Howard Barrell
OVER A BARREL
A problem with revolutionaries is that they tend to view themselves as indispensable. While they will say that the political change they helped secure was “inevitable”, they will nonetheless argue that their own intentional involvement was necessary to bring it about.
By this curious reasoning, revolutionaries cast themselves as the conscious instruments of historical inevitability.
If matters ended there, the rest of us might be able to tut-tut and get on with our lives. But they seldom do. Delusions of indispensability seem to be notoriously persistent. Revolutionaries tend to believe that, having “caused” history’s wheel to move one revolution, their presence is necessary for any subsequent movement.
The result is they often remain in power far beyond their usefulness. Their obdurate insistence on serving the nation may also, of course, have something to do with the big cars, fawning security men and opportunities to raid the national treasury with which politics rewards the dutiful. But their strange conceit is their more interesting motivation. In the process, old revolutionaries more often become obstacles to change than the agents of it.
One such cork on human consciousness is Robert Mugabe, a man evidently thoroughly convinced of his own indispensability. The old Zanu cock may no longer have anything to crow about. His farmyard may be a wretched mess. His strut may now prompt as much ridicule as outrage. But he insists we all hear his discordant song – the cry of a Zimbabwean Nicolae Ceausescu, the one true believer in his own follies.
What makes Mugabe’s rule all the more sinister for Zimbabweans is the same thing that made almost every other “revolutionary” regime of last century so sinister. He has filled the security services, the police, the army and the air force with veterans of what passed for a revolution. Every organ capable of repression now comes under the control of people who, like him, view themselves, in an almost mystical sense, as the bearers, by right, of Zimbabwe’s destiny.
These are people who cannot concede to others who think differently from themselves legitimacy, a full place in the national political drama and the right also to rule. They are, moreover, people who see the survival in power of Mugabe and likeminded leaders of Zanu-PF as the best guarantee of their own privileges. These are the people who have threatened civil war if Mugabe loses the general election, which now seems likely to be held in the second week of May.
Mugabe is most unlikely to lose the election. His loss of the referendum on a new Constitution was a massive wake-up call for Zanu-PF. And he and his party have started campaigning energetically by both fair means and foul.
Cheerleading for Zanu-PF by Zimbabwe television and radio is well under way. The ruling party’s focus is falling on the rural areas, its traditional stronghold. There, the threat of a return to war is a cruel card to have played. Rural people suffered awfully during the guerilla war that preceded independence in 1980.
The state of the voters’ roll – hopelessly out of date – is also likely to benefit Mugabe. More than half the voters on the roll have either died or changed constituencies, according to a recent United Nations study. Add to this the fact that the government body that oversees elections in Zimbabwe has a reputation for stupendous incompetence, and it is just possible that hundreds of thousands of Zanu-PF voters could rise from the dead on polling day. Local observers doubt the opposition parties will win more than 40 of the 120 elected seats in the 150-seat Parliament. As president, Mugabe nominates the remaining 30 seats. This latter fact means Zanu-PF need win only 46 elected seats to command a majority.
But Mugabe’s major electoral ploy is the invasion of mainly white-owned farms. The invasions are a political fraud. Mugabe whinged, whined and wailed for 20 years about his intention to distribute land to poor peasants. But he failed to institute any meaningful land reform plan. Instead, what little land the state took up was distributed to Mugabe’s already rich political and business cronies.
What Mugabe has done by encouraging the farm invasions is to unleash the worst possible force any leader can inflict on his or her country – a lawless state. He has dispensed with the rule of law and due process. He has threatened his opponents with death – no empty rhetoric from a man who, 17 years ago, ordered the deaths of tens of thousands of unarmed men, women and children in Matabeleland. In short, no Zimbabwean person or property now enjoys the unqualified protection of the law.
Mugabe’s hubris has destroyed any prospects of new domestic or foreign fixed investment in Zimbabwe in the foreseeable future. He has condemned his people to penury from which it will take them decades to recover. And he has also seriously undermined the prospects for all of us in Southern Africa.Would you invest in Southern Africa now – a region whose institutions and systems of law are evidently so weak that its second-largest national market can be collapsed by the caprice of a single madman?
We can’t expect a rational response to the crisis in Zimbabwe from Jos Eduardo dos Santos in Angola or Sam Nujoma in Namibia – Mugabe’s allies in propping up the brothel-keeper-turned-president Laurent Kabila in the Democratic Republic of Congo. But, if our own President Thabo Mbeki is as serious as he says he is about securing regional and continental prosperity, he will now be hard at work trying to find a way through the crisis in Zimbabwe.
This must surely include enlisting the support of our rational neighbours – Botswana’s Festus Mogae and Mozambique’s Joachim Chissano – to a joint posture. Our position must surely entail: our commitment to respect the outcome of Zimbabwe’s election and the demand that Mugabe does the same; extracting from Mugabe an undertaking that he will step down peacefully before mid-year, perhaps in exchange for a form of immunity from prosecution (regrettable though that may be); and encouraging the more thoughtful sections of Zanu-PF’s leadership to move decisively to secure the rule of law and respect for the principles of political pluralism in the country.
Anything less will be very bad news for Zimbabweans, and for the rest of us.