“As a
full-scale diplomatic war erupts between Zimbabwe and South Africa, President
Robert Mugabe has accused ANC secretary-general Gwede Mantashe of “stupidly”
telling him to stop attacking Nelson Mandela’s legacy,” reported Spotlight
Zimbabwe
“Addressing
captains of commerce and industry at State House in Harare on Thursday, the
93-year-old leader said political freedom without economic prosperity was
hollow.”
The
joke is on Mugabe himself!
Whilst
some people think Nelson Mandela could have done more to help SA’s economic
recovery has even more during his term in office, there are many out there who
say that he achieved a lot with the resources that he had. He was not given the
best hand and therefore must not be judge on the basis of anything other than
the hand he was dealt.
Nelson
Mandela’s greatest achievement, history will confirm this, was to create a
truly democratic nation out of the ruins of apartheid. SA has a healthy free
press, free and independent Judiciary, a none partisan Police force, etc. SA
has held a number of elections since Mandela came into power and they were all
free, fair and credible elections, without exception. SA is “the rainbow nation”,
as Nelson Mandela himself called it , in every positive sense of that phrase.
It is
rich for Mugabe to talk of “political freedom” when he has systematically
denies the people of Zimbabwe the freedoms and basic human rights including the
right to free, fair and credible elections and even the right to life. In his
37 years of corrupt and tyrannical rule Mugabe has murdered over 30 000
innocent Zimbabweans to establish and retain his de facto one-party (Zanu PF)
cum one-man (Robert Mugabe) dictatorship.
Four
decades of gross mismanagement and rampant corruption has destroyed Zimbabwe’s
once promising economy. Mugabe can praise to the high heavens his “black economic
empowerment” policies as a resounding success the reality on the ground tells a
different story.
He
seized the white-owned farms in 2000 onward, ostensibly to give to landless
peasants; in practice, it was he and his cronies who got the farms. He was
running short of wealth to loot to satisfy his demanding but wasteful cronies
and the farms were the only asset of value left. The gratuitous violence, “jambanja”,
used in seizing the farms was a smoke screen to hide the violence visited on
the opposition to stop regime change.
Zanu
PF loyalists got the farms but, as with everything else, failed to put them to
productive use. “Munda hauzvirimi!” as my late mother would say.
Before
Mugabe seized the farms, Zimbabwe earned a fortune from the sale of cash crops
like tobacco and cut flowers. The country produced enough food to feed the
nation and the region; we were the breadbasket of the region. Agricultural
production completely collapse after jambanja! Most years since jambanja, Zimbabwe
has failed to produce enough to feed its own people and has had to rely on
imported food aid.
Zimbabwe
is has rich agricultural land and excellent weather condition for farming; it
is, for all intend and purpose, the Garden of Eden. In the day and age when
human ingenuity has turned deserts into blooming fields and orchards; we are
starving in the Garden of Eden, a damning testimonial to Mugabe’s failed
leadership.
Zimbabweans
are the poorest in Africa; 37 years of Mugabe’s corrupt and incompetent rule
has taken a heavy toll on the nation. Mugabe and his cronies’ greed has been
insatiable and it is only now that the truth is beginning to emerge. The world
will be shock at how rich and extravagant Mugabe and his family are in the middle
of such grinding abject poverty. Mugabe is picking a fight with SA just to draw
attention away from Zimbabwe’s worsening economic meltdown and the extravagant
excesses of his family and cronies. There is a method in Mugabe’s madness!
"You
can fool some people sometimes but you can’t fool all the people all the time,"
said the Reggae legend, Bob Marley.
Robert
Mugabe has fooled many people for many years but that is now changing; the
whole world is beginning to see the real Mugabe – an incompetent and murderous
tyrant whose greed for power and loot was insatiable. Who thought he could
boast his own pathetic legacy by trashing Nelson Mandela’s iconic legacy.
3 comments:
“They (the ANC) left the very persons they said had imposed apartheid on them in control of the resources. Praise God, if the future will yield for them true independence,” said Mugabe.
