You would not send your child to the birthday party of a man said to be responsible for the deaths of thousands of people, would you?
Yet, this weekend, thousands of Zimbabwean children will pour into a venue in the city of Gweru to partake in the 21st February Movement celebrations, held each year since 1986, in honour of the 83rd birthday of President Robert Mugabe.
As streams of regimented boys and girls, neatly decorated in scarves imprinted with the stern visage and clenched fist of the Zimbabwean president, partake in the estimated $1,2million extravaganza, their parents will probably be at home cursing the celeÂÂÂbrant. Teaching in some of the schools that these children attend came to a halt weeks ago when teachers went on strike; those who remained at work threatened to stop teaching this week.
With Zimbabwe’s economy in shambles, the five million children of Zimbabwe, just more than 40% of the country’s population, have suffered most. The mortality rate of children under five years of age has risen sharply, from 80 deaths out of every 1 000 live births in 1990 to 132 in 2005. Meanwhile, life expectancy has plummeted. In 1990, the average Zimbabwean could expect to live to 60; today the average woman lives to 34, the average man to 37.
Many of Zimbabwe’s children need a bit of a party and a nice meal, particularly because the country has the world’s highest number of Aids orphans, and a great many children shoulder the responsibility of heading their households.
One might think that festivities for the only leader this country has ever known, the one who is largely responsible for the abject state of child welfare in this country, might be a bit muted. On the contrary. For weeks, Emmanuel Fundira, chair of the ”movement”, has run a fundraising campaign that is infinitely more effective than any existing child welfare programme of the government. His group argues that the birthday party is good for children, encouraging them as it does to emulate the president’s morals.
And what morals would those be?
Could this be the same Mugabe who, last September, while discussing a group of trade unionists who had been tortured by the police, said ”Yes, you will be thoroughly beaten” if you challenged his order?
Would this be the same man who has conscripted thousands of teenage children into a violent party militia that terrorises dissenters? The one who boasts of having not only eight academic degrees, but also ”degrees in violence”?
Not the sort of person you’d want to bump into in the playground.
To be fair, I benefited from some of Mugabe’s policies when he came to power. Like many Zimbabweans who were children in the early post-independence period, I had a good formal education and access to good state-funded healthcare.
But growing up in Matabeleland, Zimbabwe’s president was always, for me, the bogeyman come to life. I lived through a seven-year reign of terror conducted by the government’s notorious 5th Brigade in the south. Thousands were killed in this region during the campaign known as Gukurahundi.
In my family, we were not taught to emulate the moral example of Robert Mugabe.
An estimated 40 000 Zimbabwean women died in childbirth last year. Many of these and other avoidable deaths are the consequence of bad governance. Of late, the press has also begun to report on infanticide on a large scale, as women without hope kill their newborns and discard their corpses in Harare’s sewers. Local authorities have dredged up hundreds of small bodies in recent years.
And then there are the deaths we talk less about. Those of people who disappeared or were killed in political violence, allegedly by agents of Zanu-PF — the ruling party, once known as Zanu, that Mugabe has led since 1977.
While the hopes of Zimbabwe’s next generation are being shredded, many of us adults choose to join in the morbid ritual of cheering on the man responsible by offering vapid justifications of his morally bankrupt policies. Or we shrug weary shoulders and take care of our own.
Perhaps it is time now to think again about the morality of our responses to this crisis. The children of Zimbabwe deserve nothing less.
Gugulethu Moyo is a lawyer with the International Bar Association. The views expressed are her own