Mugabe’s malice has gone too far
September 5, 2008
Tanonoka Whande
ALWAYS for one reason or other, the world is a very troubled place. Every corner of the world is faced with one major problem or another.
Countries are groaning under the onslaught of disasters, famine, terrorism, hunger, poverty, diseases, wars and a host of other ills afflicting the world today.
And countries that may be facing less threatening disasters always try to jump to the aid of the distressed ones. The latest is the former Soviet republic of Georgia which is in a man-made internal crisis, worsened by outsider Russia.
On Wednesday US President George W Bush announced that he was sending “an extra” billion dollars to Georgia.
Meanwhile, the US itself is, once again, being lambasted by hurricanes, hardly three years after the infamous Hurricane Katrina, which claimed 1836 lives with more than 700 missing.
Although most aid from overseas went unclaimed, many countries and international organizations from around the world did offer donations to the US as relief aid in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.
The lesson to be drawn from this is that, in most times, the people of the world do try to alleviate the suffering of fellow human beings who might have been victims of some natural or man-made disasters and those caught up in a miserable cycle of death and destruction.
It has nothing to do with being rich but has everything to do with compassion.
Famine has wreaked havoc in Africa and the international community continues to try and assist in one way or other. Ethiopia, Sudan, Somalia and several countries in southern Africa are recipients and beneficiaries of such humanitarian assistance.
When disease threatens populations, I have seen presidents go on whirlwind tours around the world asking for help to save their citizens. I have seen ordinary people turning into “activists” because they cannot stand by without trying to drum up support, draw attention or otherwise seek help for victims.
The world cares. All one has to do is to look at how presidents and heads of state run around seeking help and relief on behalf of their besieged citizens.
But what I have failed to understand or to rationalize to myself is when, as the world tries to save humanity, a president deliberately causes major humanitarian disasters in his own country at the same time that foreign governments, people and international organizations are trying to assist him in taking care of his own people.
“Evil is neither suffering nor sin; it is both at the same time; it is something common to them both,” said Simone Weil. “For they are linked together; sin makes us suffer and suffering makes us evil, and this indissoluble complex of suffering and sin is the evil in which we are submerged against our will, and to our horror.”
African countries have the uncanny ability to turn draught into famine. Bad planning, shortsightedness and selfish intentions contributed to Zimbabwe’s dissipation, especially in the early 2000s.
The farm invasions followed. They totally destroyed the once robust agricultural base that ensured that Zimbabwe more than fed itself, with surplus for export.
Am I to understand that Robert Mugabe, with all the intelligence at his disposal, was not aware that his ill-advised policy would hurt Zimbabweans more than hurting the farmers from whom he was robbing the farms?
Yes, there was need to correct the land imbalances but his effort cannot be regarded as an attempt to do this, especially if we consider that he had had more than twenty years in which to correct the land imbalances.
People supported him then and his power base was not threatened. Capitulation, on the part of landholders, was easy, especially if done through legal channels. And we had a good judiciary as evidenced by the presence, on the bench, of these same judges now in Botswana, UK, Australia, South Africa, US and other countries.
Grumblings started and culminated in the birth of the Movement for Democratic Change.
Mugabe then acted irrationally to punish the white commercial farmers who, like their African compatriots, had also shown an interest in the need for a change of government.
The white farmers lost the farms that were not very much theirs in the first place for there are neither property rights nor human rights in Zimbabwe.
So the farms were taken but why are the Africans in Zimbabwe the ones starving now? Why did Mugabe try to turn every Zimbabwean into a farmer, dishing out farms to colleagues who had no real use for them?
Now the agricultural base is dead because Mugabe used state assets to settle the personal score of being rejected by the electorate.
Land redistribution could have been handled in a much better way by first identifying those able to use the land so that they could enjoy their professional pastime while feeding the nation. Now Zimbabwe starves because of spite, ego and a deliberate destruction of the nation.
For this, Mugabe must be charged with treason.
