by Alec Russell
This was a classic Big Man tussle, which had been played out countless times before with Moi in Kenya. The script is simple. The West threatens to cut off aid unless there is political and economic reform. The autocrat huffs and puffs about colonialist bullying. Finally there is a nominal compromise, promises of reform, and the aid is resumed as before. The 'rules' change, however, if the Big Man is under threat of losing power, as was the case with Mugabe in early 2000, for then there is no point in his reaching a compromise.
The showdown with Britain was a long time brewing. Mugabe's thorny relations with Tony Blair's government first came to a head at the Commonwealth Summit of October 1997 when the British prime minister refused to discuss British compensation for dispossessed farmers. It was the very next month that Mugabe announced his land-grab plans. As the political opposition gathered momentum in 1998 Mugabe said they had been primed by British agents sent to 'overthrow the state'. Thereafter any setback was routinely blamed on the old oppressor: the chronic shortage of petrol caused by Zimbabwe's inability to meet its payments was blamed on British oil companies; Mark Chavunduka and Ray Choto, the two journalists who were tortured after publishing a story that Zimbabwean army officers had been plotting a coup, were accused of being British lackeys.
In the standoff with Zimbabwe, Whitehall had the legal high ground. But it was a war it could never win. On paper it had some of the answers to Zimbabwe's crisis. An unofficial truce was declared in September 1998 when a ten-year programme of land redistribution was agreed between the farmers, Britain, other donor countries and Harare. This laid down careful conditions for reform. The international loans badly needed for Zimbabwe's ailing economy would be forthcoming, and compensation would be paid for dispossessed farmers, provided the land was then distributed and run in a fair and efficient way. But even then British officials were sceptical of Mugabe's commitment, particularly in the light of his costly intervention in the Democratic Republic of Congo in August 1998. Mugabe justified the despatch of 6,000 soldiers to shore up Laurent Kabila as an urgent act of regional policing. But it was little more than a buccaneering expedition. A number of Mugabe acolytes gained rich contracts to exploit the Congo's minerals, including his nephew Leo Mugabe.
In the same year Britain despatched a new and forthright High Commissioner to Harare. Peter Longworth was far from the stereotypical diplomat. A former journalist, in his previous posting as Consul General in Johannesburg he and his Swedish wife Christina were renowned for their lively parties. His brief was clear- persuade Mugabe to back down and retire with Grace to one of their palaces before he did any more damage to the ailing fabric of the Zimbabwean state. But Longworth's urgings went unheard, as did the complaints of the increasingly vociferous opposition under the trade union leader, Morgan Tsvangirai. As the months passed, so Mugabe's entanglement in the Congo grew. He despatched a further 5,000 soldiers in an operation that was estimated to be costing Zimbabwe at least £60,000 a day, while back home the state was unable to buy in enough petrol for its daily needs. By 1999 the state oil company had accumulated debts of at least £200 million, after failing to pay contractors for a number of years. When the contractors demanded payments in hard currency before making any deliveries the supply of petrol all but stopped. The lessons of Mugabe's cavalier neglect of the basics of fiscal discipline did not escape his people. But talk of the national interest is meaningless to 'Big Men' whose only premise is staying in power.
In this heated atmosphere in November 1999 Mugabe stopped off in London to do his Christmas shopping and once again hit the headlines when Peter Tatchell, the homosexual rights activist, banged on his limousine as he attempted a mock arrest for the recent torture of two opposition journalists. For the Big Man of Africa this was too much. Seemingly convinced that this 'affront' had had the backing of number ten Downing Street he accused the British prime minister of 'running a gangster regime of little men'. He also revived his old gay bashing routine referring to the British government as the 'gay government of the gay United gay Kingdom'. In doing so Mugabe alienated his last remaining liberal supporters in Britain who had liked to recall his stance against Rhodesia and apartheid South Africa. But in the increasingly make-believe world of State House he was of course rallying the people against the old white rulers.
