THE MUGABE FALLOUT

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THE Zimbabwe smash-up under unprincipled and in-competent Marxist dictatorship is something APN (along with many others) predicted long ago. You could say that the wonder is that it took so long. Did matters in Zimbabwe have to turn out so badly? Probably so. More than 20 years ago the French agronomist/author, Rene Dumont, said that Black Africa was "off to a bad start," not least because of the "ideological claptrap" its new leaders found so fascinating. In 1985, Conor Cruise O'Brien, formerly very much a man of the politically correct, anti-colonial left but who had been mugged into reality by a stint at the Univer-sity of Ghana, came to the same conclusion. Writing of "The African Experiment," he said: "Not all the capitalist African states have been successful, but all the (relatively) successful states have been capitalist. 'African socialism' has no success stories to tell. I say that … simply because it is true, and important." That was sound advice from intelligent, experienced men who knew what they were talking about. Natu-rally, it was ignored.

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MUCH of recent SA and Zimbabwean history has run on more or less parallel lines. As all those who put him in power well knew, Mugabe has all his adult life been an obsessive Marxist, just as later they knew equally well that Mandela had long before surrendered control of the ANC to the SA Communist Party. But, no matter. Both in their time were swept into power. Though this betrayal was all part of the New World Order plan, for the tens of millions of people concerned, it was the ultimate political absurdity. Crass revolutionaries all, neither Mandela, Mugabe nor their assorted commie cronies had the faintest grasp of state craft or how to administer a sophisticated modern economy. But, with all the self-assurance of the truly ignorant, they furiously set about their appointed task of "transformation" and social demolition. End result? Intense national peril for both countries. Zimbabwe was always one jump ahead of SA, but under Marxist rule both countries saw wanton abuse of power and misuse of state property; public expenditure wildly out of control; years of self-indulgent po-litical extravagances; bureaucracies so bloated and overmanned that their budgeds left little for infrastructural services; all conbined with an exploding population, mass unemployment, the destruction of the whole concept of freedom under the law and a total lack of moral leadership. Though we are certainly also getting there Zimbabwe - fighting an increasingly costly war in the Congo and hit by hyperinflation which has destroyed the currency - is now on the edge of imminent collapse.

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MUGABE preached racial reconciliation when he came to power but just as with Mandela and Mbeki in SA today, he now seeks to blame all the country's woes on the Whites, now less than 1% of the population. In 1980, when he took power, there were still some 220 000 Whites in the country. During the Eighties, despite strict laws against taking any of their wealth with them, some 60% of the remaining Whites fled Zimbabwe. With them went most of the country's top level skills, scientific, medical and industrial expertise. Today there are about 60 000 Whites left. Mugabe, who has denounced the Whites as "snakes," "witches" and "racists," has promised that he will make life "very difficult" for them. Deeply disen-chanted, White morale has never been lower but, as has been pointed out, they are now outnumbered by Zimbabwe's 75,000 elephants.

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ALL too often in Africa it seems that political strongmen do not see government as a means of serving, but rather of fleecing, the people. The profligate spending by Zimbabwe's parasitic Black elite is probably only equalled by what we see in SA today. One striking example: Harare, the capital, is working with a R30 million+ deficit. The municipal infrastructure is teetering on the brink of collapse. Recently one half of the city was without water for three weeks. The city's work force was not paid last October. Some 60% to 80% of the municipal budget is spent on staff salaries. Yet a new R7 million mansion, now nearing completion, was approved for Harare's Executive Mayor, Solomon Tawengwa.

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VIOLENCE and intimidation are becoming an in-creasing part of everyday Zimbabwe life. Here again we need to examine Mugabe's terrorist past. During the 1970s, during the Rhodesian War, the ill-named Patriotic Front led by Mugabe and Joshua Nkomo murdered 45,000 Rhodesians, most of them Black. They shut down a good few hospitals and hundreds of clinics; closed more than 1,000 schools, destroyed virtually all rural transportation and left a trail of bloody destruction all over the nation. It was a text book case of all-out terror. While all knew that Mugabe was supported by weapons, training and aid from China, Rumania and Yugoslavia while Nkomo got his supplies from the old USSR, Western pols and the left/lib media, including the SA-based Argus Co., then owned by Harry Oppenheimer, touted both men as "worthy representatives" of the "oppressed majorities" who were victims of "minority White rule." I would wager that there are many Black Zimbabweans who today pine for the Smith regime.

