Right now Zimbabwe is anything but prosperous and normal. Robert Mugabe and his Zanu PF government, while greatly enriching themselves, have run this country into the ground.
The country is bankrupt and, this year, faces a famine of epic proportions – there is a shortfall of more than a million tonnes of maize and, at the time of writing, Mugabe’s government has failed to issue a letter of appeal to the United Nations, standard procedure to get the World Food Programme activated.
According to opposition member of parliament Eddie Cross this is either down to Mugabe’s “pride or simply lack of attention”. On such whims, it seems, hangs the fate of millions of Zimbabweans.
At the same time the economic sectors – manufacturing, mining and agriculture – that were once the engine room of a productive and innovative small economy are grinding slowly to a halt. Bulawayo, once the hub of the nation’s industrial output, lies still and silent, the Detroit of the Zimbabwean lowveld.
The blame for this economic torpor lies unequivocally with Mugabe and his Zanu PF. These days the 91-year-old is known in Zimbabwe as “a visiting president”, as in a visiting college professor. His role as chairman of the African Union – another bankrupt African organisation that depends for survival on largesse from the West – has him jetting from one AU constituency to another just as his own country appears to be locked in a death struggle.
For the first time in 35 years of totalitarian rule Mugabe’s political party is starting to tear itself apart, purging itself of former stalwarts, breaking into warring factions as the leadership contenders position themselves for the moment the Old Man dies. The whole country is waiting for that moment.
“Even physically, he (Mugabe) can only sit up alert in his chair for 40 minutes. He’s not there mentally or physically the rest of the time.”
Mugabe blames white colonials generally for his country’s current plight, and US and EU “sanctions” specifically for the parlous state of Zimbabwe’s economy. While the invasion from Europe during the Victorian era may have destabilised a rural, tribal people and indeed exploited them in the 20th century, most of today’s black Zimbabweans are so-called “born frees”, born after independence and thus having no experience of colonial exploitation. They do not share their president’s views.
The cover of sanctions is also tenuous, to say the least. But they have provided Mugabe with a convenient smokescreen for more than a decade. Local economist John Robertson says that “the whole issue of sanctions was the most generous gift the West could have given Mugabe because he’s played it out as the entire reason for the failure of the economy after the so-called land reform programme.
“In fact the US and the EU have fed this country throughout the bad years.”
Source – Newzimbabwe.com
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