Back home for a while it was business as usual. In November 1999 Mugabe awarded himself and his cabinet colleagues a 200 per cent pay rise. Few Zimbabweans were surprised in January 2000 when the winning ticket for the Zimbabwean Banking Corporation's monthly lottery was won by none other than R. G. Mugabe. His prize, 100,000 Zimbabwean dollars, was worth only £2,000 but it was a huge amount in Zimbabwe where the minimum wage was theoretically £13.30 a month. Possibly lulled by this appearance of normality, Mugabe suffered the greatest upset of his twenty-year rule when he lost his first ever national vote.
Convinced that it would be merely a matter of the public rubberstamping his views, Mugabe had in May 1999 established a commission to draft a new constitution to replace the 1980 version as drawn up in Lancaster House. In essence there were only three points that mattered: Mugabe would be allowed two five-year terms as president, theoretically allowing him a further twelve years in office as he still had two years to run from the six-year mandate he won in 1996; presidential powers would be enshrined in law; farms could be nationalized without compensation. As a sub-clause to the third proviso it was made clear that Britain would be expected to pay for the land. By making all seats directly elected, thereby abolishing the clause that allowed the president to appoint thirty, and by creating a new upper house elected entirely by proportional representation, the new draft did in theory strengthen parliament. But this was seen as a mere gesture towards accountability. The clear thrust of the draft was to strengthen Mugabe's hand. So it was a measure of how out of touch he was with the public mood that he wholly failed to appreciate that a population that was having to queue for twelve hours a day for petrol was unlikely to give him an overwhelming endorsement at the polling booths.
On 14 February 2000 voters went to the polls in a national referendum on the text. The No Vote organized by Tsvangirai's Movement for Democratic Change, the leading opposition party, won the day with 54.7 per cent of the vote. Zanu-PF trailed on 45.3 per cent, a result that caused uproar in the party, which had never before lost an election. In Harare and Bulawayo, the two main cities, the humiliation was absolute, with the opposition winning 75 per cent of the vote. Mugabe had been given his most basic lesson in Big Man rule: never hold an election that you can lose. It was a mistake that Mobutu would never have made.
On the night of the results Mugabe made all the right noises about honouring the people's will. 'Let us all winners and losers accept the referendum verdict and start planning our way for the future,' he said in a national address. 'The world now knows Zimbabwe as a country where opposing views can be found alongside each other peacefully.' They were fine words but wholly misleading. After reading the riot act to his party, the following week he made his move. It was time for the colonial card. On 22 February the first reports started reaching Harare of bands of squatters moving in on white-owned farms. Within a few weeks up to a thousand had been occupied by a mixed bag of unemployed urban thugs, desperate peasants, Zanu-PF bootboys and veterans of the liberation war. When the courts made a stab at upholding the rule of law and called on the squatters to leave, far from obeying the ruling, Mugabe encouraged the invasions to continue.
Mugabe's justification was that his brave veterans had waited too long for the just rewards of the anti-colonial struggle, but the language fooled no one but his diehard supporters. For nearly two decades the veterans had been all but ignored. Indeed, one of the worst instances of state corruption in his rule concerned the state pension fund for war veterans, which was plundered by Zanu-PF bigwigs. When the scandal came to light in 1997 it emerged that one senior army commander, General Vitalis Zvinavashe, claimed 55 per cent disability. Two years later he was leading the missio
n in the Congo. After violent demonstrations in Harare, Mugabe awarded the massive unbudgeted payments of about 50,000 Zimbabwe dollars (then about £5,000) to each of the 55,000 registered veterans. The payments all but broke the exchequer: it did not pass unnoticed that the number of claimants was almost double the number of veterans who had been officially demobilized in the early Eighties. But for Mugabe money was not the issue; the veterans were a vital prop for his power and needed cossetting. So the official line was that the invasions were a long-overdue step in a righteous cause. But Tsvangirai, the head of the opposition MDC, appreciated all too well there was a far simpler agenda.
Zimbabwe's fourth post-independence election was due in April. The invasion of the farms was the first step in a brutal plan to ensure that Mugabe did not lose again.
