Once again the darling of Europe,
Robert Gabriel Mugabe recently delivered a powerful climate change rebuke in
Paris.[i]
He loves travelling almost as much as making speeches and as frail as he is he
wasn’t going to miss it. His most famous speeches, words that went viral
without the help of the internet, were made in 1980 when he called for national
unity and forgiveness as he graciously accepted the Prime Ministership from the
people and the independence of Zimbabwe from the British royals.[ii]
I’ve never liked him. At first that was because I was seeped
in Rhodesian Front propaganda, I was on the losing side and he spoke and wrote
English better. But when I woke to the depth of the Rhodesian Front’s lies to
understand it was a war that should never have been fought, I realised there
were many better others who could have led the new Zimbabwe.
Even as I watched from afar for him to fall, from 1980 until
the mid - 90’s, everybody loved him. The Lancaster Agreement he honoured in
every respect for the full agreed 10 years and more. He committed Zimbabwe to
paying off its huge war debt. He and Smith was best buddies – the old whitie
was in and out of his office until around 1983 - and at first even General Walls
was there too, shooting the breeze, planning the country and though he wasn’t
in on the genocide, other whitie colleagues were.
Though PW Botha of South Africa tried to derail him
financially and through terror tactics, and though the West didn’t give all
they said they would, he nevertheless marched on on his rebuilding ticket. The
world lauded him, proclaiming statesman of the decade, not because he was Uncle
Bob the rare trustworthy black, but because he was a true blue capitalist.
Under him there was little change in land ownership. The affluent
West continued to hold their great hunks of land to play in (De Beers still had
likely the world’s biggest private holding) and they continued to enjoy all the
produce of the fertilized, watered and tended to by cheap labour country, the beef,
food crops, fine tobacco and flowers too. While the white farmers made a bomb
with their new-found partner in Bob, the IMF and others plied the new country
with loans they knew, soon, Mugabe wouldn’t be able to repay. To his socialism
ideas, and the fact that he favoured those who had voted for him, they turned a
blind eye.
African agriculture soon surpassed prewar levels, supplying
nearly all the country’s basics. The Tribal Trust Lands, in terms of education,
health, roads and dip tanks that Smith had devastated were re-built, and more. The
West sniggered when he bought a mine or a bank to save it from failing (to keep
the jobs), when he (with World Bank help) introduced micro-lending to indigent
farmers (to keep them afloat and to expand), and they laughed loud when he did
away with the financial controls that had kept Rhodesia upright, allowing the importation
of luxuries and whites to take their money out. Some mines, farmers and trading-others
carried on selling the resources of Zim to themselves, calling it ‘transfer
pricing’, fine words that in old speak mean ‘taking the country’s profits out’.
They clapped.
The late 80s saw too the start of serious corruption, a
colourless phenomenon.
The West had drained Zimbabwe and while the whole world watched
Mugabe play Father of the new land, all of Central Africa was being quietly and,
out of sight out of mind, viciously plundered.
The great thing about a fading memory is that I can take up a
Tom Sharp novel, decide I’ve never seen it before, and once again laugh for
days. Concerning Mugabe many have aspired to forget those heady days when
Zimbabwe leapt forward, when the Queen knighted him and when the governments of
the UK and the USA assisted in his ‘problem’ with the Matabele and Renamo – not
for free of course.
The crunch came in 1991 when Mugabe was persuaded to
participate in the IMF’s standard (what is good for Indonesia/Zambia is good for
all) Economic Structural Adjustment Programme (ESAP), a system of loans tied to
a non-negotiable action programme ostensibly to bolster Zimbabwe’s economy, but
in reality a wave of escalating debt that would cripple the country (and any
other) under rising compound interest rates – a technique perfectly designed to
keep the West in a constant flow of hard cash from the 3rd World,
the same as any money lender. ‘Amazingly,
the Bank's 1995 evaluation of ESAP declared it "highly satisfactory"
(the highest mark possible).’[iii]
Never a truer declaration. Zimbabwe, Africa’s pre-eminent
Black State, born after years of pleading for a peaceful settlement and finally
won through the barrel of the gun against better armed and trained white folk,
proving that Black Africa could be competitive with the best in all the world,
was being collapsed. The West’s destabilisation objective was finally reached.
