Chidyausiku "hero" for supporting farm seizures - he sold-out and was well rewarded too.

Hero: a person who is admired for their courage, outstanding achievements, or noble qualities,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

Robert Mugabe has just declared the late Chief Justice Godfrey Chidyausiku a national hero and for the wrong reasons as far as the Oxford Dictionary definition is concerned. Mugabe said the top jurist ruled for Zimbabwe's planned seizure of thousands of white-owned farms that violated international law and common sense that the Supreme Court had ruled should be halted immediately.

Justice Chidyausiku overturned a ruling by then Chief Justice Anthony Gubbay that government should take all measures to protect the possessions and properties of white farmers who challenged the legality of the contested land reform programme.

"Considering the way we worked with him, the way he supported our interests, the values of the war of liberation, we found it fit to confer him with a hero's status," Mugabe said. “We could not just throw him into a pit.”

There was never any question of the need to redistribute the land after independence to address the historic injustices. The injustice of forcefully removing the blacks off their ancestral lands to give them to white farmers. In most cases the blacks were resettled in overcrowded communal areas with poor soil and poor rainfall.

By the time the country attained her independence in 1980 most of these communal areas were arid and badly eroded. There crying need to reduce the pressure of the land and aliviate the suffering of those eking a living off the sick and unproductive land by resettle some of the peasants on state land and/or commercial farms.

There is no double that the way went about seizing the white-owned farms was motivated by selfish political interests and by greed. It was no accident that the farm seizures started after Zanu PF lost the 2000 referendum on the proposed new constitution. The party blamed the white farmers and their workers for the defeat and thus set out to punish them. Later on the violent white farm invasion was used as cover for violence against the populous.

By the late 1990s the Zimbabwe economy was already in serious trouble and Mugabe was running out of loot to give out to his ever demanding but wasteful party loyalists. White owned farms were the only valuable assets left and Mugabe went for it regardless of the economic consequences.

Although Mugabe still insists that the land redistribution was to benefit “landless peasants” the chief beneficiaries was himself and his cronies. Mugabe and his family own as many as 13 farms and many rural areas as still as overcrowded as ever. It is no secret that Zimbabwe lost its break basket of the region accolade soon after the farm seizures. Ever since the farm seizures country has, more often than not, relied on imported food aid. We are starving in a country that is for all intent and purpose the Garden of Eden.

Zimbabwe’s economy was thriving on the back of a successful agricultural sector so when that collapsed the economy followed fast on its heels. The Zimbabwe economy shrunk by a staggering 50% in the decade following the farm seizures alone.

Last week AfrAsia, a regional Bank now based in Mauritius but once based in Zimbabwe, reported that Zimbabweans are the poorest in Africa. 37 years ago, we were in the top five of the richest countries in Africa! What AfrAsia should have said but did not say is that Zimbabwe’s ruling elite are some of the richest in the world!

The late Chief Justice Chidyausiku died in a hospital in South Africa. After declaring Chidyausiku a national hero Mugabe jumped on the plane to go to Singapore for his regular health checks. Zimbabwe’s ruling elite live in mansions, drive some of the lasted posh cars, they and their families use SA or overseas institutions for their education and health needs. Chief Justice Chidyausiku was a member of the Zanu PF ruling elite and therefore he was pampered, no doubt he too was given a former white-owned farm.

It is only the impoverished millions of ordinary Zimbabweans who continue to suffer eking a living in overcrowded rural areas, forced to queue for hours on end to withdraw 50 bond notes, who have to use the local health and education services that have all but collapse due to decades of underfunding, etc.

It is interesting to note that in her 37 years of post-independence history, Zimbabwe has had more declared national heroes and heroines than other nations with ten times her population even if we extend their historic period a hundred years. The irony is Zimbabweans have suffered and many, many lives lost from 37 years of economic meltdown and political tyranny because of the moral decadence and decay in Zimbabwe society; where were the true heroes and heroines to stop the madness.

If the truth be told, the very sorry state in Zimbabwe today demands that the truth must be told, declaring Chief Justice Chidyausiku a national hero because he overturned Justice Gubbay’s ruling to call a halt the madness of the violent farm seizure; underlines just how perverted and corrupt Mugabe is. Chidyausiku did exactly what any corrupt official in his shoes would have done; sell-out on the law, on common sense, on principles and on national interest to appease a ruthless tyrant for selfish gain.

Justice Chidyausiku will be interred at national Heroes Acre on Saturday 13 May. When the curtain is drawn on Zanu PF’s corrupt and tyrannical rule and the nation is finally free to review the regime’s rule objectively; Chidyausiku, like so many others at Heroes Acre, will never be judged a hero. He is a sell-out and Mugabe paid him well for his services.