world
Mercedes Sayagues
President Robert Gabriel Mugabe this week articulated his vision of Zimbabwe in the new millennium: one redolent with the stale air of Albania under the paranoid Enver Hoxha, the Stalinist who led his country into extreme isolation and penury during the Cold War – a country cut off from the rest of the world and its ways, a closed economy based on peasant agriculture and despotic rule enforced by militia, with no challenges admitted.
Evidently oblivious of the effect his words would have on his country and the region, and the economies of both, Mugabe said on Wednesday:
l “We cannot afford to lose our country to the whites’ MDC [Movement for Democratic Change], never, ever … MDC started the violence and now they are getting more than they bargained for.
“… We are masters at this game. They are amateurs. We are professionals … Are we a foolish lot, to watch while white farmers support MDC and start military training on farms, and do nothing? Goodness me! Study our history, where we come from.”
l “We just want our land and we will take it … If there is resistance, if you don’t acknowledge our reasonable demands, then you are not fit to be one of us.
“The 20E000 [British passport holders] are free to make their choice. We can even assist by showing them the various ways to go.”
l “They [the British] can keep their money. We want our land. From our land, we will get money.”
l “Our silliest mistake was to accept structural adjustment … We will go back to our brand of socialism … to control prices of basic foodstuffs. Let the IMF [International Monetary Fund] cry foul, that we have reneged.”
l “If investors don’t come to Zimbabwe, we will create them from ourselves.”
l “You journalists portray us as evildoers, the worst of autocrats. Even religious people call me Satan, devil and criminal. I am inured to that kind of abuse.”
l “We must reject outside interference. This little world of Zimbabwe [392 600km2], this is our world. Our little, beautiful, sacred world, for us. God gave us our shrine. It has minerals, game, rivers, birds … We are our own redeemers, our own liberators.”
Mugabe began and ended his 90-minute speech in Shona and English with shouts of “Pasi ne [down with] British imperialism and neocolonialism!” – his fist in the air.
In a navy-blue suit, pink shirt, ochre
and yellow pied-de-poule tie and a rose with a sprig of baby breath in the buttonhole, Mugabe was cocky, menacing, sometimes ironic – and hopelessly out of touch with the modern world.
His tired liberation rhetoric went down well with the 200 war veterans who toyi- toyied, scowled at the foreign media, and chanted: “Mugabe will rule because we war vets agreed to it.”
The occasion was the launch of Zanu-PF’s election manifesto. Its motto is: “Land is the economy and the economy is land.”
One sample of its quality: “The nonsense that the root cause of the temporary setback in our economy is the presence of our troops in the DRC [Democratic Republic of Congo] is nothing but a sinister imagination of imperialists, neocolonialists, racists, sellouts and the international media all bent on derailing the progress of Africans and Africa.”
But leaked official documents estimated the cost of war to Zimbabwe was US$1- million (R6,8-million) a day.
The manifesto added that the World Bank and the IMF would no longer have “any direct or indirect role in managing and controlling our country’s fiscal policy”.
But, without a satisfactory rating by these two international financial institutions, it will be almost impossible for Zimbabwe to raise desperately needed foreign funds.
Mugabe bragged: “We introduced democracy, rule of law, peace and security.”
But this week several businesses and cars of black MDC supporters were bombed. An MDC candidate’s brother was beaten to death in Mount Darwin on Monday. His mother was also badly beaten but survived.
Three other MDC members disappeared in Mvurwi and are feared dead. Farm invasions continue.
Farmers and their workers are forced to attend Zanu-PF rallies and praise the party in Chinese-style indoctrination.
Any takers for a safari in Albania?