Mugabe was not through with the deliberate destruction of the country.
Again, reacting to his own paranoia that the less privileged would swing the vote heavily away from him, Mugabe set out on a spree to destroy houses occupied by citizens under the pretext of cleaning up the cities and towns.
Families were cruelly uprooted with thousands sustaining injury and people dying in the process.
And I felt it personally too. My son is now permanently disabled as a result of Operation Murambatsvina.
With the shortage of housing worldwide, one would have thought that Mugabe would encourage people to be home owners rather than to destroy what they had legally erected to provide themselves and others with shelter.
Meanwhile, the United Nations offered to build cheap affordable homes for people and Mugabe sent his people to destroy the prototypes being erected by the UN. Can you imagine a government cleaning up the cities by deliberately destroying people’s homes and exposing infants, the elderly, the infirm and women to the elements?
If this does not call for treason, I do not know what does.
With all the intelligence services at his disposal, Mugabe knows fully well how the country has just about collapsed; it’s just that he does not care. How can he not know that there is no food in the country?
Because he knows that, he, once again, in response to fear of rejection at the polls, started using food as a tool to entice people to vote for him and his merciless and greedy lieutenants.
This went on for several years with people, who were suffering heavily from the fallout of the farm invasions, starving to death in some parts of the country.
But the president we had was a merciless, selfish destroyer, not a builder or protector of the nation and the people. He would continue to blackmail the people he was supposed to care for. He would continue to demand their vote in exchange for food.
Children started do die and those of our citizens who needed food so as to take their ARV drugs started to regress, with some dying, not to mention children, the infirm, nursing mothers and the elderly. All this happened before 2008.
Starvation offers only two alternatives: eat or eat.
Just four months ago, “The President and First Secretary of Zanu-PF and President of the Republic of Zimbabwe” ordered that international organizations that were operating in his country, helping him to take care of his citizens, be stopped from distributing food to the starving citizens. He would not allow someone else feed the people he is supposed to be feeding unless those people sold their vote to him for food that is not even his.
Evil is considered a broad term used to indicate a negative moral or ethical judgment; it is often used to describe intentional acts that are cruel, unjust, or selfish. Evil is usually contrasted with good, which describes intentional acts that are kind, just, or unselfish.
Accepting this definition and having considered all that we discussed above, can we justly deny Mugabe the description or title of “evil”? He has worked so hard for it and continues to do so.
It was Voltaire who said that as long as people believe in absurdities they will continue to commit atrocities. Zimbabweans, don’t believe in absurdities; we are in distress and we duly give Mugabe the title.
He deserves it. His malice has gone too far.
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WHANDE Tanonoka, Robert Mugabe’s malice knows no bounds. If ever there is a man who was never supposed to be State President, it is him. When one chronicles Robert Mugabe’s sins and crimes, even the devil would cringe with shame as Robert Mugabe takes the prize.
Imagine a State President who razes down urban shants for the poorest of the poor’ not in summer, but in the middle of a cold and wet winter! That was an combined military operation he would later famously dub ‘ Operation Murambatsvina OR Operation Expel Trash. Those of us who have retrospectively analysed this operation universally agree that it was a precise surgical military exercise meant to de-populate the urban areas in order to quell imminent riots born on the backbone of urban poverty, lack of urban housing and general despondency associated with Mugabe’s rule.
Before that, from around 1982 to mid 1987, there was ‘ The Storm ‘ or Gukurahundi. Estimates vary, but it is said that anything from around 8000 to 20 000 peasants in the Western regions of the country may have been killed. Notwithstanding the fact that this was a complete negation of the ideals of the foundations of the nascent two- year old independent state and the fact that it was an ally in the war of liberation who was now targeted, this was to be one of the most intensely planned and coldly executed internal military operations carried out by a national army on citizens it was meant to defend.
