Africa Vision 525 Initiative
I met Professor Johan Galtung, a mathematician physicist turned socio-logist, on a bus ride in Kampala. He had travelled from Oslo, Norway’s capital, to Zimbabwe to study the impact of economic sanctions imposed by the United Nations against the rebel regime of Ian Smith in Rhodesia. Smith had declared that there would be no African majority rule over the European settlers in Rhodesia in another one thousand years.
Galtung said his visit had confirmed that sanctions do not bring down a regime but arouse a collective creative determination to overcome shortages of what were previously imported. Rhodesian industry benefited from new inventiveness for fabricating machinery and tools. It had injected heroism into economic productivity among whites in rebel Rhodesia. Chinua Achebe wrote that economic blockade led to “great ingenuity” in Biafra whose people “learned to refine its own oil”.
Galtung may have tickled his grey moustache when in 2008 the European Union and the United States imposed economic sanctions against Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe following his aggressive grabbing of land from 6,000 white farmers and distributed them to 276,000 black farmers. His minister for Indigenisation and National Economic Empowerment, Saviour Kasukuwere, told Baffour Ankomah of New Africa that: “Before the sanctions, we didn’t even know where fuel for our cars came from… We now run our own oil companies; our own bread-making companies, our own manufacturing companies and our own tourism and hospitality companies”.
But Mugabe faced a lot more than 2009 sanctions. Olusegun Obasanjo’s military administration had bullied Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher by nationalising British assets in Nigeria to force her to bully Ian Smith and his South African supporters to accept elections which would enable African majority votes to determine who would rule. On his part Obasanjo pressurised Mugabe to accept that he would NOT redistribute land for TEN years after independence. Twenty seats in parliament would be reserved for white members voted for by only white voters so that they would not be outnumbered by black voters. Mugabe was very bitter. His people had died fighting for a promise of taking back land from white farmers.
In a television interview, President Obasanjo later confessed that when 1990 arrived they begged Mugabe not to implement the land reform his people had waited for with brewing fury. African leaders feared that white leaders in South Africa would not release Nelson Mandela if they saw Mugabe throwing out whites from farm lands and distributing it to his liberation fighters. Mugabe’s credibility and legitimacy was depleting rapidly and his solidarity with liberation movement in South Africa and Namibia was bleeding profusely.
With land not yet in their grasp, the leadership of Zimbabwe African National Union/Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF) decided on a strategy of building schools and health clinics, establishing a university for Africans, and avoiding corruption. The white politicians who had ruled from 1890 to 1980 expected Mugabe and his team to start on a familiar “false start” and rapidly lose legitimacy.They would be defeated in an election by a puppet leader whose election campaign they financed. Mugabe’s clean record shocked them into adopting a new strategy.
They found it in an alliance with the World Bank/IMF. They persuaded Mugabe to accept a Structural Adjustment Programme (SAP). Its “condi-tionalities” (or poisons) would sap Mugabe’s support. The poisons of throwing civil servants out of work; not employing new graduates; withdrawing free education and health care (including drugs) would turn students and workers into angry bedfellows. Morgan Tsvangirai, a trade union leader, becamea hero to students against Mugabe’s seeming betrayal of liberation politics. With funding from white business and politicians, Tsvangirai forced Mugabe to fight them on a political fieldof failure to find land for his war veterans; throwing people out of jobs and not giving jobs to his own school and university graduates. Both failures were traceable to the very same forces that he had waged liberation war against for 15 years. He had been imprisoned for 11 years.
He went back to liberation war for land. A team of researchers led by Joseph Hanlon from the London School of Economics would later find that Mugabe’s “cronies” got only 10 per cent of land brutally yanked from white farmers. The bulk of that land went to small-scale farmers. A total of 276,000 black households took land which only 6,000 white farmers had owned. Voters from these households would be for him in 2013.
From 2009 he turned to tackling a British report gloating that Zimbabwe was part of “the Persian Gulf of strategic minerals of our earth”, holding the second biggest deposits of diamonds. It had gold, coal, platinum, chromium, uranium and other natural resources including “landscape, scenery or site having aesthetic appeal or scenic value or historic or archaeological interest”. In anger he told a campaign rally in 2008:“We are tired of being workers, workers, workers. We want to be owners, owners, owners also!’’; owners of wealth from these resources.
His weapon became a policy known as “Indige-nisation and Economic Empo-werment Act’’. It excluded white Zimbabweans because their ancestors had benefited from economic exclusion of blacks. Government would own 51 per cent of shares in businesses worth minimum of 1 million dollars. Out of this 5 per cent of shares in a company mining minerals from their community would be collectively owned by rural communities; 10 per cent would go to employees in addition to their salaries; and 36 per cent would become a national Sovereign Wealth Fund. Unlike South Africa, it is “integrating the 70 per cent dwellers in rural areas and urban employees, into collectively sharing funds conventionally enjoyed by a few shareholders”. Mugabe has made youths “see themselves as economic fighters” against former exploiters.
Morgan Tsvangirai, as an ally of foreign and local owners of capital, opposed these “economic fighters”, but asked for votes from beneficiaries of Mugabe’s policies. Mugabe can now nurture a successor with the luxury of ZANU-PF having a two-thirds majority of seats in parliament.
© anu for Royal Times of Nigeria Newspaper, 2013. |
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