Zimbabwe Information Center in North America
A project of the North American Coalition for a Free Zimbabwe (NACFREEZ)
By Stanford G. Mukasa
Letter from America
January 8, 2007
Zimbabwe in a state of retrogressive atrophy
For people who drink the Johnnie Walker whisky, the bottle’s label that reads: "Born 1820 – Still going Strong!" will be very familiar. In a similar vein, when Robert Mugabe ordered the invasion of commercial farms in 2000 few people ever imagined his regime could still be in power nearly seven years later at the start of 2007.
If one reviews media headlines about Mugabe in the past seven years the predictions were for a regime that was about to fall anytime because of the economic meltdown.
As a matter of fact, all conditions for the fall of the Mugabe regime exist in Zimbabwe today. The situation has retrogressively deteriorated to a point where Mugabe’s greatest accomplishment is the near total destruction of the social and economical infrastructure.
Zimbabwe has, to all intents and purposes, now hit rock bottom. Things cannot get any worse than this. Zimbabweans have had more than their share of life in Hell. It is now almost like they are immune to any further deterioration of their situation. In their state of atrophy, Zimbabweans appear resigned to their fate: sitting, weeping, singing and praying by the Rivers of Babylon in the hope that someone, anyone, will come to their rescue.
One lifeline that is keeping many Zimbabweans afloat are remittances from Zimbabweans in Diaspora. Zimbabweans abroad send an estimated US$100 million every month to their families and relatives at home. This was enough to make Mugabe salivate. He wanted a share of this foreign currency. So he sent Reserve Bank Governor Gideon Gono two years ago to negotiate channeling the remittances through a government controlled agency.
The vast majority of Zimbabweans have lost almost everything. Only a minority elite supporters of Mugabe and ZANUPF have gained materially. This explains why, in this state of utter dilapidation and unprecedented poverty, Mugabe’s cronies are almost bursting to the seams with exuberance and wealth looted from the State resources. Mugabe has created a lifeboat of affluence for his cronies. He has now abandoned and sacrificed the once Titanic ship of a nation that was a few years ago the breadbasket of the region – a nation that political scientist, Ali Mazrui, once called “a glimmer of hope in the decaying garden of Eden of Africa.”
Several years ago a travel writer visited what used to be called Stanleyville in the then Belgian Congo. He noticed that the once thriving city in the middle of nowhere had now degenerated into abandoned buildings that were systematically being chocked by a thick shrub. His conclusion was that the jungle was claiming the city, soon there would be few signs there ever existed a city.
This analogy is very similar to the descriptions of today’s Zimbabwe by many people who recently visited the country. One visitor said she saw a Tsunami type of social environment. It was like the nation had been hit by an earthquake, a civil war or some natural disaster.
Asked what she liked best about Zimbabwe she nonchalantly replied: “When my plane took off from that wretched country!” This may have sounded like a cruel hoax. She now understood why nearly one-quarter of the Zimbabwean population is out of the country and why on any given day thousands are frantically trying to leave the condemned country, reflecting the dissatisfaction with the status quo that was eloquently captured in one Punk song “I was shouting long before I was born get me out of this wretched place!”
A journalist noted that many Zimbabweans have been reduced to eating rats. That report, incidentally, was attacked on the grounds that
rats or mbeva are a delicacy in Zimbabwe in as much as dogs, frog’s legs, monkeys and snakes are delicacies in other cultures.
But what critics of the report missed in their haste to attack the journalist was that rats are not a mainstream or staple food for most Zimbabweans. Yes, they are eaten among some of the rural population, but they are universally shunned by the modern Zimbabwean generations. There are some traditional foods that modern Zimbabweans no longer touch. A Zimbabwean musician composed a song in which a boss fired an employee and told him to go back to the rural areas to grow sweet potatoes!
Eating traditional foods like rats is an obvious indication of the impoverishment of a society whose relative affluence had socialized them out of the practice. There is, therefore, a positive correlation between eating rats and poverty.
Ironically, there was another report last year about members of the elite Presidential guard hunting squirrels at the botanical gardens to feed their families. That report never received any criticism at all!
