Henry Olonga: the profile of a dangerous Zimbabwean

Henry Olonga: the profile of a dangerous Zimbabwean

HENRY Olonga wants ban on Zimbabwe sportsmen

• Editor's Memo: He could have lived

• Editor's Memo: The MDC is part of the problem

• Editor's Memo: Voters must demand better leadership

• Editor's Memo: Cut the chase, blame Blair

• Editor's Memo: Zimbabwe's future lies in voting

By Mduduzi Mathuthu

IT IS difficult to discuss Henry Olonga’s sick campaign to get every Zimbabwean sportsman banned from competing in the United Kingdom without words like traitor and puppet passing through one’s lips.

Reacting to plans by the UK government to ban our sporting heroes from advancing their careers in Britain, Olonga said: “It's great to see that Gordon Brown is taking a much stronger stance than his predecessor. Zimbabwe's in a desperate position, 100,000 per cent inflation, there's poverty across the whole country, so it's a desperate, desperate situation.”

Many Zimbabweans have always felt that there is something slightly disturbing about how the UK government formulates its policy on Zimbabwe. With policy consultants like Olonga, it’s not hard to see why successive UK governments are out of step with the aspirations and dreams of the ordinary Zimbabwean.

I am indebted to the London Times reader, Telit Likitiz, who wrote on the newspaper’s website: “How can taking the one thing that Zimbabwe can be proud of affect Mugabe? Does Brown think this will make Mugabe suddenly think:

"Hold on, I've been a tyrant for 28 years; had thousands of people tortured and killed; but the cricket team not touring England is too much; I must change my ways!?"

In a few words, Likitiz lays bare the hollowness of a whole government policy, bizarrely backed by opposition parties; a policy, we are told, crafted with the interests of Zimbabweans at heart.

Worryingly, the reality of these stunts – you can also add the ‘refusal to shake’ policy, the idea that avoiding Mugabe at all costs and refusing to shake his hand will destroy the dictator in him – is that the British media somehow see them as positive actions, or a vote winner if you are a politician.

It does not help when you have vacuous characters like Olonga – an average cricketer at the height of his career -- throwing themselves into the fray and shouting loudest as if Mugabe was not the dictator he is today when they toured England and other top cricketing nations.

Olonga, who was born in Zambia and is married to an Australian, wants us to believe that Mugabe turned into the monster we are witnessing today as late as 2003 when he joined Andy Flower and wore black armbands during the cricket World Cup in Zimbabwe to “mourn the death of democracy”.

Olonga wants young, upcoming black cricket players like Tatenda Taibu, Hamilton Masakadza, Stuart Matsikenyeri, Prosper Utseya, Vusi Sibanda, Elton Chigumbura and others stopped from realising their career dreams of playing one of the top sides in the sport.

This “much stronger stance”, goes Olonga’s argument which has takers in the British corridors of power and its media houses, will teach Mugabe a lesson and haul him back from his quarrelsome brand of politics which Zimbabweans up and down the country are made to bear everyday.

This is not only lame but dangerous, and feeds into Mugabe’s propaganda devices just like previous stunts from the former colonial power have been so skilfully exploited by the sly Zimbabwean tyrant to the perpetuation and prolongation of the crisis.

Some history lessons for Olonga:

Robert Mugabe, the tyrant, is not a post-2000 incident. Between 1982 and 1987, thousands of fellow black Africans were mindlessly slaughtered at the hands of his troops in the Midlands and Matabelelend.

The wholly-white cricket team of the day was never threatened with travel sanctions, not by Britain anyway. They played in the 1983 World Cup in England while Mugabe was producing widows, orphans and mass graves in the villages of Tsholotsho and Bhalagwe.

Zimbabwe was everyone’s favourite destination, and Robert Mugabe Britain’s favourite person.

Donald Trelford, a journalist for the Observer newspaper who reported the massacres at the time, wrote recently: “The Foreign Office, more concerned about relations with Mugabe than with human rights and doubtless sensitive that Britain had provided some training for the Fifth Brigade, was briefing against me.

“I learnt this from Prince Charles, with whom I happened to have lunch at that time. 'The Foreign Office tell me you were wrong about Matabeleland,' he said airily. I ate my soup in silence.”

In succeeding years, Mugabe met and dined with the Queen. The ‘refusal to shake’ policy – the one which forced Brown to boycott the EU-Africa summit in Portugal last year – was never activated.

In fact, we had Mugabe being awarded honorary degrees by UK universities, and to cap it all, Zimbabwe hosted Princess Diana in 1993. We didn’t hear this rallying call to moralism then. Boycotts and sanctions were not on the agenda.

As a collective, whatever happened after 2000 and now – the collapse of the economy, the killing of a dozen white farmers and confiscation of their properties, Operation Murambatsvina and death of a few opposition activists – pales into insignificance when you test it against the excesses of Robert Mugabe two decades prior.

This, by the way, is not an effort to normalise what is a very abnormal situation, to paraphrase Masipula Sithole. It is simply a pointer to how the same people who normalised the abnormal in 1984 suddenly rise up in indignant chorus 20 years later and start prescribing the wrong medicine to a misdiagnosed and arguably lesser problem.

Can Olonga tell the world what the difference is between Tatenda Taibu, who plays cricket to provide food for his family, and Paulos Pauros, a Zimbabwean nurse on the NHS who also works to feed his family? Why is the other seen as a representative of Mugabe and not the other; and deserving to be denied the opportunity to pursue his dream?

Olonga is a dangerous Zimbabwean, (or can we make that Zambian Australian?), the type that we really could do without. His nauseating activism practised in Canberra and London has elements of sponsored protest – or what Mugabe would call puppetry. He is the sort that would be sent to ‘Traitor’s Gate’ in post-war England.

Zimbabweans need practical help, not headline grabbing stunts that simply blow more life-saving wind to Mugabe’s battered sails. You don't need to be a fist-waving Zanu PF supporter to see that!

Mathuthu is the New Zimbabwe.com editor. He can be contacted via e-mail: mathuthu@newzimbabwe.com
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mathuthu@newzimbabwe.com