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Time For the Old Lion to Go Many years ago I was driving across the highlands of Lesotho in thick mist and at dusk, on a grass road marked only by tyre tracks, on my way to a small Anglican hospital. Suddenly, out of the mist lights and movement all around, Range Rovers, four wheel drives and men and women in traditional dress on horses rode past on both sides unconcerned that we was driving the wrong way through their funeral procession. Then they were gone. A glimpse of Africa. So I met Robert Mugabe just once, at Lancaster House, at the independence talks presided over by Sir Christopher Soames. Mugabe called me to see him. I assumed because I was General Secretary of War on Want, an NGO supplying his ZANU refugee camps in Mozambique, that he wanted to know about food aid and logistics. But not so. He knew I had been a European Commission official in DG8, the old EC development department. He asked me about the Lome Convention and how Zimbabwe could benefit. His political secretary wrote it all down. The Lome Convention covered aid and trade relations between the European Community and the states of Africa, the Caribbean and the Pacific, (now replaced by new sub regional agreements). The ACP agreement was good for its time but the performance of most African states under it, relative to other parts of the world, was to continue to lose their relative share of world trade. This reflected much wider problems. European or UN development programmes often did not bring out the best in African society. Africa wanted to be Africa, not a replica of Europe or the USA. Mugabe was at Lancaster House leading the independence talks because ZANU had done what the British Foreign office had least expected and had beaten the experienced old hand Joshua Nkomo´s ZAPU as well as the Rev Albert Sithole’s centrist party. Soon after Lancaster House I visited the new Zimbabwe and had a strange feeling that things were not quite right. I noted the time Mugabe was said to be on holiday when the North Korean trained 5th Battalion did a minor pogrom in the ZAPU heartland of Bulawayo. Why this aggressive push for a one party state when Sam Njomo in Namibia and Nelson Mandela in South Africa came to represent multi party democracies? Where did this instinct come from, the African authoritarianism of Mobuto Sese Seko in Zaire and Gnassingbe Eyadema in Togo? Or Soviet Stalinism with a dash of North Korea`s Kim Il Sung? What happened to this promising young man I met so briefly at Lancaster House? What swallowed him up in the mist of African politics? Of course he would lead a radical land reform program, but why did he leave it so late? And why so wrapped up with political patronage for supporters? The UK and commercial farmers would have supported it if it had been better planned and implemented. Why so politicized and so badly done when the Smith regime itself had done well with small farmer support schemes in defiance of sanctions? In Namibia by contrast there was no sense in breaking up white commercial farms in areas of low black population, and the large black population was right up North. The political and farming map of Namibia had been determined by the limits of Afrikaner and German hydrology 30 years before, so the commercial farms were where available technology had worked, and the deep artesian water in the North was still there, waiting to be used later. Namibian thinking reflected pragmatism and reconciliation as well as the realities of demographics and hydrology. In Zimbabwe by contrast belated land reform took on the character of a latter day anti colonial class struggle, rewarding aging supposed freedom fighters, or political supporters, in defiance of the British colonial inheritance, to bring down the white farming class. The result was to dismantle what worked and previously made the country prosperous without being able to substitute workable alternatives. This was done by using the theory of land reform from a radical European textbook without the practice of achieving real results in social and economic transformation or production. And the result is the degeneration of rural radicalism into an authoritarian patron client state. The rest was accounted for by bureaucratic ossification, accumulation of subservient advisors and exclusion of good ones and the tendency that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. The loyalty of the security forces until the last moment the inevitable reflection of power politics, self interest and fear of change. Now it appears the old lion may lose his last election battle, with a close run first round maybe leading to a final runoff election. If he loses will he go quietly, or play his last card, the military card, and end his days in a perverse tribute to the book by Ruth First that Power Comes Out of the Barrel of a Gun? Perhaps his last instincts are from the heart of the old Africa that the old lion will never go except to his last resting place. Nonetheless hopefully a solution will be negotiated. Whenever, at last, change does come, hope and pray for Zimbabwe to never again place quite such dependence and power upon the shoulders of one man. |
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