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DESPITE Zimbabwe's really desperate eco-nomic/political crisis, most of the ruling ZANU-PF party continue behaving as if Robert Mugabe will be in power for ever. They should be warned by some recent history. This year will see the tenth anniversary of the collapse of another regime, very similar to that of Mugabe's: that of the Rumanian communist dictator Nicolae Ceaucescu, whose flat (apartment) in Bucharest contained several expensive presents from his good friend, Robert Mugabe, all paid for by the Zimbabwean taxpayer.

Arrested in the popular uprising that followed the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Ceaucescus were brought before a hastily-convened military tribunal and charged with "crimes against the Rumanian people." These charges included: Genocide of 60,000 people; destruction of the economy; issue of criminal orders to the Army; depositing more than US$1 billion in foreign accounts. In voiceovers carried in an hour-long video tape of the trial, you could hear the prosecutor asking: "What possessed you to reduce the people to the state they are in?"

The quiet voice goes on relentlessly:
"Not even the peasants had wheat … why did the people have to starve? It is sad that you not only deprived the people of bread and heating, but you imprisoned the Rumanian spirit. You have drained us. You call on the people. How can you face these very people?" Elena Ceaucescu laughs. "This laugh says all that needs to be said about you," says the voice. "On the basis of your behaviour you belong in a mad-house." Then comes the verdict. "It is unanimously decided that Ceaucescu Nicolae and Ceaucescu Elena be given the maximum sentence for genocide against the Rumanian people and the destru-tion of the Rumanian land. On the basis of the action of the members of the Ceaucescu family, we condemn the two of you to death. We confiscate all your property." In December 1989 they were executed at 4 p.m. on Christmas Day: put against a barracks wall and shot. They faced the firing squad without being blindfolded. Zimbabwe at first glance seems far removed from communist Rumania of a decade ago. But the lesson of all this is that even the nastiest autocracies vanish eventually.

THE consequences for SA if and when hit by this juggernaut of destruction will be enormous, both to the economy and internal security. Zimbabwe is SA's biggest export market. According to figures given by the Financial Mail, our exports to that country in the first seven months of 1998 totalled R10,9 billion, compared with R6,2 bn to the UK, our next biggest customer. Because of dwindling demand, these exports to Zimbabwe are already heavily down. Any economic crash next door would be a desperate blow to SA industry, already suffering severe liquidity problems. The social consequences would be even worse. To the immense anger of domestic Black South Africans, the country is already at bursting point with illegal aliens. Xenophobia has provoked some very ugly mob violence. Any new flood of Zimbabwean refugees would really upset the applecart. Whether the ANC/SACP-led ruling party is sufficiently focussed on this remains to be seen.

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MUGABE, that well-known graduate of the Pol Pot charm school, due to retire in 2002, has much to answer for. The crash in Zimbabwe is visible on all sides, nowhere more so than in the plunge of the Z$, which crashed a stunning 70% in November alone, hitting a low of Z$45 to the US$, causing allround price instability. The banking system is suffering a liquidity crisis. The property market is in even worse recession than at the height of the Rhodesian war, while the industrial and commercial sector is at a virtual standstill. Punitive taxation is a ceaseless headache. Even the stock market went on strike last month in protest at what brokers described as a "monumentally stupid" new 5% tax on the gross value of all transactions. The government duly backed down, but it has already sparked an exodus of investment from the Harare stock exchange.

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MUGABE's total indifference to the welfare of his people is best demonstrated by his hostility to the White commercial farmers, now the only productive element of the entire economy, accounting for more than half of the country's foreign earnings. For years he has unsettled the entire farming community with his on-again, off-again threats to grab White farms without compensation. Though, under IMF/World Bank pressure, he has again retreated on this to a de-gree, recently he once more announced the arbitrary confiscation of 841 White farms, totalling more than 5 million acres, for peasant resettlement. Following the notice of compulsory confiscation, he said there "was not the faintest chance" of his government paying out 841 farmers, that "the most the farmers could expect was an IOU." Mugabe may consider he has little to lose by throwing out his White farmers. But Zimbabwe would feel the effects soon enough. While, on past experience, it could be expected that the best of these highly developed properties would be dished out to Mugabe's cronies on the basis of political favouritism, others would go to peasant farmers lacking both the expertise and the means to carry out anything but subsistence farming. But Mugabe treats the threatened collapse of Zimbabwe's commercial agriculture with indifference and disdain. He is on record: "I am not at all concerned if our land acquisition programme and indigenisation policies mean our economy fails." Charming chap. The scandal does not end there. The government has one million acres of state land available for peasant resettlement programmes but as far as can be established has not distributed any of it. It either lies fallow or has been parcelled out to party cronies.

