same army was solidly
behind Mugabe throughout his years of abuse - it was the North Korean trained
Fifth Brigade that was responsible for the massacres in Matabeleland
locally referred to as “Gukurahundi” (a Shona term that loosely translates to "the
early rain which washes away the chaff before the spring rains").
In fact, this was largely an internal struggle within the
ruling party, ZANU-PF, over who is to succeed the aging dictator. the immediate
spark for the current crisis was Mugabe’s decision to fire his long-time ally
and now replacement as President, Emmerson Mnangagwa, from the vice presidency,
to pave the way for his wife to succeed him. The military seemed reluctant to
openly intervene, its head, Gen Constantino Chiwenga, and 90 senior officers
initially only demanding
a halt to the purge
of Mnagangwa’s allies within the party. Mnangagwa himself is no angelic figure,
attracting the moniker "The Crocodile" for his actions during the
independence struggle and as a reminder of his alleged role -which he denies- in
the Gukurahundi massacres, as Minister for State Security and Chairman of the
Joint High Command, and in masterminding attacks on opposition supporters after
2008 election.
This then is a dispute, not over how
Zimbabwe is run, but over who runs it. In June, University of Zimbabwe
Political Science lecturer, Eldred Masunungure, when asked about the
possibility of military coup if Mnangagwa did not succeed Mugabe. He
responded thus: “It will be restricted to the elite level. This level does not
involve you or me or the 13 million Zimbabweans. It is an elite struggle.”
The people now jostling to replace Mugabe have been more
than content to benefit from the policies he has pursued, even when those came
at the expense of long-suffering Zimbabweans.
It is instructive too that the record of military takeovers
in Africa and across the world gives little cause for hope that this particular
one will quickly lead to a restoration of genuine democracy in Zimbabwe. From
Nigeria to Egypt to Burma, the record shows that once military generals get a
taste of power, they are loathe to give it up. Further, they tend to govern as
badly, or even worse, than the civilian despots they overthrow.
Amid talk of the military setting up a transitional
government to return the country to civilian rule and prepare fresh elections, one
senior opposition politician told
CNN that “this takeover was planned a long time ago by Emmerson Mnangagwa
and secret discussions did take place with opposition about a succession plan
including forcing out Mugabe… What you saw yesterday at State House [published images
of Mugabe speaking with military chiefs] was acting."
This ties in with a
Reuters investigation in September that found that Mnangagwa and other
political players, including former prime minister Morgan Tzivangirai, with had
already been positioning themselves for this possibility.
The report, which cites “politicians, diplomats and a trove
of hundreds of documents from inside Zimbabwe’s Central Intelligence
Organization (CIO)” says that in the event of Mugabe’s leaving office, “Mnangagwa…
envisages cooperating with Tsvangirai to lead a transitional government for
five years with the tacit backing of some of Zimbabwe’s military and Britain.
These sources leave open the possibility that the government could be
unelected.”
“This unity government would pursue a new relationship with
thousands of white farmers who were chased off in violent seizures of land
approved by Mugabe in the early 2000s. The farmers would be compensated and
reintegrated, according to senior politicians, farmers and diplomats. The aim
would be to revive the agricultural sector, a linchpin of the nation’s economy
that collapsed catastrophically after the land seizures,” it continues.
Once again, the focus would appear
to be on appeasing the country’s former colonial rulers at the expense of its
citizenry. Rather than seek to comprehensively restructure the state so it
works for all its people, Zimbabwe’s would-be rulers seem bent on resuscitating
the same “historic compromises” that have been at the root of the country’s malaise.
We'll 'ave to fight
(we gon' fight), we gonna fight (we gon' fight),
We'll 'ave to fight
(we gon' fight), fighting for our rights!
Rather than an agreement to restore the power of elites, any
transitional government should pursue a genuine broad-based national reflection
on the nature of the Zimbabwean state and force the country to face up to the
demons of its past, rather than hide from them. For all his many faults, it
must be acknowledged that Mugabe’s attempts at redressing historical injustice,
though pursued for less than noble reasons, struck a chord with many ordinary
Zimbabweans (and
many ordinary Africans beyond).
Apart from restructuring the state,
Zimbabwe will also need to build the necessary infrastructure to keep it
accountable to the people. This includes a free and independent media -it
has been great to see international networks allowed to report openly once
again- and a
vibrant civil society.
The current situation, while not ideal, thus still offers a valuable opportunity for Zimbabwean leaders to do right by their people. Whether they will take it remains to be seen.