All the while, Britain was unwittingly playing into Mugabe's hands. On paper Blair's much-vaunted 'ethical foreign policy' addressed the concerns that were dear to Africanists' hearts. But in practice the rhetoric of Blair's ministers, particularly Peter Hain, the British Foreign Office Minister with special responsibility for Africa, resounded in the continent like the hectoring of colonial officials. Born in Kenya and a prominent anti apartheid activist in his early political career, Hain liked to refer to himself as a 'son of Africa'. When I met him in his office in Whitehall in September 1999 soon after his appointment he was seething with indignation at Mugabe. He readily admitted he felt personally betrayed by a man whose election he had cheered in 1980, although with London's relations with Harare just remaining cordial, he insisted that his criticisms of Mugabe were off the record. After the farm invasions he decided it was time to speak his mind.
Hain summoned the Daily Telegraph's diplomatic editor to his office in Whitehall and in some of the most outspoken language ever used by a British minister of an African president he branded Mugabe an 'economically illiterate leader who had bankrupted his country'. (3) Battle was joined. Mugabe too felt betrayed. Labour politicians had been 'on his side' back in the Eighties and yet were now berating him like the Tories had at independence. Two days after Hain's interview, in a blatant snub, Mugabe's officials brushed aside the protests of watching British officials and forced open a six-ton consignment of anti bugging equipment, which supposedly was exempt from inspection as a diplomatic shipment. Hain responded with an even more stinging attack: 'This is not the action of a civilized country,' he said. Reminiscent of the tones of a district com missioner to a native court, the language stoked outrage in Harare. It was in this emotional context that I headed off to the Strand to meet the Zimbabwean High Commissioner. Mumbengegwi is an experienced diplomat. Before taking up his post in
London in 1999, he served in Brussels and the United Nations. Throughout my interview he never raised his voice nor lost his temper. But I might as well have been talking to a firebrand from the Zanu-PF youth wing. In a claim that later baffled British diplomats he argued that while the Vienna Convention guaranteed the sanctity of diplomatic 'bags' and 'baggage' , the issue of diplomatic 'cargo' was a grey area. In short, the break down of diplomatic relations was entirely Britain's fault. There would be no climb down, nor apology. Indeed why should there be an apology when there was nothing to apologize for?
An opinion poll in Harare had just suggested that the opposition would get two thirds of the vote in the next election. Having reached an impasse on the subjects of the farm invasions and the diplomatic bag, I asked the High Commissioner's thoughts on the findings. He and his three attendant officials clearly found the question tremendously funny, not to say completely irrelevant. 'The president is democratically elected,' Mumbengegwi chuckled. 'He enjoys the democratic support of the electorate. As for this opinion poll I can go and conduct my own opinion poll which will tell me one hundred per cent of people will support Mr. Mugabe.' Even as he spoke, a ruthless campaign of intimidation was underway in the opposition areas to try to ensure that the polls were not realized.
I left Mumbengegwi's office profoundly depressed. Hitherto I had clung to the hope that Mugabe might still prove a little better than Mobutu and that he would step back from dragging his country into the abyss. His friends had, after all, long insisted that he was desperate to go down in history as a great man of Africa. But Mumbengegwi's 'them and us' language and childish point scoring left no doubt about the mindset of Harare. For too long Mugabe had surrounded himself by such placemen who only told him what he wanted to hear. The time for compromise was over.
*
The histories of many of Africa's Big Men were inextricably entwined with the politics of the West. You cannot see Mobutu, Banda, Moi or Savimbi outside the context of the Cold War. But Mugabe has no such excuse. With the advent of majority rule in South Africa, he became a pawn on the global chess board. By 1990 for the first time in a century the territory now known as Zimbabwe was free of outside influence. There was no one else egging Mugabe on. Zimbabwe could so easily have been a triumph. Instead it is a disaster almost entirely of his own making, a monument to his greed, megalomania and pride. It was, as the Economist said, a case of 'The mess that one man makes. (4)
As if the referendum had never happened, in early April Zanu-PF amended the constitution, giving the government the right to seize white farms without compensation. It was, inevitably, hailed as the climax of the long fight against colonialism. When three Zimbabwean ministers came to London for talks with Robin Cook, the British Foreign Secretary, about the land crisis, their praise-singers made out it was tantamount to a meeting with the old Rhodesian government.
