/ 19 April 2007

Rough justice

''It turns out that I'm not the first man delivered to the police chief on the back of this pickup. The last one was a labourer, caught overcharging for the farmer's tomatoes at the local market.'' On the border between Zimbabwe and Mozambique, Mark Ashurst observes an unwritten constitution at work.

The chief of police is all smiles. A big man and jovial, he strides towards us wearing a T-shirt and flip-flops. A large brown bottle of Dos M beer dangles from one hand.

The farmer, a white Zimbabwean burnished red by the sun, climbs out of his pickup. They meet like old friends. They speak Shona, Zimbabwe’s mother tongue — the Mozambican is fluent. It’s a scene that not long ago was commonplace in Zimbabwe too.

We are in Chimoio, a Mozambican market town about an hour’s drive from Zimbabwe. I’ve hitched a lift with the farmer, who has left his birthplace to start again on a neglected plot of land leased from the government in Maputo.

From my vantage point in the back of his truck, I watch their noisy, ebullient exchange. The police chief, noticing me, makes an inscrutable gesture — the joke, apparently, is on me. Beer bellies sag over their shorts, swaying as they laugh.

It turns out that I’m not the first man delivered to the police chief on the back of this pickup. The last one was a labourer, caught overcharging for the farmer’s tomatoes at the local market.

Six weeks later, the labourer is still locked up at the police station. In return, the police chief enjoys a steady supply of tomatoes — a perk of the job.

”Rough justice,” I say under my breath.

Next to me in the back of the pickup, Sidonio shrugs.

”You have to,” he says.

Sidonio runs a bar in Maputo.

”I’d do it too if one of my barmen was stealing,” he says. ”You cut a deal with the police chief.”

They are pragmatists: Sidonio, the police chief and the farmer. Cutting deals, trading favours, the sum of their transactions adds up to a political process. For practical purposes, this is the unwritten constitution that governs life in a rural, under­developed corner of Southern Africa.

On the far side of the Mozambican border, in Zimbabwe, the same system has broken down. The market in Chimoio, capital of the northwestern province of Manica, is laden with goods that were once plentiful in Zimbabwe. The wooden tables are piled with washing powder, packaged food, plastic buckets, maize.

For many Zimbabweans, these same goods, the basic materials of daily life, are becoming scarce commodities. Hyper-inflation renders them unaffordable. But in Chimoio these goods are plentiful — if you have metacais, the Mozambican currency, to spend.

Zimbabwe’s President, Robert Mugabe, is under pressure to restore stability. The Zim dollar has collapsed. Foreign exchange reserves are exhausted. Bank notes must be carried in satchels. All this was true five years ago, but there is more evidence now that pressure from regional governments has increased.

Thabo Mbeki, recently appointed as mediator by the Southern African Development Community, wants a deal between Mugabe’s ruling Zanu-PF and the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC). Mbeki’s strategy is to confer a shred of legitimacy on Zimbabwe’s delinquent politics — an approach rooted in his suspicion that neither Zanu nor the MDC has a credible programme for change.

Twenty-seven years after independence, Zimbabwe bears all the hallmarks of a colonial state. Its economy still depends on tobacco and farming, although these industries are in disarray after Mugabe’s chaotic seizure of white-owned farms.

State institutions, from the secret police to government departments, are used and abused by a small clique of officials. The mechanisms of internal repression bear an uncanny resemblance to those on which Ian Douglas Smith relied to suppress demands for majority rule during the bloodbath of Rhodesia’s civil war. Except that these days, of course, the faces of the securocrats are black, not white.

Even universal schooling, Mugabe’s biggest achievement, was built on an education system inherited from colonial times. It seems extraordinary that a man who was once the toast of the liberal world has fashioned a new nation, Zimbabwe, which in its structure and government so closely resembles the old one.

But then perhaps this explains why Mugabe was praised in the 1980s as a champion of reconciliation — the Nelson Mandela of his decade.

He formed a government of national unity, invited white people to the Cabinet table and reassured the commercial farmers: ”You grow the food,” he told them. ”You support our governance. In return, we’ll always give you a Cabinet seat.”

The comparison is dubious, of course: Mugabe’s hands are steeped in blood, from the vicious colonial war against the old Rhodesia to the Matabeleland massacres soon after independence. But he was a great conciliator too.

The land invasions and state-sponsored militia began only when Mugabe faced a real challenge from a new opposition. The MDC is a party bankrolled by sympathisers abroad, and the farmers at home. It is a deeply personal quarrel for Mugabe.

Lovemore Mgibi, a Zimbabwean businessman and academic who left Zanu in 1985, describes the president’s attitude to the farmers in terms of a modern-day revenge tragedy: ”You betrayed us. You messed us up. If we go down, you’re going down with us.”

Sitting on the back of the Zimbabwean farmer’s pickup truck in Mozambique, I wonder what it would take to turn the jovial police chief against the smiling white farmer. A poor crop of tomatoes, maybe? Another 20 years of slow-burning resentment glossed over with deals, favours, rough justice?

If Zimbabwe’s turmoil holds any lesson for Africa, it is that democracy is more keenly craved now than it has ever been. Not because it is any remedy for the political and economic inheritance of Southern Africa: the labourer in the police cell could vouch for that. But because the alternative, the old political art that brought peace to post­independence Africa, has failed so spectacularly to create a fair society.

Zimbabwe has long been a land of deep, perhaps implacable, suspicions. ”Tsvangirai, Mugabe, everyone is mistrusted,” Mgibi told me five years ago. That scepticism may yet stand them in good stead, as South Africa positions itself to broker a new version of the collapsed post-colonial settlement.

Sooner or later, a new government will take power in Harare. The new order is likely to bring an unwieldy coalition of rivals and the deal-making, once again, will take place in private. This time, at least, they will not be easily duped.

Mark Ashurst is director of the Africa Research Institute, London. This report was first broadcast on the BBC’s From Our Own Correspondent