The Zimbabwean Parliament has just passed a series of laws, one of which makes it a criminal offense to ridicule President Robert Mugabe. This seems odd, since Mugabe is now making a fool of himself.
His draconian new laws make a mockery of everything which the Zimbabwean president claims to stand for. With the sweeping powers to muzzle virtually any opposition, the country can no longer claim to be a democracy. The majority of Zimbabweans are heartily fed up with the corruption and misrule that has dogged their country since independence in 1980, when Mugabe took control, first as prime minister and later as president.
Though Zimbabwe has suffered from outside economic pressures, the greater part of the responsibility for the country’s economic collapse lies in the discredited socialist policies to which the president has clung doggedly. As a man who cut his political teeth fighting the white colonial regime of Ian Smith, Mugabe could never bring himself to accept the continued dominance of white farmers, upon whose efficiency much of the country’s export earnings rested.
The land issue is a legitimate one. Substantial white farms were created out of the best land, which was seized by the early colonialists from its tribal owners. After independence, a few of these farms passed into black ownership, generally into the hands of political cronies of Mugabe, but most stayed under white control. These whites, however, did commit themselves to the new Zimbabwe and believed that because of their pivotal economic role, their fortunate position would remain secure.
For a long while, it seemed that ZANU-PF accepted the economic reality of this arrangement. But as Mugabe’s half-baked socialist politics brought about the financial collapse of his country, he cast around for a scapegoat for his own ineptitude. In targeting the white-owned farms, he let his political prejudices have full rein. It mattered not that the carving up of these great estates into thousands of holdings for subsistence farmers would destroy what remained of Zimbabwe’s ability to earn precious foreign currency. He hoped the campaign would shift attention from his own dire performance. Unfortunately for him, the political opposition that has grown so rapidly, is not merely from pauperized whites, but from great swathes of black citizens who have been served no better by the regime.
By dividing his country so decisively, then seeking to cling to power through using the arbitrary powers of a police state, Mugabe is leaving a bitter inheritance for those who succeed him. Now that the Pandora’s box of fascistic powers has been opened, there is no guarantee that a future non-ZANU-PF government will not also choose to use them in its turn. In politically unstable countries, injustice feeds upon injustice
To his credit, history will record that when his own ZANU party merged with the ZAPU party of Joshua Nkomo in 1988, Mugabe did not press ahead with plans to introduce a one-party state. It was widely believed that he saw then the chaos this arrangement had produced in other black African countries. Unfortunately, in the eventide of his political career, he has lost such good judgment. As a result, he has set Zimbabwe on a course, full speed, for conflict and chao.
