adminsee an African country standing tall while its former enemies, who spent nearly a decade and a half trying to bring it down, seek its friendship and co-operation.
In the past three months, the world’s remaining superpower, the US, has sent an official envoy, Andrew Young, to Zimbabwe’s capital, Harare, on a reconciliation mission. The European Union followed suit a few weeks later with an official delegation to Harare, while the “Old Enemy”, Great Britain, has held talks in London with a delegation of senior Zimbabwean ministers.
“Wonders,” as they say in Ghana, “shall never end.” Not to be outdone, the Rev Jesse Jackson followed Andrew Young’s lead, and came on his own accord to Harare in mid-April.
After a two-hour meeting with President Mugabe, the man the West recently refused to speak with, Jesse Jackson told a Press conference that he would work to remove economic sanctions on Zimbabwe as he did during the defeat of apartheid in South Africa.
Jackson said the time had come for the US and Zimbabwe to build bridges, even as American companies are now eager to invest in Zimbabwe, especially in the mining sector. “Just as we worked hard to bring down barriers within our own country, (and) worked hard in bringing down barriers in apartheid South Africa, we will work hard to bring barriers down on sanctions (in Zimbabwe) because it is the right thing to do and it is mutually beneficial,” Jackson said, adding:
“We are anxious for sanctions to end. We will not be satisfied until the barriers are removed between our two great nations.”
What the West wants
A senior Government official in Harare confirmed to New African that Andrew Young conveyed the White House’s “official remorse” to President Mugabe, admitting that the US had been wrong in supporting Britain in the dispute with Zimbabwe over land reform, which led to Washington following the UK and EU’s line in imposing economic and personal sanctions on Zimbabwe and its leaders 13 years ago.
The official said Young indicated that Washington would lift all sanctions by the end of this year.
In fact, a few days after Young’s visit, Washington indeed removed two Zimbabwe banks — the Agricultural Development Bank, and the Infrastructure Development Bank — from the sanctions list, even though all along, the US, like Britain and the EU, had been insisting that it had only imposed “personal” and “travel bans” on Mugabe and his government officials. Where did the banks come in then?
The American ambassador to Zimbabwe, Bruce Wharton, said by sending Andrew Young, a senior citizen with lofty credentials for fighting for the advancement of Black America, Washington was indicating the seriousness it attached to its reconciliation overtures.
An EU delegation, the first sent to Harare by Brussels in over a decade, similarly discussed ways of lifting sanctions and improving the relations with Zimbabwe that have been strained since 2000, when land reform began. On the part of Britain, according to the senior government official in Harare, Prime Minister David Cameron’s Tory government is trying to find ways to ditch the “Labour Party propaganda against Zimbabwe that was so strident under the governments of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, and the recent talks with our ministers in London was only an ice-breaker.”
Great things lie ahead, and so it should be. For the West, the reconciliation overtures could not have come at a “worse” time. The man they supported for the past 13 years to spearhead their regime change agenda, Morgan Tsvangirai, has not delivered.
In the meantime, while they would not shake hands with Mugabe, the Chinese, their new competitors in Africa, were pressing hands all over Harare and getting all the business.
As the West continued with its animosity towards Zimbabwe, the Chinese were getting diamond mining and other lucrative contracts in Harare. The latest Chinese venture is a spanking new shopping centre in Harare, built in record time.
It is therefore obvious, though it has remained unsaid, that the time has come for the West to cut its losses and return to its former haunts in Zimbabwe. The country still has immense untapped mineral wealth and other business opportunities that can bring mutual benefits to it and Western investors. So why allow the Chinese to have it all?
African lessons
What has happened in Zimbabwe is a lesson that should resonate loudly across Africa and even beyond.
That if a leader stands firmly for his people’s interests, no matter the obstacles thrown in his or her way, victory will come in the long run. It may take 15 years and require heavy sacrifices and suffering, but, as Zimbabwe’s experience has shown, victory will eventually come! And when it comes, a rise in national pride can only be the end result.