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ZIMBABWE's starving masses and thousands of AIDS orphans look like facing a rough winter in com-ing months. The long predicted shortage of maize-meal, the national staple, is now a reality. In April 1998 Zimbabwe had a strategic stockpile of about 500 000 tons. Because of excessive sales of that stock on the export market, and excessive summer rains, official estimates are that Zimbabwe will end the present maize season with about 250 000 tons in stock. The country could be down to a week's supply of maize by March or April. According to the Financial Mail, 5.2.99, Zimbabwe will have to import at least 600 000/700 000 tons of maize over the next year. This will intensify still further downward pressure on the Z$. Imported maize will be far more expensive than the locally grown product. Last year food prices surged 39%: it is predicted the rise must be greater this year. Food shortages are al-ways the most potent threat to social stability.

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TODAY's Zimbabwe is largely the creation of the US State Department, the British Foreign Office, the UN and other outposts of the New World Order. All played a crucial role in destroying Ian Smith's government and advancing Mugabe's cause. Have any of these said one word about the spreading social collapse, the increasing breakdown in law and order in Mugabe's Zimbabwe? Not at all. On this, the world maintains a strange silence. The irony is that though he is now presiding over the final ruin of his country, very few in Britain or the US seem to no-tice or even care. Yet both countries do have a grave moral responsibility. They created this disaster, just as they created the fast escalating disaster in SA. The fact is that Mugabe has never been perceived in Britain as a true dictator, though that is the way most Zimbabweans, Black and White, view him. His lifestyle has all the panoply of a dictator. His bullet-proof Mercedes is preceded by motor cyclists with blaring sirens and several cars full of plain clothes goons. In the rear are two trucks filled with troops armed with rifles and machine guns. Any motorist failing to stop his car in proper respect risks being shot.

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BRITISH double standards were well exposed late last year. General Pinochet, who did so much to help Britain during the Falklands War, was in London for back surgery. On the highly suspect orders of a lesser Spanish judge, the British arrested Pinochet on allegations of human rights abuses and still hold him in detention. Mugabe, whose forces killed 20,000 Ndebele and tortured many more, was in London at the same time with his stupid, free-spending young wife, with whom he is reported to be having family problems. They were there for Christmas shopping: but Mugabe was received at Cabinet level and treated like royalty. Zimbabwe may indeed be a small country, a long way away. But so is Chile. Do the lives of innocent Ndebele tribesmen count for less than those of Spanish and Cuban revolutionaries in Chile in an effort to consolidate a brutal Marxist government? Still, I am happy to say that not all is lost. The ex-Marxist student activists now running Britain, together with all those Brit clergy and other fellow travellers who so enthusiastically supported the independence struggle, have been much disconcerted to find that Zimbabwe is now ruled by a man (their one-time hero) who says homosexuals are "lower than pigs or dogs." That must have gone down well with Peter Mandelson, Chris Smith and other members of the gay community in the Blair entourage.

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REVERTING briefly to the global silence on the Zimbabwe meltdown. Let's look back 20 years. I always believed that once Rhodesia and SA had fallen to the Marxists, the views, needs and interests of the Blacks would cease to concern anyone in the West. The Black man would have served his purpose and become redundant. And so it proves.

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LET's end on a slightly more optimistic note. Two reasons why, until recently, there has been no serious opposition to Mugabe's destructive regime were:

1. that many Zimbabweans had been cowed into sub-mission by the savage Central Intelligence Organisation and,
2. the lack of any real opposition.

Both these factors are being corrected, with the name of one man being especially mentioned in despatches. He is the articulate and obviously courageous Morgan Tsvangarayi, leader of the 700, 000-strong Zimbabwe Confederation of Trade Unions (ZCTU). Tsvangarayi has emerged over the last 18 months as a rallying point against Mugabe's regime. His ZCTU played a leading role in organising the trade union revolt which erupted with such force and to Mugabe's great embarrassment: the first mass mobilisation against the Mugabe regime since the Marxists took power. I have as yet not been able to gain much information on Morgan, but he sounds like a useful chap. And, while he has already survived one major assassination attempt, he is clearly not afraid to speak his mind. He was recently quoted:

"Every day people are getting poorer while they see the corruption of the ruling elite become more and more blatant. It is getting hard to contain their anger." I hope to bring you more news about Morgan in the near future. If any Zimbabwean can help me here, I would be grateful.

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