Once again, a variety of reasons are offered for this tragic chapter in our nation’s history, but chief among them will remain Robert Mugabe’s deluded desire to establish a one-party-one-leader state in Zimbabwe. It meant then that all residual opposition in areas that remnants of the now partisan Zimbabwe National Army (ZNA) had hitherto not operated in during the liberation war had to be softened up for this grand project.
Then we also have on record the trumped up treason charges on Abel Muzorewa, Ndabaningi Sithole, Joshua Nkomo, Dumiso Dabengwa and Lookout Masuku and most recently Morgan Tsvangirai. All these are national leaders who dared challenge Robert Mugabe to a leadership contest based on ideas they had to offer to drive the national ship forwards.
Add in the cycle of violence, murders, rapes and planned pillage each time we hold elections that threaten to topple him from power and a very chilling picture of a psychopath hiding in the humility and serenity of national office slowly emerges.
There is a tendency by people close to Robert Mugabe to want to portray him as a benign old statesman. Grim cold facts say beware, and be very afraid, even now as he fades away slowly into his own time-picked retirement and single-handedly decides who is going to carry on his legacy of intolerance, intransigence and the pillage of national coffers.
Years after he is gone and buried, because I do not think we will have the courage to do so while he lies still in his coffin, as a nation we shall have a lot of soul searching on how we ever allowed such an individual to scale right to the apex of national office.
This excellent article should be read by everyone in Zimbabwe. And if they can’t read it should be read to them. From the poor to the rich. From the literate to the illiterate. How can this be done.
It’s time a massive amount of money and energy was allocated by rich democratic supporters to the free distribution of information to the people of Zimbabwe.
People need to know and be assured that the world is watching and trying to help. The people need to be motivated into a strong willed change for the better.
The people need to get out and and say , “I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to this any more”.
EDITOR: When rich democratic supporters start to allocate a massive amount of money for the free dissemination of information to the people of Zimbabwe we can be reached through this medium.
I have never experienced starvation, but I am well aware of people who are dying because they are starved of medicine. Some of them were very close to me. This hurts me. How can anyone let it happen. I watched a plot at warren hills cemetery fill up, quite literally over three days, a weekend for that matter. Its horrifying.
A friend of mine in the middle of a debate yelled “we don’t eat rhetoric”! I don’t know where he got it from, but it was funny and apt. Mugabe has fed us a lot of rhetoric. Why on earth has Africa taken so long to condemn this guy? It baffles me at times, his actions smack of malice and evil. The fruits of his rhetoric are death and misery. So why is the thrid world not against him? Why does it seem, that the more his actions villify him, the greater the awe of his contemporaries? I tried to detach myself from the emotion in a bid to be objective (an excercise fraught with problems but I tried).
Looking at Mugabe in a global context, at a world politics level, its almost as though Mugabe is fighting a monster rivaled in monstrosity only by his own monstrosity. The “West” is a hypocrite, quite simply. Tanonoka you start by looking at aid. Is it not strange that that same aid is part and parcel of the impasse in the World Trade Organization. Its never really money but goods and in a disaster situation the most immediate need is food. Food implies agriculture, and agriculture is the reason why the WTO is at a standstill, that GMO debate wasn’t a whim.
That aid we clamour for is the reason why agriculture in the Thrid World will never amount to anything more than subsistence. The “West” that the trade unionist Tsvangirai spoke against during ESAP hasn’t changed. That is why it is sometimes irritating to note that some parties are reproducing this failed panacea. Of course people always talk about the failures of structural adjustment but no one ever talks about the successes. Lets give it up for New Zealand everybody….and thats about it.
When a news story broke that the UK had offered pounds if the regime changed I was saddened. Then Ms Rice came out and spoke of a country that had so much potential. I found myself trapped, quite literally between a rock and a hard place. Mugabe and this “West”. I was under pressure, why? Simply because I could not undersatnd why there was so much malice in the world. I know about bribery, I have come very close to it, they are buying the people of Zimbabwe.
