Fighting imperialists? No! Mugabe is alone in the ring

Fighting imperialists? No! Mugabe is alone in the ring

25/07/04
(READ MTHULISI'S PREVIOUS ARTICLES)
A FUNDAMENTALLY flawed and deeply disturbing notion about President Robert Mugabe's political conduct since 2000 has taken root. It suggests that the Zimbabwean tyrant is embroiled in a fierce fight with British Prime Minister Tony Blair over our troubled country.

The connotations are that a righteous African patriot is waging a just war against the bitter descendants of Cecil John Rhodes and company - Blair among them. Even otherwise intelligent political commentators have purchased wholesale into this fallacy and are floundering in a bog.

Mzwakhe Mbuli's latest album Mbulism points to this sad truth. Track 16 is a wonderful idea in which he sarcastically asks redundant questions whose answers are known to all informed people. For instance he asks if the arms of mass destruction were found by the Bush government following the invasion of Iraq a couple of years back. But I disagree with him when he asks: "U Robert Mugabe wase Zimbabwe lo Tony Blair bona babangani" (What are Blair and Mugabe fighting over?).

The effect of this question is that it implicitly helps the notion in question. Since Blair is the Prime minister of a country that colonised Zimbabwe and caused all sorts misery for the African people in very nearly all the continents it is easier to conclude that the supposed feud is a racial drama informed by imperialist interests on Blair' s part and patriotism on Mugabe's part.

Another development fits into this debate. An editor of a respectable Christian magazine in Oxford recently asked me to make a contribution on Blair's obsession about Mugabe. He said it was clear to him that Blair was fighting this African leader and he had the evidence since all the papers in England were all out to get Mugabe.

This was beside the fact that Blair' s government doesn't own newspapers of note. I resorted to obfuscation and stirred an irrelevant debate with the sole aim of creating conditions under which no concrete arrangement would be arrived at on that subject.

I succeeded.

The danger was that whatever I was going to write it was going to lend credence to this pathetic notion. Yet the truth today is that it is easy to read a racial component in this whole Zimbabwean drama since some whites are evidently bitter over their lost farms than they are surprised at the wanton murder of black people in the 1980's in the Western part of the country.

Yet is even easier to see that Mugabe has erected a smokescreen to obscure his appalling failure on the economic front and his sheer savagery. That which has been termed "a false fight" has been designed between Mugabe and the British government to suggest that he is waging a Pan-African war to defend dear motherland.

Day and night the Presidential flatterers are peddling this fallacy with pathetic enthusiasm. Every comment made by number 10 Downing Street is not a comment but a stone thrown at an African patriot and all Africans should stand up to condemn the act, we are supposed to believe.

The reality is interesting. Mugabe is not involved in a fight with anybody. He is an old paranoid dictator who soon found himself under the spotlight and before
demands for accountability. But unlike a rabbit he is angry and is lashing out at anybody whom he suspects to be plotting against him.

To him even his friends and soul mates should be among those aiding this push and hence they should be jailed and sidelined like James Makamba and Edison Zvobgo.

Suddenly everybody else is wrong except the dear leader himself! Once it became clear to all that the rivulets of misrule were pouring into the mighty river of economic decline it became apparent for Mugabe to invite the world to witness his imagined persecution by the imperialists.

"Robert Mugabe took the view that white bashing was good for his image as a strong blackman," writes Christopher Hope in his book Brothers under the Skin:
Travels in Tyranny. The irony is that this "strong blackman" and supposed African patriot has performed or sanctioned every evil that Africans abhor. The 1980's atrocities will suffice.

Mugabe is a clear and present danger to a common humanity. All those who thought two elephants were fighting had better stop to watch how the other elephant is rampaging mad lumbering about destroying grass and trees in its own camp in search of an imagined offender.

Mugabe is alone in the ring and when a man goes into the ring alone with gloves on, punching into the air, cursing worried spectators, bumping against the ropes and guardrails he is not fighting anybody. He is anything but a normal and settled gentleman.

Witness how he cuts a lone and pathetic figure even as he talks. He is the only one talking the language of "fist fight", "degrees in violence", "crush", "never ever", "defeat". None of those whom he is said to be fighting are talking that language.

All what black people of Kezi and Harare are demanding from Mugabe is accounting. They want to know how he allowed their people to be killed by the army he leads. They want to know how his ministers got rich so quickly when they were a s poor as anybody only yesterday. They want to know how Zimbabwe had its resources washed down the Congo River before they were
consulted. They want to know why his henchmen, known to be thieves and murderers are not where Makamba is.

That is scaring to Mugabe and so he should pretend to be a persecuted Pan-Africanist - thuthuma@yahoo.com
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