ARMED STRUGGLE IS NOT THE ANSWER TO ZIMBABWE'S PROBLEM: NEED A MORE SUBTLE SOLUTION!

@Sterling Ferguson

I agree with you completely that Mugabe “has no intention of honouring any agreement that he made with the SADC,” much less with Tsvangirai. Nothing would please more Mugabe than have a SADC army and even more a Western army amassed against Zimbabwe. Mugabe has the gangster – what is a dictator other than a supersized gangster – mentality of dying under a blazing gun fire. Well it is better than being hanged; the only other fate is awaiting him if he lost power.

Sterling, you are also right; none of the SADC leaders have the stomach for a military confrontation with Mugabe. Some people have suggested that Zimbabweans should take up arms and fight for their freedom and dignity. I do not believe that a military solution is the answer here.

Mugabe has been digging his own grave for thirty years all that is to be done is bury the dictator and all he stands for. The world had a chance to do just that after Zimbabwe’s sham presidential run-off elections in June 2008. Most countries stated categorically that they will not accept Mugabe as the “legitimate” head of state; not after such outrageous and despicable display of abuse of power and disregard of the very sanctity of human dignity and life! Even the some of the tyrants and dictators kept their distance for fear of a national revolt if the people believed they too would stoop that low some day.

All SADC had to do was throw SADC’s own Election Monitoring Team’s damning report on the sham election back at Mugabe. Mugabe was finished, he was history.

Instead SADC came up with the power sharing idea which, as was clear before the GPA was even signed, was restoring Mugabe back in State House with all his dictatorial powers with Tsvangirai as his side kick. Tsvangirai was foolish enough to agree. “Give the fool a fancy title and he will agree to anything!” Mugabe must have said to himself and time has proved him right!

Tsvangirai and SADC have had many other chances since June 2008 to pressure Mugabe to change but again and again they wasted the chances.

When you have such hopelessly incompetent leaders like Tsvangirai and Jacob Zuma you must avoid an armed conflicted at all cost. A blundering political leader will cost millions of dollars in lost business and opportunities and blundering general will cost you hundreds of thousands of human lives and the cause you were fighting for! One more reason why a military solution is out of the question in this case!

@ Fungayi

What I am talking about is how Mugabe and his cronies have ridden rough shod of the ordinary Zimbabwean denying them their freedom of expression, the right to a meaningful say in the governance of the country and all the other basic human rights including the right to life itself. In the 1980s 20 000 (that is the CCJP figure) of our people were murdered by the country’s soldiers for no other reason than that they supported the main opposition party, PF Zapu. And since hundreds more have been murdered for the same reasons.

On the economic front the dictator has denied the people the right to basic needs like education, health, gainful employment because of the decades of gross mismanagement, rampant corruption and looting. The white farm invasion were not carried out for the benefit of the landless peasants; that is now well established, the dictator and his ruling elite own most of the farms. The one man one farm song too has been forgotten because the dictator, his wife and many others own up to five farms each. So the new party line is that the farm invasions were to punish the whites and the increased farm production is clearly a bonus.

The farm invasions was the “stub to the heart” of the Zimbabwe economy sending unemployment into the stratosphere of 95% and for the first time ever the country did not produce enough to feed the people even after a good growing season. Before the looting farms the nation’s farmers produced enough to feed the nation with surplus for export contributing to the nations’ GDP and earning the nation valuable foreign currency. Now we have to spend millions to the looter turn farmer to get them to produce anything at all!

The farms were profitable before Mugabe looted them, that was what made them so attractive. The looters thought they will harvest bumper crops, fruits, etc year after year. That did not happen, of course, as anyone who has driven around Zimbabwe would testify. The beautiful and juicy fist-size apples from Inyanga before the looters moved in are now golf-size and just as hard and rotten to the core. “Munda hauzvirimi!” – the field does not till itself – as my late mother would say.

The only reason the looters are determined to hand on to the farms is for the subsidy money – $20 million from the US, R50 million from SA and God knows how many millions from the Zimbabwe government. Ease money!

“Tax will be paid when the farmers start making a profit as with any other business enterprise. No one just starts by paying tax.” You would say that Fungayi, wouldn’t you! “Even BHP when it was mining platinum they had a 5 year tax break, nothing new here.”

Oh yes there is something new here! One, the regime looted a profitable and key sector of the economy and turned it into a subsidy dependent one. Two, BHP had a five-year tax break; the looters have not only paid a single cent in tax but siphoned millions in direct and indirect subsidies. Three, the looters have already had tens years, not five, of subsidies. Four, last but more significantly, the looter will never ever get Zimbabwe’s agricultural sector back to its pre 2000 productive level – these are looter not farmers!
If Zimbabwe’s economic is ever to recover from the doldrums this regime of looters landed us in it will need to fire on all cylinders and the agricultural sector is one of these cylinders. At present the nation is spending millions in subsidies to these looters to get them to produce a fraction of what the farms produced before 2000. And you can that “progress”? No Fungayi, that is a cylinder misfiring!

Zimbabwe today, thirty years after independence, finds itself in a sorry situation in which life is a lot worse now than before independence, qualitatively – the ordinary person is treated like a second class citizen denied of all basic human rights and dignity, just as the white man treated him. And quantitatively, life expectancy has plummeted from 65 years to 34 years in thirty years. This is NOT what people fought and died for!

