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
July 9, 2007
Final circus act of Matibili Mugabe, the madman from Ngomahuru?
MDC
Robert Mugabe’s latest act of madness involving plans to take over businesses and attempts to force down consumer prices to
levels that make it unprofitable to do business in Zimbabwe are undoubtedly part of the overall strategy to win the next combined elections scheduled for next year.
There is no rational explanation for forcing businesses to trade at a loss. The simplest law of business is that one must sell goods at prices above, not below, what it cost the business operator to procure them. Any law or activity by any government that seeks to control business and trade must take into account this basic principle of why and how businesses operate. Price controls, if needed, must be aimed at reducing the level of profit a business is making rather than killing the goose that lays the golden egg. Mugabe’s threat to businesses to “produce more or be taken over” is a smokescreen for his real intentions – to invade retail businesses the way he destroyed commercial agriculture.
Mugabe tried this stunt seven years ago when he ordered the invasion of commercial farms. He did this because there were very clear indications that he and ZANUPF were headed for a landslide defeat in the 2000 elections. The invasions effectively destroyed commercial agriculture which had been one of the main pillars of the country’s GDP. Commercial agriculture has traditionally contributed between 15 and 20 percent of the country’s GDP and nearly 50 percent of the country’s exports. Agriculture contributed to the livelihoods of about 70 percent of the country’s population.
There is a direct correlation between the level of poverty and economic decline in Zimbabwe today with the destruction of commercial agriculture. Zimbabwe is the only country in the SADC region as well as Africa that has recorded, for seven years in a row, a negative economic growth rate. With the key sectors like manufacturing, industry and agriculture in a downward spiral it is no wonder that poverty and unemployment have now devastated Zimbabwe.
Instead of working to address the root causes of the economic decline, Mugabe is using the collapsed economy for yet another of his personal survival strategies. His game plan is to use businesses to reward his cronies and supporters into voting for him again next year. What he does not seem to care to know is that his support base has dismissed significantly.
There is no more mass support for Mugabe, if ever there was any. There is a myth that Mugabe has a strong rural support base. What is left now is a handful of supporters who have benefited from his patronage. Those supporters are not enough to secure a victory for him at the next elections. But Mugabe needs them to do all his dirty tricks like rigging elections, assaulting members of the opposition, misinforming the public and protecting him. Mugabe has no illusions he can ever win elections by a popular vote. He is like a jilted lover who is now arm-twisting his wife to love him.
No wonder the late Edison Zvobgo described Mugabe as the madman from Ngomahuru mental asylum! He said Mugabe was a like an athlete who was given a baton in a relay race to pass it on to the next runner but fled with the baton into the mountains where he is still running mad to this day! Mugabe now seems to appreciate this characterization. If reports are true, Mugabe lambasted his Politburo sycophants last week for not speaking out like “Edison Zvobgo.”
In trying to manipulate business, with his characteristic violence, Mugabe faces a backlash that he cannot control.
The first is businesses have refused to restock. And stores now have rows upon rows of empty shelves. That is a recipe for a mass demonstration, if only Zimbabweans would heed the wake up call, when people cannot find basic commodities. Already Zimbabweans have been pushed to the corner. In this situation they cannot be pushed anymore without fighting back.
The second is many of the affected businesses are owned by top ZANUPF officials. This puts Mugabe on a tightrope. Already he is making concession by; guess what, printing more money to compensate businesses for the losses they incurred. There can be no doubt that when it comes to compensation businesses owned by ZANUPF top officials will be the first, and possibly only ones, to receive the compensation. Mugabe is now completely oblivious about the inflationary impact of printing more money.
Yet another backlash is the fact that the police, youth militia thugs and others sent to enforce the directive to lower prices are themselves now looting the same goods and selling them at an even higher price in the black market.
The irony of it all is that the retailers who bought those goods and are selling them to make a profit are, especially if they are not prominent officials of ZANUPF, being hunted down like common criminals and jailed. But absolutely nothing is being done to the real criminals, the police, thugs and Mugabe’s cronies who are now looting and fuelling the black market and inflation.
An even more disturbing feature is that some Zimbabweans are reported to be following these thugs around so they can buy goods at reduced prices. Granted that they are in a desperate situation and struggling to survive these same Zimbabweans will never answer a call from the opposition leaders to stage mass demonstrations against the regime. It is now like they have been bought for a few pieces of silver by their oppressors.
Mugabe’s behavior raises serious doubts about his sincerity in the so-called talks under Thabo Mbeki’s patronage. The talks are supposed to return Zimbabwe to democracy, basic freedoms, economic progress and free and fair elections. Mugabe is supposed to be part of these talks. But his behavior is undermining the aims and objectives of the talks. There is growing evidence that he has started plans to rig the elections scheduled for next year.
