Cry Zimbabwe

Zimbabwe has been crisis for a long time now — its democracy is in tatters, inflation has sky-rocketed to absurd levels, unemployment is at 80 per cent, the media is gagged, and the vast majority of its population is caught in a downward spiral of poverty and violence. A country which was once considered the bread basket of Africa is in ruins today.

And there is no getting away from the fact that much of the blame for this lies with the man who has been in power for all of the 28 years since the country gained independence in 1980, President Robert Mugabe. Yet, as the latest endorsement by the African Union has shown — he was hailed as a hero at its summit — the continent’s leaders hold a different view from much of the world.

International opinion, led mainly by the former colonial power Britain, has tried its best to put pressure on him to quit but he has managed, mainly with some brutal tactics, to stay on. He has the support of a key African neighbour, South Africa, whose president Thabo Mbeki has steadfastly backed Mugabe chiefly on the grounds that it is an African problem that Africans should resolve.

Other countries are ambivalent too — India has decided not to back a cricket boycott of the country.
Once hailed as a pan-African revolutionary hero, Mugabe’s Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF) won election after election with overwhelming majorities, not always in the most honest of ways.

But the patience of the people finally ran out, and in the Presidential run-off elections which were held last Friday, Mugabe had to resort to declaring himself the winner because the other candidate, Tsvangirai, opted out of the race in protest.

This latest development is the only the most flagrant instance of what Mugabe has been doing over the years: steadily undermining the constitution by arrogating more and more powers to himself. With the breakdown of the agriculture sector, following a botched and corruption-ridden land reform process, the economy went into a tailspin, causing public unrest, which only led Mugabe to further tighten his grip on power.

While it would be difficult to justify forceful interference in the affairs of an African nation by an international community led by powerful, white, ex-colonisers, it is at the same time imperative to come to the aid of the Zimbabwean people who are at the receiving end of a brutal tyranny.

For the moment, it appears to be a hopeless situation, but how long will he hold on? The tragedy is that the country is sinking into an abyss and whenever and however Mugabe goes, he would have left behind a once-prosperous country in a ruined state.