“How do you think he would have been assessed if Robert Mugabe had either died or quit office two decades ago?” a leading comrade and progressive journalist asked me in a telephone conversation on the fate that had befallen Zimbabwe’s maximum ruler for over four decades who had been forced by the country’s army and liberation war veterans to quit office? The answer is, of course, obvious. He would have been celebrated as a worthy African leader, canonized by the West and lionized by the international community. Unfortunately, Mugabe stayed too long in office, had become increasingly alienated from reality and was unfortunate to have fallen under the spell of his excessively power-thirsty wife, Grace, a veritable Jezbel of our time. Some commentators have dismissed Mugabe as just another example of the myriad of sit-tight African leaders who only lust for power and do not have the interests of their people at heart. He validates for those who hold this view, the proposition that Africa’s most fundamental problem is that of poor and inept leadership. This is, however, a rather superficial viewpoint that oversimplifies a more complex situation.
The truth of the matter is that many of the African leaders who like Mugabe started out well but some of whom ended up as villains in office, were leaders and able statesmen of the first rank. These include such first post-independence generation leaders as Jomo Kenyatta of Kenya, Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, Sekou Toure of Guinea, Milton Obote of Uganda, Amilcar Cabral of Guinea Bissau, Kenneth Kaunda of Zambia, Patrice Lumumba of Congo, Abdel Nasser of Egypt, Julius Nyerere of Tanzania or Muammar Gaddafi of Libya to name a few. They were well read, cosmopolitan and highly patriotic leaders of their countries. Many of them courageously led the struggle for their countries’ liberation from colonial rule most times at great personal cost. Their sacrificial and pioneering roles in the nationalist struggle for independence unfortunately gave them a sense of entitlement of their right to lead their newly liberated countries; a feeling shared by a not insubstantial number of their fellow country men and women.
It is so easy with the benefit of hindsight to blame these leaders for the rash of one- man and one-party dictatorships that erupted all over Africa in the immediate post-independence period. However, the conventional wisdom in the aftermath of independence even in highly distinguished and respected intellectual circles was that liberal democracy was at that time a luxury which the newly independent African countries could hardly afford. A choice had to be made between a liberal democracy that could all too often be distracting, cacophonous, obstructive of swift and decisive decision making as well as divisive and what the ‘modernization theorists’ described as ‘developmental dictatorship’ if I can recall correctly.
All these turned out with time to be completely wrong headed. For, African leaders could not be exempted from Lord Acton’s enduring and time tested maxim that ‘power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely’. That was the tragedy of Mugabe as that of several otherwise immensely talented African leaders who met their waterloo in power. For at least his first two decades in power, Mugabe was the toast of the western media and political establishment. He was even given a knighthood by the British Queen. He remained the darling of the West for as long as he left intact the grossly unjust and inequitable economic and social structure bequeathed to Zimbabwe by imperialism. This was particularly the case with the criminally untenable and abysmally unequal distribution of land with a minority of white farmers retaining control of large tracts of fertile land to the detriment of millions of deprived Zimbabwean peasant farmers and families.
For over two decades after independence, Mugabe was reluctant to do anything about the historic injustice of asymmetrical land distribution in Zimbabwe. His stance was no doubt partly due to the kind of advice he was given by the radical political economist and revolutionary, Abdulrahman Babau, in an open letter to Mugabe in May 1980 shortly after his assumption of office and published in the New African magazine. In the words of Babu to Mugabe, “Experience elsewhere has taught us that the taking over of ongoing viable farms has invariably led to almost total collapse of agricultural production and has forced the countries concerned to incur heavy foreign debt to import food. As foreign borrowing without repayment cannot be sustained for a long time the countries are forced literally to beg for food on an international scale…It is a painful historical fact that in Zimbabwe such large-scale farms are owned by White settlers, some of whom are liberal and others incorrigibly reactionary. To expropriate them will amount to economic disaster, at least in the short run. To allow them to continue as before will amount to perpetuating a national injustice. This is a serious dilemma”.
The popular perspective and conventional wisdom is that the Mugabe administration undertook the confiscation of White-owned farms and distributing them to its cronies as his dictatorial grip on the country tightened, his intolerance of opposition grew and his popularity at home plummeted. There may be some truth to this view. But the radical South African Political Economist, Professor Patrick Bond, gives us another no less instructive point of view. According to him, the same war veterans largely responsible for Mugabe’s eventual ouster from power, had earlier confronted him in Y2000 when they became fed up with his reluctance to take over the white farms, which as that year were mostly under-utilized.
Consequently, over the Easter weekend in 2000, over 3000 large white farms were taken over by about 170,000 Zimbabwean families. This was obviously a carefully planned operation. Mugabe, who initially opposed the development, was forced to change his stance and support the takeover given the popularity in Zimbabwe of the occupation of the white farms. In any case, what choice did Mugabe have since Britain reneged on its pledge under the Lancaster House agreement to pay Zimbabwe 10 million pounds to buy back some of the white farms for redistribution to deprived black farmers?
Zimbabwe’s efforts to move, through the forcible acquisition of unjustly acquired land, from mere flag or nominal independence to genuine economic emancipation instantly drew a furious and punitive reaction from the West. Stiff sanctions were imposed on the country that virtually brought the economy to its knees. Inflation soared. Food scarcity became the norm. The country’s currency became practically worthless. The British monarchy withdrew Mugabe’s knighthood. He became an international pariah and a persona non grata in the West overnight. It will be recalled that key western countries such as the US and Britain vigorously supported the apartheid regime in South Africa as well as white minority rule in the former Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). If they had their way, white supremacist rule would be alive and well in those countries today.
Even though the compulsory acquisition and redistribution to thousands of black farmers of the huge white farms is widely regarded as a disaster with deleterious economic consequences, Professor Bond points out some little publicized gains of the exercise. He notes, for instance, that “The 146,000 smaller farmers with land of six hectares saved and reinvested and became highly productive, creating 800,000 jobs”. This is in addition to the several vibrant market towns which have reportedly grown around the land reform farms. Again, Zimbabwe reportedly produced more maize in 2017 than was ever grown by white farmers who have always been credited for making the country Africa’s food basket. This year, Zimbabwe produced 2.2 million tonnes of Maize, the highest in two decades. Compared to 2011, another good year for Maize production, an increase of about 700,000 tonnes was witnessed this year.
Apart from favourable weather conditions, the United States Department of Agriculture has cited a special programme for import substitution known as ‘Command Agriculture’ as being responsible for the successes recorded in this respect. The ‘Command Agriculture’ scheme involves land reform farmers signing contracts for a certain number of hectares and agreeing to sell not less than five tonnes of maize per hectare to the Grain Marketing Board. On its part, government provides seedlings, fertilizer, tractors where necessary and fuel for ploughing with the cost deducted from the sale prize of the maize.
Mugabe’s successor, former Vice-President Emmerson Mnangagwa has promised more support for the Land Commission set up under Mugabe to “ensure that all land is utilized optimally”. It will be prudent and wise for him to seek better relations between his country and the international community. Even as VP, Mnangagwa had reportedly been moving to curb corruption by using the army to check that agreed number of hectares were ploughed and planted as well as getting some senior figures of the ruling ZANU-PF arrested for selling fertilizer and diesel meant for other farmers. However, the truth is that what has taken place in Zimbabwe is only a palace coup. The discredited status quo remains intact. Mnangagwa and the military high command remain part and parcel of the rot of the Mugabe years. His prime task should be to liberalize the political space, legitimize political opposition, strengthen the integrity of the electoral system and perish any though of sit-tight, life dictatorship if the same fate that befell Mugabe is not to be his portion.
