South Africa should not give Mugabe a cent

South Africa should not give Mugabe a cent

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• Zimbabwe: talking with one voice

By Chris Kabwato

IT'S really hard to argue with people who have no sense of history or who deliberately fabricate history. The debate on Zimbabwe has become one in which facts have been sacrificed at the altar of racism, disaffection with SA’s poverty levels, deliberate revisionism, emotionalism and woolly Pan-Africanism.

It can be quite tiring being a Zimbabwean because all the time you have to describe, explain and interpret the mess in that country. And yes it’s a mess. The author of that mess is not Tony Blair though if you listened to the deranged messages from ZANU-PF you would think the British Prime Minister was some suicide bomber let loose to cause havoc with Zimbabwe’s politics and economy. No the economic crisis in Zimbabwe stops with Mugabe. The World Bank and the IMF and their misguided Structural Adjustment Programme (SAPS) may have to shoulder some blame for the economic problems of the early 1990s but it is Mugabe who has driven a once-proud nation into the ground.

Mugabe paid war veterans billions of Zimdollars (the Zimbabwe currency then was trading at 1 to USD8) in 1997; led us into a private war in the DR Congo where his thieving elite looted the resources of that country; led a violent seizure of farms under the pretext of redistributing land to peasants; and now he has come up with Operation Murambatsvina (a very derogatory term in this context and which means “we refuse to be associated with dirt/rubbish”). But what is context of my article? Well, Mugabe has come begging for money and South Africans are clearly divided on whether he should get the funds or not and if he does under what conditions. My take on this is simple: if you give money to a habitual thief and delinquent what do you really hope to solve? Mugabe is not going to return the South Africans taxpayers’ money. Mugabe is not going put the funds to any productive use unless the funds are channelled by the SA government to the creditors directly. And the next question would be what next? Will SA loan ‘Oliver Twist’ some more funds in a few months when he comes begging for some more?

"My take on this is simple: if you give money to a habitual thief and delinquent what do you really hope to solve? Mugabe is not going to return the South Africans taxpayers’ money"

CHRIS KABWATO

The Zimbabwe government is clueless on how to resolve the economic meltdown. Hospitals and clinics have collapsed; the education system is bleeding (of course all the elite’s children are at Rhodes and elsewhere in the world); there is no foreign currency for the simple reason that the country is not exporting tobacco. The ‘cellphone farmers’, as we call the elite who have seized farms, have not started producing. The last time they produced was when they were harvesting what they found on the farms they seized. But of course Mugabe will blame everything on Tony Blair.

I can give an example of the thieving nature of the ZANU-PF government. 13 years ago I was working as a civil servant when Mugabe announced a housing scheme for government workers. For a monthly contribution you would secure a housing stand in an area called Tynwald (a lower middle-class suburb). Well as a simple citizen with simple needs of wanting food, clothes and shelter I duly paid my funds over a period of seven months. Needless to state I never got the housing stand. The next thing I was told was that the housing fund had been looted and the chief beneficiary was Grace Mugabe who went on to build a mansion the media dubbed “Gracelands”. Fruitless missions to the Housing Ministry did not get me my money back. And now Mugabe claims he is destroying people’s houses (they are not shacks) in order to give them decent accommodation (what a contradiction!). And people still have to split hairs on what Mugabe represents? He is not a revolutionary. An consummate political opportunist Mugabe is the epitome of a revolution of that has lost its way.

South Africa should not give money to Mugabe – after all he is the government, the state and the country. Any financial aid can only give him time to entrench himself. Mugabe must go. He is bad for Zimbabwe, Southern Africa and Africa. He is bad for people like me who just want to get on with their lives and in their own country. A million or more Zimbabweans live on Tony Blair’s native land and many more are devising dubious ways of getting there.

Mugabe’s supporters must ask why three million Zimbabweans wander across the face of the earth. An analysis of the Zimbabwean situation should not be tainted by the gut reactions of African political solidarity nor should such analysis be motivated by a desire to return to the skewed racial distribution of land pre-2000. An analysis of Mugabe must be based on whether he has provided the people of Zimbabwe with a life that a democratic society assumes: freedom of speech, freedom from fear, freedom from want and all the rights enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Chris Kabwato works in the School of Journalism & Media Studies at Rhodes University
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