Zimbabwe

” The responsibility of government for the public safety is absolute and requires no mandate. It is, in fact, the prime objective for which government comes into effect.” - Winston Churchill

People tend to measure themselves and be challenged by the highest thing in sight. In our social, economic and political arrangements, the highest ‘things’ in sight are the women and men who through fortitude, staying power, creativity or a combination of those virtues, overcome difficulty to succeed. They inspire us. They become our heroes. The problem with Africa is that we have too few heroes and of those few, only a minority retain their status. Our heroes empty the store of goodwill in the public repository by relentlessly making unreasonable demands of our patience. Such is the case with President Robert Mugabe.

Robert Mugabe is was an African hero. Robert Mugabe once attained and held the same status as Nelson Mandela, not simply because of his (Mugabe’s) resistance to Ian Smith’s White majority minority rule in the former Southern Rhodesia. Robert Mugabe kept the ANC viable in its resistance to apartheid in South Africa. For a good while on the continent, President Mugabe was one of the ‘highest things in sight.’

Then in the mid-1980’s Mugabe began to sap his social capital when he sanctioned the butchering of thousands in Matabeleland because it was a bastion of opposition to him. Emerson Mnangagwa, Mugabe’s former security chief, earned himself the unenviable title of “the Butcher of Matabeleland” for his leadership in the slaughter of thousands of his compatriots. Robert Mugabe will not, in the words of Harvey Dent (Dark Knight) die a hero, he has stayed around long enough to see himself become the villain.

We can blame Europe and the West for the sanctions that have Zimbabwe’s economy in the tank. And there is enough blame to go around, but by God the West didn’t do this:

“Women were stripped and beaten so viciously that whole sections of flesh fell away from their buttocks. Many had to lie facedown in hospital beds during weeks of recovery. Men’s genitals became targets. The official postmortem report on Chaona opposition activist Aleck Chiriseri listed crushed genitals among the causes of death. Other men died the same way.” - Washington Post

Over the last few years, President Mugabe has emptied his store of goodwill and is now drawing blood - literally. There is no question that the land distribution in Zimbabwe was a travesty - White farmers (approximately 1% of the population) owned 70% of the arable land. This was an injustice that had to be corrected. But how is Zimbabwe (as it is today) in any way a ‘correction’? Inflation is now 2.2 million percent! Private estimates put inflation at 12.6 million percent. This is impossible to wrap one’s mind around. Twenty billion Zimbabwean dollars now trade for $1US. It just boggles the mind. Unemployment is at 80% and a 4lb bag of sugar costs up $90 billion (Zimbabwean). At independence in 1980 the Zimbabwe dollar was worth more than US$1. The worthless Zimbabwean banknotes appear to be the least of the problems right now as the Zimbabwe Times reports that the country is about to run out of paper to print the useless money. The German company that supplies paper stopped over concerns of the recent election rigging.

So let’s do what we do best in Africa - make excuses. Let’s blame other people for causing ALL of our problems while life expectancy hovers around 40 years for the lucky among us. Let’s make excuses while African countries consistently crowd the bottom of the annual Human Development Index. Let’s make excuses and allow the rest of the world to infantilize and patronize us. Let us crystallize our place as the world’s basket case in perennial need of handouts and regular salvation from its own murderous and self-destructive inclinations. Until we own up to our complicity in and responsibility for the condition of Africa - thousands will continue to starve in Zimbabwe, be raped and pillaged in Darfur and live in the lawlessness that ravages Somalia and eastern DRC. Only Africans can solve Africa’s problems. The government in Harare is an illegitimate one, it has breached the social contract with its people by consistently defaulting on its end of the bargain. African leaders can grandstand in mock indignation at what they perceive as “interference” with the domestic affairs of Zimbabwe, but Mugabe’s administration lost claim to that principle when it unilateral abrogated the social contract with Zimbabweans for no rationally accessible reason.

Update: Hat tip to ‘justrecently’ for pointing out that it was ‘minority’ and not ‘majority’ rule.