As the repression intensified in the spring of 2000, Tsvangirai and other opposition politicians, including Margaret Dongo, the feisty Mini-Clubman driving orator who had shot to prominence in 1995, vowed to continue their fight to oust Zanu-PF by democratic means. But their prospects seemed bleak. Three white farmers were murdered by squatters in April and early May. Two of the three attacks bore all the hallmarks of an assassination by a hit squad. The next to bear the brunt of Mugabe's fury were black farm workers, many of whom were brutally attacked for suspicion of links to the opposition and for daring to stand alongside their employers. Then came the turn of the opposition, the principal target of the violence. Zanu-PF thugs rampaged through opposition areas, threatening, beating and even murdering MDC supporters. By early May the MDC reported that fifteen of their supporters had been killed. In the West this was seen for what it was - as the last act of a desperate dictator. Targeting the farmers was the equivalent of Milosevic picking on the Kosovars in the winter of 1998 or Vladimir Putin, the Russian President, launching his war against the Chechens the following year. It was the last resort of an autocrat: identify your scapegoats and persecute them. But in Africa it was inevitably not so clear-cut.
And so the pattern was set. In 2002 and 2005 Mugabe presided over deeply flawed elections in which supporters of the MDC were viciously targeted. All the while the economy was in freefall, inflation spiralled, leading to the printing – and rapid devaluation of course – of 100 trillion Zimbabwe dollar notes, and the flight of hundreds of thousands of people across the borders in search of work. In 2008 Tsvangirai won a narrow victory over Mugabe in spite of more terrible intimidation but the resultant crackdown was so brutal that the opposition leader pulled out of a second round of voting.
Tsvangirai was appointed prime minister in an unhappy power-sharing arrangement and the US dollarisation of the economy ended the hyperinflation and led to a minor economic recovery. When I visited him in his home in Harare in 2011 he remained characteristically upbeat insisting that he won some battles around the cabinet table and that Mugabe was running out of steam, even dozing off in government meetings. But in 2013 as the country prepared for fresh elections it remained at an impasse with Mugabe and his securocrats still in charge – and businessmen wary of considering investment against the backdrop of threats of nationalisation.
12 - Africa Roaring at Last
Appropriately enough it was Nelson Mandela who first talked
of an 'African Renaissance'. He was addressing an OAU summit of heads of state two months after his inauguration, and he was infused with hope that Africa was at last on the threshold of a new era. Opening with Rome's defeat of Carthage 'in the distant days of antiquity' and the censor Cato's vindictive 'delenda est Carthago', he led his audience through a litany of African suffering and subjugation, climaxing in the twentieth century with Africans as 'the outstanding example of the beneficiaries of charity' and as 'the permanent victims of famine, destructive conflicts and the pestilences of the natural world'. He acknowledged that many in his audience had failed their people. But he concluded resoundingly that Africa's time had come.
'Africa cries out for a new birth; Carthage awaits the restoration of its glory. If freedom was the crown, which the fighters of liberation sought to place on the head of mother Africa, let the upliftment, the happiness, prosperity and comfort of her children be the jewel of the crown…
'We must face the matter squarely that where there is something wrong in how we govern ourselves, it must be said that the fault is not in our stars but in ourselves that we are ill governed. Rwanda stands as a stern and severe rebuke to all of us for having failed to address these matters ... [But] we know that we have it in ourselves, as Africans, to change all this. We must assert our will to do so. We must say that there is no obstacle big enough to stop us from bringing about an African Renaissance.' 1
The very talk of a revival was a step forward from the Seventies and Eighties. Africans had long been looking in vain for a new vision since the collapse of their independence hopes. Even as the 21st Century began, the “Renaissance” still seemed as much aspiration as reality. Poverty, corrupt leadership and abuse of power were prevalent. At the turn of the millennium according to the United Nations Human Development Index the world's 22 poorest countries were in Africa. At the same time more than a quarter of sub Saharan Africa's forty-two countries were at war. And yet Mandela was right. The continent was changing. A decade into the new millennium that suddenly became much clearer as greater political stability, improved infrastructure and communications, a surge of interest from other emerging powers, such as China, India and Brazil, and a ravenous global investor appetite for a new “frontier market”, fuelled an economic and business resurgence and the rise of a consumer class.