The people’s poverty and misery have sustained the Mugabe regime. Like a disease Mugabe and ZANUPF are thriving on, and at the expense of, the social and economic health of the nation. This is what has kept Mugabe and ZANUPF in power.
Zimbabweans are like a sick person who has not sought medical treatment to cure himself of the disease called Mugabe –ZANUPFitis. It’s not like the cure does not exist because, unlike HIV/AIDS, there is a potent cure for the Mugabe-ZANUPFitis disease.
The cure is also available for free. It is called mass action. This cure has been tried, tested and worked in several countries around the world. Yet some Zimbabweans are in a state of denial that this cure could work for them as well.
Zimbabweans are hoping this disease, Mugabe-ZANUPFitis, will go away and they will recover. Yes. It is true the disease, unlike HIV/AIDS, will sooner or later go away, and, Yes, Zimbabweans will recover. But this will be after years of wandering in the wilderness and the recovery may not come in any foreseeable future.
In postponing any action to deal with the disease right now Zimbabweans are bequeathing future generations a legacy of a dilapidated country that will be very expensive to repair.
In the seven years Mugabe has intensified his brutality against Zimbabweans a witches’ brew of strategies to dislodge him have been tried. But Mugabe has consolidated his stranglehold on the Zimbabweans.
The problem with the opposition movement is they keep repeating the very same strategies that have not been successful in the past. A philosopher once said madness is doing the same things over and over hoping and expecting different results.
As a result, Zimbabwe now has a splintered opposition, each trying their own snake oil to cure Zimbabweans of the Mugabe-ZANUPFitis disease.
What is needed right now is for the opposition leadership to critically evaluate their strategies in the past seven years and learn from their mistakes. To simplistically make hollow promises and then repeat the same ineffectual activities will be a reflection of poor leadership.
The opposition leadership and the Zimbabweans could learn something from Bishop Desmond Tutu’s non violent strategies against South Africa’s apartheid regime.
When the apartheid regime under P.W. Botha was intensifying its repression of South Africans, a new civic society leadership under the coordination of Bishop Tutu emerged. Reflecting on the challenges that the South African opposition movement faced after Botha had militarized the state --just like what Mugabe has done --Bishop Tutu said he planned a street march to protest against apartheid.
Given the ruthlessness of the apartheid police and army who were brought in to deal forcefully with the opposition movement, Bishop Tutu said it was up to the people of South Africa to take the decision to march under these circumstances. Bishop said he had stated his opposition to violence from whatever quarter. He said he believed that nonviolent protest could eventually achieve the desired results if well organized and well attended.
Inspired by both Gandhi and Martin Luther King Bishop Tutu said his belief in mass protest and what it could achieve was inspired by his religious faith. The march took place with thousands of the people on the streets. Asked whether people were prepared to participate in nonviolent action that did not show immediate promise Bishop Tutu said the people of South Africa, just like slaves in America, had always had a spiritual hope for salvation regardless of how long it would take. And when the South Africans took to the streets they were not necessarily expecting immediate results.
Many Zimbabweans today shy away from mass protests because they do not think demonstrations will bring immediate results, if any at all. One point the Zimbabweans are missing is the philosophy of mass protests. As Bishop Tutu said: when thousands of unarmed citizens take to the streets and confront their armed oppressors they are, in fact, exposing the violence within the oppressor. And that exposure can have a profound impact nationally and internationally.
While many people have given up on mass action this form of protest remains Zimbabweans’ strongest weapon against Mugabe. It has not been tried and tested in the manner it should. Previous calls for mass action have met with little enthusiasm for a variety of reasons related to both leadership and followership problems.
Of course, mass action should be one of a number of strategies based on what works and what does not work. There is a real possibility that the cracks in the ZANUPF could break into open warfare among the factions in ZANUPF. What is holding tenuously the superficial unity in ZANUPF is Mugabe who is 83 years old. While, like Johnnie Walker whisky, Mugabe has survived longer than many forecasts, the dictator, unlike the whisky, is a mere mortal. Anything can happen to Mugabe anytime and any day.
Mass action should continue to be an option and planning for it must continue. However, other options such creating an alliance even with moderate and disgruntled members of the ZANUPF should also be actively pursued.
<mbanga@thezimbabwean.co.uk>