Mugabe's spurious Africanism

Mugabe's spurious Africanism

ZIMBABWE has been in the news all over the world a lot in the last few years. An odd phenomenon of the associated high profile of its controversial president Robert Mugabe has been the deeply disparate passions he rouses in different audiences.

The recent general election his ruling ZANU-PF won, though not without a lot of controversy, showed that the rural areas are largely where his support base remain, from the heady days of 1980 and soon after, when the whole country was behind him. The urban areas that are traditionally thought to be the locus of the intelligentsia of a country continue to be repulsed by the man, his party and their message and performance, a trend that began in the last few elections.

A central part of Mugabe's message is that even if there has in recent years been widespread decline in all sectors of performance, wiping out many of the
impressive early gains of the post 1980 Independence era, there are still important reasons nationalists and Pan-Africanists should continue to support him. Those reasons, the argument continues, include the fact that he and his government are under siege from a hostile, racist western world that has not forgiven him for seizing farmland from "their white kith and kin," who dominated productive farmland up to 2000.

According to Mugabe, those western countries have spared no effort to make the country suffer for his radical deeds at sudden land re-distribution from 2000 onwards. The country's hyper-inflation, reduced hard-currency earning capacity as all productive sectors experience decline, the shortages of many basic goods, hyper-inflation and the many other indices of decline under his tutelage are all somehow linked to this purpoted diabolical western conspiracy.

While many Zimbabweans have rejected this as absurd scapegoating for failure, this is a message that has found a receptive audience in many parts of the black and developing worlds. To many present or recently past victims of group discrimination and marginalisation, Mugabe comes off like a towering
hero.

How many leaders, particularly in a donor-dependent Africa struggling to find its feet in the world, dare to tell off US president George Bush or British Prime Minister Tony Blair the way Mugabe does? And he not only does so fearlessly, but eloquently and using examples of these countries' marauding tendencies that one cannot fault. Their pretext for going into Iraq and razing that country to the ground is one such example that Mugabe uses to point out how his harshest critics are far from paragons of virtue in their own conduct.

As such Mugabe has successfully cast himself in the mould of a great Africanist, and at least rhetorical defender of larger developing world interests against the depredations the powerful western countries would like to visit upon them. Many people all over the world obviously feel there is a vacuum in that regard, and Mugabe would seem to fill it very nicely.

Allegations of human rights violations, stolen elections, corruption and economic mismanagement can then all be dismissed as nothing more than the expected propaganda of that hostile western world Mugabe is bravely challenging. Or even if true, the truth of the suffering that Zimbabweans experience at the hands of Mugabe somehow pale in importance to the greater "good" he is doing being a spokesman for the downtrodden of the rest of the world!

"The US and UK's pretext for going into Iraq and razing that country to the ground is one such example that Mugabe uses to point out how his harshest critics are far from paragons of virtue in their own conduct"

CHIDO MAKUNIKE

The many reasons that Africans and many others across the globe have a mixed, love-hate relationship with the western world are obvious and many. As a Zimbabwean who once greatly admired Mugabe but have little respect for him any more, it is not difficult for me to understand his emotional appeal to an African who listens to his rhetoric from afar and does not have to live under his ruler ship.

But our standard for our leaders must be much higher now than how well they articulate our many resentments at past and present, real and perceived mistreatment from the West. It might have been largely enough to rally us to support the continent's various liberation struggles many decades ago, but today the challenges are quite different. Among them are unemployment, HIV/AIDS and many other chronic health issues, development of human capital and physical infrastructure, agricultural and industrial productivity, unfair trade terms and so on.

The solutions to these great challenges will continue to elude us as long as we allow ourselves to be mesmerized by rulers who appeal more to emotions over past wrongs and their present effects, than they do to what concrete plans they have to deal with those challenges. Twenty-five years after the old (81) and now very westernized, comfortable and bourgeoisie Mr. Mugabe came into power as a scrappy guerilla leader, he has rhetorically reverted to a role he is no longer fit to play!

Instead of merely telling us about the great structural inequalities of the world, he should be using his power to show us his ideas for strengthening Africa for its future generations to have a chance not to be the permanent marginalised of the world. Instead the crafty old Mugabe talks "radical" as his promising country crumbles from lack of inspired leadership and ideas.

The man who scores a lot of points among many sectors all across Africa and beyond for "telling off the white man" builds a lavish personal mansion in Harare at a time of deep hunger and deprivation among his fellow citizens. He spends millions of dollars in hard currency to buy fighter jets from China when many companies are operating sub-optimally or closing down because the country does not have enough foreign currency to import essential raw materials, worsening an already critical economic situation.

For the same reason, fuel queues unheard of in many poorer countries have been endemic in Zimbabwe for more than six years. Pictures of that embarrassing situation have been beamed all across the world again in the last few weeks that fuel has virtually dried up. He, his fashionable youngish wife and their large entourages still somehow find the wherewithal and justification in this environment of deprivation to make trips to the shopping capitals of south-east Asia, having been banned from the Western capitals that were their first-choice playgrounds. Despite the travel ban imposed on him and his cronies by many western countries, many of them find ways to continue their close ties to countries they have been coached to attack as the source of all our problems.

The "land" that he makes such a hullabaloo about having reclaimed from the whites, which reason some in Africa and beyond still respect him for, despite
his many sins and failures, becomes less productive every year because of the many associated effects of widespread economic implosion, further impoverishing those he pretends to wish to empower. The rhetoric that sounds so "radical" from outside Zimbabwe has cost the country incalculable goodwill way beyond the western countries it is directed at. African leaders who cynically cheer Mugabe's populist rantings in public would never think of following his ruinous example.

Much is made of his "look east" (Asia) policy in response to his being spurned by the west, but many other African countries who do not need to look particularly in any one direction have just as good or better relations with south-east Asia, while also having mutually beneficial relations with much of the rest of the world. They have those good relations without needing to be virtual captives, second-generation colonies like is happening with a Mugabe with precious few options. A country with a chronic forex crunch will be indebted to this new colonizer for years to come. This is not the conductof a smart African leader!

However emotionally appealing Mugabe's rhetoric and antics may appear to someone listening to and observing them from outside Zimbabwe, we should all wish for and agitate for a far higher standard of leadership from Africa's rulers than has been provided by the likes of Mugabe. The Africanism he spouts so eloquently and romantically, stirring the hearts of many of us who are still wary of the west for its treatment of us in recent centuries, is totally spurious. For Africa to stand on its feet and stop sliding behind the rest of the world by every measure, we need far more from our leaders than the likes of Mugabe are able to deliver.

It is time to admire African leaders based on problem-solving abilities, rather than merely on how well they articulate resentments whose origins may are easy to understand. But their articulation not only does not at all help us move forward, but actually keep us feeling sorry for ourselves; wallowing in stagnation or regression, as Zimbabwe under Mugabe is doing while some people cheer him on for his impoverishing, hypocritical rhetorical "heroism."
CONTACT CHIDO: chidomakunike@yahoo.com
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