We cannot trust those guys, and thats why African leaders won’t capitulate to the “Mugabe must go” crowd, well, at least not publicly. The things he says are the exact same things they say in trade negotiations and politicians hate being called hypocrites.
I don’t trust aid agencies, simply because the aid comes with conditions. If someone, out of the goodness of their heart wants to give, they must give. This business of satisfy this, then satisfy this, is not fair, dare I say its “evil”, because people will not stop dying while they work out definitions.
Mugabe will go, but I doubt that will change anything in the long run. The lesser evil always seems the best option in such circumstances but the greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world that he didn”t exist.
regards
Kappa
WHANDE Tanonoka, Robert Mugabe fails on very many levels of leadership if not all of them. Imagine a State President who will proudly go on national television, at prime viewing time, and proclaim that the gun is a tool for development and peace and that he would rather put the gun in front of the pen ! When and where else has that ever happened ? What message is passed to a sixteen year old ? That he can make it in life if only he could arm himself with a gun and a knife ?
Then a year back, at the height of widespread food shortages in the country, he was quoted as saying, ‘ “Why force that foreign food on us ? Do they want us to choke ? ‘ Add to that the razing down of poor peoples’ homes in the middle of a cold and rainy winter ! Is that what a State President should be ?
Today, as he walks into age-induced oblivion, the nation is polarized, there is no national cohesion, ethos, common agenda and we have very strong external forces against us. The national army has been turned into a personal militia. Only a few weeks back he was pinning medals on army commanders for a job well done ! What job ? Mass intimidation, rape and pillage ! As long as it secured him a few more nights in State House !
So there you are WHANDE, this is the paragon of virtue that all youths have to celebrate come 21st February yearly. I do not know if people, just once, stop and contemplate what it is exactly they see in Robert Mugabe that they would like their children to emulate. Robert Mugabe is a very deeply disturbed man, and the sooner he vacates State House, the quicker will be national healing.
Whande I am by no means an expert in analysis or politics and have no experience what so ever, I’m just a Zimbabwean teenager and I struggle to understand why my life is worth a fraction of that of an American. Why do African leaders; even leaders of great nations like South Africa; why leaders sit back and watch Mugabe molest his citizens and try to propagate his poor governance. Why do African leaders sit back and watch Muswati do the same to his citizens. It is like African leaders go to the AU to have seminars on poor governance? What can be done?
Over the years, I have noticed that African leaders are a criminal cabal in that they condone murders by others African leaders as long as they do it to their own citizens.
My astonishment is growing and I am defeated with the evil ways permeating leaderships everywhere. No government appears willing to be open and honest to the people and this is what Mugabe is doing only in the most extreme and horrifying ways.
I am humbled by Max Mukuruwangu, Kappa and Mao Mwanawashe’s offerings above. They should have written more because they made me aware of issues I left out. They made me wish I could re-write the article again and incorporate some of their thoughts.
Max’s “There is a tendency by people close to Robert Mugabe to want to portray him as a benign old statesman…” points to where our problem lies. It is no longer Mugabe alone; we are fighting all of them as they try to remain afloat and avoid The Hague.
And when Kappa wrote (above) that, “Looking at Mugabe in a global context, at a world politics level, it’s almost as though Mugabe is fighting a monster rivaled in monstrosity only by his own monstrosity”, I felt very humbled to find one who sees the evil that I have been scared to admit exists in our leadership because the activities of this government can no longer be put down just as “bag governance”; it’s way past that stage.
“What can be done?” MugabeMustGo asks. Well, the right thing to do would never bear any fruit. Diplomacy, that horrid practice of protecting wrongdoers, failed.
So, maybe Mugabe is right on one thing: to remove him maybe the gun is better than the pen.
I don’t think condemning Bob will lessen the suffering in Zim. Have you ever asked yoselves why in UK & America the leaders there don’t abuse the office…..it is because they have better constitutions. That is the most important tool in curtailing abuse of power.