The IMF demands brought ridiculous levels of hardship
overnight. All the good works of the 80s in the poverty stricken zones of the
TTLs and townships were undone. Staff trained at the cost of millions of
borrowed money were fired. The great diaspora was underway and commonwealth
countries picked the best qualified personnel while Zim still had to pay them for
them. If that wasn’t enough, the ground work was being laid for the US funded MDC,
and the fun had just begun.
‘ESAP brought immediate, unprecedented increases in interest
rates and inflation’[iv] just
when the entire region was hit by the worst droughts in recorded history. Money
was fleeing the country, the stock market (up to then rife with insider trading
– I was invited) crashed, manufacturing’s steep decline (the corporates’ way of
adding pressure) was devastating the employment market, never to stop until
today.
Mugabe’s naivety was shown to the full when, after all of
that, his lack of exchange controls allowed the fragile Zim$ to come under easy attack, beginning in 1997
where it ‘[fell] 74% during one four-hour raid after Mugabe joined the DRC
conflict and paid generous pensions to protesting liberation war vets.’ Reacting
to growing unpopularity and two Harare food riots, he finally invoked three
pro-poor policies in 1997-98. He reimposed price controls on staple foods,
controls on conversion of corporate foreign exchange accounts to local
currency, and steep luxury import taxes.[v]
Under the demands of the financier(s) every social project
and every black empowerment process collapsed. Only the army and police were
allowed to stay because the money men (the IMF and partners) knew the hardship
would be so dramatic and so deep that their guns and muscle would be needed to
keep order. It was and should have been the end for Robert Gabriel Mugabe. Instead
of following a slowly slowly make a place for all Castro route, as indeed
Machel advocated, in gods, the West and debt he had trusted. By 1999 all except
the privileged original white miners and white farmers were blown apart (they
had had a bonanza right through the 90s).
But he didn’t go and so the farm invasions had to happen.
For Mugabe to have stopped them would have been political suicide, just as
Smith would have seen his had he allowed a black to own a white farm before
1977. Having a devastated black portion in 2000 after the heroic fight for
liberation while the white portion continued as if nothing had happened was
dynamite, exacerbated by a continued refusal of whites to share.
And so began the era of wholesale corruption as the failed
Mugabe paid to stay in power. Cronyism reached and has stayed at record levels
even for a capitalist outfit.
It was the farm invasions however that allowed media to
focus on little Zimbabwe (with an economy smaller than a US state capital),
while massive abuses of power and plunder were happening elsewhere - in big
brother’s Pretoria and with the Queen’s very own Blair.[vi]
Had the MDC acted honestly and proved their grass-roots they’d have likely
taken Mugabe down, but the people remembered Zanu had defeated the colonists.
‘If you’re going to pressure us,’ was the natural thought dictating most of the
land, ‘we’ll resist just as we did before.’
Retaliation came from outside. The big boys with the reserve
currencies of the US$ and Brit£ crashed the tiny Zim$ with inflation hitting
12,875% per year in 2007,[vii]
an action that made sure the country couldn’t even borrow wheel barrows and which
forced Mugabe to turn to (the non-aligned, for a time) Gadhafi for assistance
for the first time ever.
Some kind of Land Reform had to happen. For once the country
had to look to feeding its own and not growing and supplying the over fed, wealthy
and hugely subsidised Europeans. And, over and above the obvious cronyism, there
were huge extraneous reasons adding to the fire, such as no money and no rain.
Land reform hasn’t gone well but nor has it been a total
failure. There are many reports of successes recorded in UK university studies,
in the work of Ian Scoones and his team in among the hype of land left lying (just
as it did under the Rhodesian Front).
Suddenly it’s all changed and the dictator, Zimbabwe’s
newest destroyer in chief who has been in violent action since the late 1990s, is
once again the darling capitalist of the West. Paris last week and who knows
where next.