Today, the hugely maligned leader of Britain’s last liberated colony on the African mainland, President Mugabe, all 89 years of him, could not have wished for a better epithet than “the man who slayed the mighty Western empire”.
In so doing, he has become the only leader in modern African history to survive a combined assault by the nations of European stock! Since Europe came into contact with Africa in the mid-1440s when the itinerant Portuguese sailors came across the West African coast looking for whatever they could find, every other African leader — whether traditional, religious or political — who was assailed by European power was, and has been, defeated.
Bar Mugabe! It must therefore give him abundant inner pride to see his erstwhile enemies and critics now giving him backhanded compliments, and even predicting an easy win for him in a general election due in the next month or so.
It must have been galling for one such “former” critic, David Smith of the British daily, The Guardian, to report on May 10 2013, after visiting Harare: “He has been a schoolteacher, freedom fighter and political prisoner.
He has gone from admired independence leader to despised autocrat. Now a life that spans nine decades could be about to add its least expected final chapter: the rehabilitation of Robert Mugabe.”
Least expected by who? The Guardian’s man did not say, though he disclosed rather tellingly: “The following scenario, once unthinkable, is now just conceivable. The Zimbabwean president will retain power in this year’s elections through fair means or foul: the poll will be relatively peaceful and deemed ‘credible’ by the West; then sanctions will be lifted against Mugabe and his inner circle, ushering him back in from the cold.”
An African nationalist might discern a tinge of arrogance in David Smith’s tone (“the West ushering Mugabe back in from the cold” as if they were God’s appointed doorkeeper), but that notwithstanding, The Guardian’s correspondent made a significant point with his next paragraph: “This (the West’s recent overtures) coincides with a subtle shift in the mood music around Africa’s oldest leader,” Smith wrote.
“Domestic political foes have praised him. He recently enjoyed cordial meetings with Andrew Young, special envoy of the US State Department, and civil rights stalwart the Rev Jesse Jackson. A documentary film, Mugabe: Villain or Hero?, has won sympathetic audiences in London. Most contentiously of all, researchers have begun to challenge the orthodoxy that Zimbabwe’s land reform programme was an unmitigated disaster.”
And David Smith was not finished: “No less importantly,” he continued, “the rival Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) is seen by many as having lost momentum and the moral high ground after entering a power-sharing agreement with Zanu-PF .
The MDC stands accused of the sins of incumbency, its leadership seduced by ministerial houses and luxury cars; and the party has been forced to discipline some councillors for corruption. It has failed to heal a factional rift that could divide its support. Leader Morgan Tsvangirai, who serves as prime minister in the unity government, has been criticised for becoming too close to Mugabe and for an unseemly run of sex scandals.”
Smith quoted an unnamed “senior MDC figure” as lamenting that Tsvangirai “has been a total disaster. He has let us all down.” In fact, this view is shared by many across Zimbabwe’s political divide. It is a view also thundered from the pages of the The New York Times by Lydia Polgreen, reporting from Harare one full month before David Smith came visiting.
Polgreen had made it so clear that “Zimbabwean voters are increasingly questioning the country’s erstwhile opposition group”. Headlining her 12 April article “Tasting good life, opposition in Zimbabwe slips off pedestal”, the American writer proceeded to show why Tsvangirai’s party would be no match for Zanu-PF in the coming elections. “The guests arrived in Bentleys, Benzes and BMWs,” Polgreen wrote.
“At a plush, riverside wedding in an upscale suburb, the wine and spirits flowed and tables groaned with the ample buffet.
“Politicians, celebrities, diplomats and business leaders mingled to the strains of Oliver Mtukudzi, a Zimbabwean music star, serenading the happy couple with his famous love song “Svovi Yangu”. “This was not the wedding of some stalwart of the dominant (Zanu-PF) party that has ruled this mineral-rich nation for decades. Instead, the 60-year-old groom was a one-time labour organiser, Morgan Tsvangirai, the longstanding opposition leader and now prime minister in a once uneasy but increasingly comfortable unity government with President Robert Mugabe.