“And Gwede Mantashe was foolishly reacting to what I had said. That’s it, it’s the truth: South Africa is not as free as the other countries of SADC.
“There’s greater freedom for the whites than there is for the blacks. The whites have the industries, they can pride themselves on ‘this is my company, that is my company, this is my farm’. How far can the Africans go in doing the same in South Africa?
“They don’t want it said. We must say it, because we went to war together. We assisted also in the fight against apartheid, as indeed they also assisted us. We were assisting each other, we were in the same trenches.”
SA or any other country has never presumed to instruct Zimbabwe on how we should govern ourselves. Mugabe should have the common decency to accord other nations the same respect.
As the Portuguese proverb aptly say, each monkey on its own branch!
Mugabe is picking this fight with SA to draw attention away from his wife his madness and Zimbabwe's worsening economic problems. He is fooling no one!
You know what, you may well be right, President Mugabe is going out of his way to pick a fight because he needs an excuse for walking out of SADC. He threatened to walk out of SADC last time the regional body pressured MDC to boycott the elections.
“And we came back on a Sunday and that Monday we had a SAPES Policy Dialogue to discuss the Summit,” Dr Ibbo Mandaza told Violet Gonda. “Lo and behold, whilst we were discussing it, the court papers arrived calling the MDC to court to show reason why the elections should be postponed.
“Mugabe had done a volte-face against the decision (demanding the elections to be postponed until reforms are implemented) of the Summit. Mugabe went on TV and threatened to leave SADC – ‘Who is SADC, we can leave SADC anyway’, he threatened.
“And so, under some pretext of a court application by Jealousy Mawarire, which others claim was really a ZANU PF ploy, the elections were held.”
President Mugabe is smart enough to know SADC leaders are under increased pressure to condemn Zimbabwe’s rigged elections. He knows that SADC leaders are not going to let him off the hook and he will be wise to have an excuse for leaving to count their reason that he rigged the elections. This is a trick he has used many times in the past and it worked.
President Mugabe has always allowed the violent white farm seizure flared up towards elections and then pretended the violence was spreading to opposition party leaders and their supporters everywhere including in the rural areas and urban centres because they were all fighting to resist farm seizures. When the West condemn the failure to hold free and fair elections Zanu PF said they were being punished for seizing the land.
Mugabe is going to rig next year’s elections but before the elections he will walk out of SADC accusing the regional body of interfering in Zimbabwe’s internal affairs to pressure Zanu PF to reverse its black empowerment policies. He will insist the ANC government in SA is the one behind all the political machinations.
President Zuma’s government has its own weaknesses and President Mugabe will be looking at making the most of these for his own selfish agenda. There is a method in the tyrant’s madness and he is not done yet!
"Chidembo kana choda kumba mukadzi, chinoshereketa!" (When the honey badger wants to divorce the wife it goes to extraordinary lengths!) President Mugabe is up to his usual dirty tricks and is preparing the ground by picking a fight with SA and SADC.
Mugabe’s black empowerment policies have been a total failure for Zimbabwe and yet his zeal that other African countries follow his example, especially SA, has become an obsession. He cannot accept that other countries have a right to decide for themselves what path to follow. This is typical of the bully and control freak in him. It is little wonder that the country’s cabinet members, MPs, etc. have all been reduced to subservient concubine, “vakadzi vaMugabe” as Margaret Dongo called them. No wonder the tyrant has never allowed even one cabinet meeting to take place unless he is there to chair it. He cannot bear the thought of someone else being president and hence the reason why he has used every dirty trick he can ever devise to ensure he remained president.
I will bet that President Mugabe’s quarrel with SA is not about black empowerment but about him wanting to rig the vote and stay in power. He does not care about empowering blacks or their suffering, he only pretends to care as cover for pursuing his selfish individual interests.
Right now Mugabe has figured SADC it a threat to his iron grip on power and he will stop a nothing to discredit SADC and what better way than discrediting the regional power house, SA.
Post a Comment