Just because Mugabe and others were the heroes of the war of independence that does NOT give them the right to ride rough shod over the people. This regime has looted the nation’s resources leaving nothing for the people. Zimbabwe is a wealthy country and yet millions now live in abject poverty and the future is gloomy. The regime has denied the people their basic right and has terrorised them into silence. That is not right and it can not be allowed to continue. THAT IS WHAT THIS DEBATE IS ALL ABOUT; ENDING A CORRUPT AND REPRESSIVE SYSTEM.

@ La Quebecoise

So Gideon Gono bought maize at X Rand/tonne from SA and sold it back to GMB at 2X Rand/tonne. Well Gono must be disappointed by that. During the “good times” when he was running the Z$ printing press, he bought foreign currency from the public at the official rate of Z$ X / US$1 and he and the ruling elite then sold the same foreign currency on the black market at Z$ 800X/ US$1 in 2004. By the time the Z$ was finally scrapped the difference between the official rate and black market rate had soared to six plus figures.

@ Dora Makute

The sanctions were imposed on Mugabe and his cronies for failing to hold free and fair elections. The dictator has never ever held free and fair elections since 1980 and has murdered tens of thousands of our people to establish this dictatorship. The West should have imposed the sanctions on the regime a long time ago.

Mugabe and his henchmen claim the sanctions were imposed because of the regime’s land redistribution policy. The regime may have a point there but that does not change the fact that it has repeatedly failed to hold free and fair elections. Even if the regime had given the land to landless peasants as it originally claimed holding free and fair elections would still be on the table.

As far as the dictator is concerned political repression is NOT an issue. His refusal to carryout any more political reforms as long as the sanctions are still in place is totally unacceptable; human rights including the right to life are not privileges for him or anyone else for that matter to grant and deny as he wished. It is an outrage to even suggest that and only shown the arrogance and contempt he has for the ordinary Zimbabwean. No thinking person would accept that!

You Dora have not just accepted this intolerable situation, you and a few others have taken it upon yourselves to defend Dictator’s position. There are two possible explanations for this; either you are part of the dictator’s ruling elite and have benefited from the repression and looting. Only an idiot would support a ruthless murder of thousands of innocent people; that is selling one’s own mother for any price. Or you are part of the ordinary majority who have suffered the tragic consequences of this repressive regime but are totally blinded by your hatred of the whites you have readily traded in your basic rights for dictator’s anti-white red herring. That is being plain stupid. I am neither stupid nor would I sell my own mother and if that makes me “boot lickers and askaris” – whatever that is supposed to mean – then so be it!

999999

SADC heads of State meeting in Namibia gave Mugabe a one-month ultimatum to implement all the outstanding issues between Zimbabwe’s power sharing parties. An ultimatum Mugabe made sure it was publicly known that he would ignore it within days of it being issued. President Jacob Zuma as thea fellow SADC head of State and SADC’s mediator in the Zimbabwe crisis must have felt the insult by Mugabe’s arrogance. So why was President Zuma taking it upon himself to ask EU to lift sanctions against Mugabe?

President Zuma must have really believed that EU would lift the sanctions otherwise he would not have asked.

I can understand Tsvangirai making a complete ass of himself by making the same request to have the sanctions lifted last year – after getting Mugabe off the hook following the sham elections by signing the GPA Tsvangirai, anything after that stupid act was nothing. I had expected President Zuma to a block ahead of Tsvangirai and some common sense at least.

"In case of positive developments in Zimbabwe we'd be ready to look at fresh measures," Van Rompuy, the president of the EU, to President Zuma. Well, that is the diplomatic language for “F** off!” Tsvangirai got exactly the same answer. The two clowns got the answer they rightly deserved!

@ Thuthukani Mkhize

We are talking whether or not the EU should lift the targeted sanctions against Mugabe and his repressive regime. You claim the EU is bankrupt and then in the next breath talk about the EU selling $400 million plane to Zimbabwe (as if that proves beyond doubt your initial statement), jump on to President Bush signing the sanctions act, talk about President Obama’s fundraiser, etc. What have any of these stories to do with the subject matter before us?

@ Fungayi

You do like to split hairs, you are paid to defend Mugabe and the dictatorship and you do not care about the millions of Zimbabweans who have suffered under this brutal tyrant; we understand. So it was MDC who talked of the one month ultimatum for implementing the outstanding matters. It would not be the first time that MDC raised an important point and it is “edited” out in the official communiqué. Still, these outstanding issues have been talked about for months now; anyone else would be sick and tied of going over the same ground and would taking it as a personal insult that Mugabe has stubbornly refused to resolve these issues. Anyone else, it seems than President Zuma!

Maybe that was why President Zuma was careful not to give Mugabe an ultimatum on these issue; he KNEW Mugabe would ignore it. So President Zuma can now hide behind his finger if he was asked why Mugabe has not implemented the outstanding issue: “He will, give him time!” What a cowardly things.
A few months ago Ziparo, the M & G cartoonist, depicted how SA’s democratic evolution has comparable to that of man from an ape like creature to homosapien Nelson Mandela and then back to an ape, Jacob Zuma. I thought the idea humorous then but now I have my doubts – there is something called “throw back” in evolutionary theory, you know!