“‘I couldn’t believe my eyes’ said Misheck Shoko, a member of Parliament for Tsvangirai’s party. ‘It must have cost a fortune. We cannot help but wonder: who paid the bill?’” Polgreen added, rather ominously: “As Zimbabwe prepares to choose a new president this year in long-awaited elections, voters are increasingly questioning the erstwhile opposition . . . Tsvangirai’s underdog movement has long been the vessel of millions of Zimbabweans’ hopes for a more democratic, peaceful and prosperous future in what was once one of Africa’s most stable and wealthy nations.
“But four years of governing alongside Mugabe – and in some ways, analysts say, being co-opted by him and his allies — has taken a toll on its reputation.
“The disenchantment was evident in a survey last year conducted for Freedom House, a watchdog group based in the US, that found support for Tsvangirai’s party had fallen to 20 percent from 38 percent two years earlier among voters who declared a preference.
By contrast, support for Zanu-PF grew to 31 percent last year from 17 percent in 2010, the survey found.”
The New York Times correspondent continued: “. . . These days, Tsvangirai’s lifestyle has been the talk of a nation where millions live on US$2 a day. He has taken to travelling abroad with a sizeable entourage, officials and analysts say, honeymooning in London and spending holidays in Monaco. He recently moved into a government residence that cost about US$3m to build . . . Meanwhile, officials in Tsvangirai’s party, many of whom suffered poverty while fighting to remake Zimbabwe, began enjoying the trappings of power. Government ministers, members of Parliament and other officials were awarded fancy cars and travel allowances.
“Tsvangirai traded his trade-unionist leather jacket for tailored suits. His personal life has been a source of embarrassment as well. His wife Susan died in a car accident in 2009, and his romantic life since has been the subject of extensive news coverage, much to his party’s chagrin. When he was planning to marry Elizabeth Macheka, his current wife, another woman challenged, claiming that she had been married to Tsvangirai in a traditional ceremony in 2011.
The matter ended up in court, with a magistrate ruling that Tsvangirai was in fact already married under customary law.
“He was forced to cancel plans for a legal wedding . . . Tsvangirai (later) apologised publicly to supporters for his messy search for a new wife, saying: ‘I had no intention to hurt anyone. It was a genuine search’.”
The coming elections
Tsvangirai does not hold a monopoly on sexual peccadillos in the country. They are a widespread and deep-seated problem that has attracted even the concern of President Mugabe himself. On May 10, the president interrupted a serious televised speech to the Third Zimbabwe Local Government Conference in the Manicaland capital, Mutare, to tell the nation, in unscripted remarks, that sexual infidelity within all strata of Zimbabwean society, including people in leadership, was destroying families and the fabric of the country by leading to an abnormal increase in divorce.
To preserve their families, which are the primary foundation block for national stability, men, when married, should keep to one wife and stop keeping mistresses, the president pleaded. Thus, Tsvangirai is not alone in this morass.
What is likely to hurt him electorally is the current political environment itself. The atmosphere in the country has dramatically changed from 2008 when severe economic hardships compelled many Zimbabweans to vote with their stomachs, hoping that a protest vote against Mugabe and Zanu-PF would usher in an MDC administration, headed by Tsvangirai, that would bring much-needed relief.
Tsvangirai duly won the first round of the presidential election, garnering 47 percent of the vote to Mugabe’s 43 percent, and the MDC-T beat Zanu-PF in the parliamentary poll by a single seat (100 to 99). If the 10 seats won by the smaller MDC breakaway faction then headed by Prof Arthur Mutambara (it is now led by Prof Welshman Ncube) were added to the equation, the margin of the Zanu-PF defeat would increase to 11 seats.
But Tsvangirai’s subsequent boycott of the presidential run-off, citing violence and intimidation of his supporters, handed an easy victory to Mugabe and Zanu-PF, who have since gleefully used the interregnum provided by the dysfunctional unity Government, formed in February 2009 by Zanu-PF and the two MDC formations, to reinvent themselves.