This strengthens the view that Mugabe is using the so-called talks in South Africa for his own political interest. He wants to buy time to strengthen and finalize his rigging machinery. By going along with the talks in South Africa Mugabe hopes to divert attention from where his energies are invested, strengthening his position in the face of growing opposition to his rule. He is also trying to reduce international criticism of his domestic polices.
There is yet another reason Mugabe is not serious about the talks in South Africa.
The MDC is demanding simply to give every Zimbabwean citizen a vote and an end to violence and intimidation of voters. To achieve this universal suffrage in the next elections MDC is demanding that the voters’ roll be done away with, and every Zimbabwean be allowed to vote on production of identification. As a matter of fact, this should be a non negotiable demand because every Zimbabwean citizen is entitled to the right to vote.
Mugabe does not want to give every Zimbabwean a vote. He wants to maximize his supporters’ votes and minimize his opponents’ votes through a process of manipulating the voters’ roll which is said to be loaded already with ZANUPF supporters whether alive or dead. Mugabe’s logic is similar to the one Ian Smith once held when he, for many years, denied Zimbabweans the one- person- one- vote principle. The reason for this is very simple. If all qualified Zimbabweans, regardless of where they are, were to vote, the defeat for Mugabe would be decisively traumatic. It does not matter whether the opposition MDC is united or not – which explains why MDC under Morgan Tsvangirayi is not placing unity talks with the Mutambara breakaway faction high on its priorities. Zimbabweans will vote for anyone but Mugabe or ZANUPF, if elections were free and fair.
It would be a monumental public relations disaster for Mugabe if talks broke down just because Mugabe refused to give every Zimbabwean the right to vote. Even Mugabe’s apologists in SADC and AU would be hard-pressed to justify their continued support him.
The African Union summit in Ghana recently adjourned with no reports of ever formally discussing the Zimbabwean crisis. Mugabe and Mbeki probably managed to stave off any criticism of Mugabe by telling the African leaders that talks were in progress and it would not be helpful to discuss the situation at this point. Notice that whatever conversations on Zimbabwe were held, these were not done in the AU plenary meeting but on the sidelines, that is, while they were having coffee or tea break.
The Zimbabwean situation, notwithstanding strong representations by civil society and the opposition MDC, was probably a minor inconvenience.
It is amazing the AU spent so much time discussing a proposal to form the United States of Africa, only to conclude what everybody knows that this is an impossible dream, given the geopolitics of the continent. Why they ever had this issue high up on the agenda, instead of tackling the pressing problems of Zimbabwe, Darfur, Somalia and African development and regional cooperation is anybody’s guess.
Mugabe will obviously get some satisfaction in that the African Union, SADC and President Mbeki are exerting very mild pressure, which an artist once described as more of a massage than anything else, on Mugabe. The international community appears to have no political will to go beyond the present targeted sanctions.
Internally, Mugabe does not feel any real threat in form of mass action from the opposition movement. His perceived real challenges are opposition from within ZANUPF and the economy.
Whatever measures Mugabe has taken so far to control the economy have been a dismal failure. The so-called talks in South Africa are not likely to take center stage in what is preoccupying Mugabe now as he grapples with the twin evils of dissension within his party and a stubbornly independent economy.
The only time Mugabe will take a serious view of the talks in South Africa is if he fails totally to control his perceived twin evils. ZANUPF businessmen, feeling the adverse impact of Mugabe’s policies, are likely to form a coalition with other factions, especially one led by Solomon Mujuru, opposing Mugabe into a new concerted push to oust him from office. The reported conditional $2 billion-loan offer from Libya and, more importantly, the SADC plan to rescue the Zimbabwean economy by extending the South African Rand area into Zimbabwe will give the business community an impetus to negotiate new political coalitions against Mugabe should he continue to be a stumbling block on the SADC plan.
But Mugabe has sustained his dominance of ZANUPF by playing one faction against the other. He also knows the dirty secrets about each faction and this could limit the potential for a united opposition to Mugabe within the party. However, if the economy maintains its downward slide unabated, as it has for the last seven years, there is every reason to believe that the opposition within the party will, on economic grounds more than anything else, neutralize whatever dirty little secrets within the party apparatchiki may have held at bay such efforts.
When all is said and done, the end game for Mugabe, the son of a Malawian immigrant, Matibili, and who, ironically, has beendenying citizenship to others on the basis they were not Zimbabwean by ancestry, is approaching. This same Mugabe, whom the late Zvogbo called “the mad man from Ngomahuru” may be, even as we speak right now, in the last act of his circus show.
The post- Mugabe era looms in the horizon like the morning dawn.