The reason is the standard and most simple: Zimbabwe has the
world’s second largest reserves of platinum, its uranium production is going
westwards and Mugabe has agreed to toe the line on the marketing of the world’s
largest ever single field diamond operation, Marange. Where before it was a
free-for-all,[viii]
now apparently the prices stay stable and the traders continue to number among
the world’s most wealthy.[ix]
Tobacco is flowing again, the wild profits and collateral damage is all on
track and wild-life safaris are in demand.
The Greedy capitalist pig Robert G Mugabe is back at the
trough and Europe is wetting itself with joy.
I refused to go back during the 80’s and 90’s. I turned offers
down because I didn’t trust Mugabe. I’ve been proved right but for all the
wrong reasons. Who knows, had I stayed perhaps I’d have been invited into the
white fringe and ended up with an amazing Billy Rautenbach farm,[x]
a piece of one of the vast De Beers Estates or luxuriant living at Van
Hoogstraten, or assisted to retire to a palatial Bredenkamp place in the UK and
got to know a royal. Or, more likely, I’d have simply been able to enjoy life.
As an ex-colleague wrote a few days ago: ‘but (Zim) is still the best place for
me and my kids and my grandkids …Kariba and the Zambezi, golf and mates …and
the people still friendly and well-intended.’
That the whites of Rhodesia institutionalised apartheid with
the infamous Land Apportionment Act of 1930, a process that saw 99% of blacks
excluded and which led to an insane war was dreadfully wrong, but it was done
in the frame-work of an old world. That Mugabe and Zanu have debased and all
but destroyed 60% of their own in the new world isn’t acceptable to me, but
that many of my contemporaries pour the same misguided diatribe onto him,
inaccurate fodder manufactured by the West’s corporate owned media, is
unacceptable to me also. Mugabe is a fool caught in a wider conspiracy, an
effective puppet made better by his mad ravings.
My new year’s wish is to see Robert Gabriel Mugabe gone
before the bells clock in January 1, 2016, and even bigger, some sanity and
peace restored to the world.
[i] http://www.newsdzezimbabwe.co.uk/2015/11/mugabe-on-attack-in-paris.html
[ii]
The same family that turned a blind eye to the illegalities of the Occupation
of Mashonaland in 1890.
[iii]
Prof Bond is a store-house of data and opinion on modern Zimbabwe: All those
really interested must read his work. For this piece I have supported by
experiences with his ‘Zimbabwe’s Crisis Showcases Reasons for Bank/IMF Protest’
(see http://www.tokyoprogressive.org/)
and ‘Lessons of Zimbabwe: An exchange between Patrick Bond and Mahmood Mamdani’
@ http://links.org.au/node/815.
[iv]
Bond
[vi] Blair
was in at the end of Thatcher’s Saudi arms deal - http://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/feb/05/bae-saudi-yamamah-deal-background,
as well as at the pre-planning stage of the invasion of Iraq - http://metro.co.uk/2015/10/18/smoking-gun-memo-shows-tony-blair-agreed-to-military-action-a-whole-year-before-iraq-invasion-5446527/
[vii] Cato Institute
[viii]
https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/08HARARE1016_a.html
[ix] Europe has always ignored the blood
on diamonds … they have a few fancy-smart sounding rules that amount to ‘little
man –away with you, we’re here’. Some stories suggest Daniel Gertler (said to
be grandson of the once big man in the Israeli Diamond scene) is/was cheek to
jowl with Mugs and team. It is confusing – many other names are suggested. I
recall being skyped by a (black) Zimbabwean that the Zim Forces had suddenly
acquired new equipment and in particular (some, a) awesome helicopter gunship.
Days later the news broke officially of the diamonds we like to wear and of
diggers being driven out of Marange.
[x]Billy
Rautenbach see http://mg.co.za/article/2009-11-20-rautenbachs-fast-and-furious-ride-to-riches,
and there’s Nicholas van Hoogstraten @ www.theguardian.com › World › Zimbabwe
of May 23, 2014 and old timer, Smith’s sanctions mate, John Bredenkamp –
Wikispooks - https://wikispooks.com/wiki