In her New York Times article, Polgreen quoted one of Tsvangirai’s critics as saying the MDC-T “has been naïve, falling into a trap set by Mr Mugabe to co-opt and compromise them. ‘Old Bob must be chuckling and enjoying himself right now,’ said Munyaradzi Gwisai, a prominent activist. ‘He has them right where he wants them’.”
But Nelson Chamisa, the young but top official of MDC-T, insists that “Tsvangirai is (still) the next big thing in Zimbabwe. He is the only game in town.” This line, though, is becoming something like a joke — especially in the face of the political realities in the country today. Jokes, in fact, are selling two a penny in Harare in the run-up to the elections.
Even President Mugabe, perhaps buoyed by the return of the West and the comfortable winds of impending electoral victory blowing across his bow, has been peddling a lot of jokes of late — one of which, of course, was on the poor Tsvangirai. During his televised speech in Mutare on May 10, Mugabe had the audience in stitches as he broke off from his written text, and joked about Tsvangirai.
In the last elections in 2008, he said Zanu-PF won just six of the 26 parliamentary seats in Manicaland, and when he tried to analyse why the party had lost so heavily there, he first thought it was because of his age, 84 at the time, and perhaps the voters did not like the wrinkles on his face, which were consistent with his age. But on deeper reflection, he realised that it could not have been his age or the wrinkles, because, even at that great age, he still looked much better than his challenger, Tsvangirai, whose party won 20 seats in Manicaland.
Even at 84, if the two were to go for a beauty contest, Mugabe said, he would beat Tsvangirai.
“Then I said where could the sin be? If I stood up when I was 84 then, I would attract more women than him,” Mugabe said to hilarious laughter. Tsvangirai was 56 at the time.
Why Tsvangirai will not be king
Jokes aside, the political factors now in play do not favour Tsvangirai. It is no wonder therefore that he and his party do not want early elections. They want elections to be held in September or after.
They even tried to play delaying tactics in Parliament to forestall the passing of a crucial Constitutional Amendment Bill that would legalise the coming into force of the country’s brand new Constitution, upon whose authority elections could be held. Zanu-PF, with the sweet fragrance of victory in its nostrils, wants elections held before August so it can run the country alone, as in old times.
The Constitutional Amendment Bill was finally passed on the third day of debate, amid singing and dancing on the floor of Parliament by elated MPs from across the political divide.
It was finally signed into law by President Mugabe on May 22 at a ceremony at State House during which a happy Tsvangirai laughed with the President and gave the Zanu-PF clenched fist salute. With the signing of the Constitution out of the way, and looking at the lie of the land, one can easily see several factors militating against Tsvangirai’s electoral chances. The first is the success of the land reform programme.
In early April, even the all-white Commercial Farmers Union (CFU), which had been stridently against land reform for 13 years, threw in the towel, saying in a sponsored newspaper article that it was giving up its opposition to the land reform because it could not “continue swimming against the current”.
Peter Steyl, the CFU vice president, who signed the article on behalf of the union, was categorical in his conclusion: “We have finally realised that the land reform is irreversible. [So] there has been a change of heart,” he wrote. “We have realised that we cannot carry on like this. The overall concept is to empower agricultural stakeholders and investors, past and present, in an inclusive way that brings sustainable benefit to all sectors of the Zimbabwean economy.”
As one Zimbabwean commentator put it: “This ringing statement amounted to a major climbdown by a body that historically has been the bedrock of white power and white politics in this country from colonisation and beyond. Except it is coming a good 13 years late, well into our land reforms, well after the deluge, well after the current, and all is settled.”
What this says electorally is that Zanu-PF, whose government championed the land reform against stiff opposition from the West, has a major vote-winning selling point which Tsvangirai’s MDC does not have.
The second factor in play is a clear sense of compromise and reconciliation in the country. Even Tsvangirai’s faction of the MDC, which was so vociferous in its opposition to Mugabe in the past, now appears to accept that compromise and reconciliation is the best policy, and that there is no point in trying to humiliate “a legend”, an accolade now widely attached to Mugabe on account of his revolutionary credentials and the things he has achieved for the country. — New African.
Online Reporter