I came across an article in Newsday titled ‘Cde. Mugabe it’s time to rest’, the article cites several political analysts who examine the President’s legacy and what the last decade has done to it. The article cites University of Zimbabwe lecturer Eldred Masunungure as saying that while President Mugabe would know best when he should retire, his continued hold on power was eroding his legacy. All the analysts agreed that Mugabe is a committed nationalist and a patriot.

I must confess that I too have some mixed feelings about Our Dear Leader. On the one hand I think some of the policies and acts of his government(s) whether official or unofficial have been at best misguided, and at worst evil. I cannot stomach violence and murder. But on the other hand I appreciate his point of view, and have some admiration for his dogged resolve in the face of so much criticism and resistance. Much like Winston Churchill during the Second World War, Mugabe is a man who knows how to stay the course.

On the issue of his legacy, only time will tell. Was land reform just a political manoeuvre to quell rebellion from war veterans? Or was it part of a grander scheme to restore dignity to the dispossessed black majority? Knowing several war vets of his generation, I am well acquainted with their mistrust of white people. How could they not when they grew up in a world where black people were classified as being of less value than livestock? But does that mean that he and his generation can no longer operate in a time in which race is an increasingly outmoded basis for discrimination? More importantly are his ideas less relevant today than they were when the nationalist movement began? I believe he is one of the last great southern African nationalists, so when his time comes what is the future of the nationalist movement? Does it have a future at all, or will it give way to the homogeneity offered by globalisation?

Reaction to the article was emotional with two comments being moderate and the remaining containing hate speech from people who do not understand that Zimbabwe is greater than the sum of the last ten years, as is Mugabe. A man who can inspire such language must surely have a place somewhere in the chronicles of our country. How will history judge the Commander-In-Chief and what will his place in the history of Zimbabwe be?

I’ve just been reading about Facebook and Twitter being blocked in Uganda. Museveni is worried about new media helping people to organise protests in response to state repression and economic hardship. I’m pretty sure that Mugabe wouldn’t feel a move like that was necessary in Zimbabwe. People don’t protest here, no matter how much we get kicked in the teeth. Reading Peter Godwin in the New York Times, I have to agree that the pressure from neighbouring states helps to turn up the heat on dictators. Neighbours can’t ignore wide scale protest. But they can ignore silence. Which is what Zimbabweans are very good at. We’ve had stolen elections, detentions, torture, mind blowing inflation and food shortages. We didn’t respond. Will we ever? What is certain is that SADC, the AU and Showerhead will continue to ignore the crisis in Zimbabwe because we let them.

I’m reminded of a quote from Viktor Frankl; What is to give light must endure burning.

Here’s Godwin’s latest:

Making Mugabe Laugh

Barely was Laurent Gbagbo, wearing a sweat-damp white tank top and a startled expression, prodded at rebel gunpoint from the bombed ruins of his presidential bunker in Ivory Coast, than Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton announced this conclusion: His ejection, more than four months after he refused to accept electoral defeat, sent “a strong signal to dictators and tyrants throughout the region and around the world. They may not disregard the voice of their own people in free and fair elections, and there will be consequences for those who cling to power.”

Zimbabwe’s 87-year-old president, Robert Mugabe, who began his 32nd year in power this week, must have chortled when he heard that one.

The parallels between Ivory Coast and Zimbabwe are striking: both were once viewed as the singular successes in their respective regions, the envy of their neighbors. Both Mr. Gbagbo, a former history professor, and Mr. Mugabe, a serial graduate student, are highly educated men who helped liberate their countries from authoritarian regimes.

Both later clothed themselves in the racist vestments of extreme nativism. Mr. Gbagbo claimed that his rival Alassane Ouattara couldn’t stand for president because his mother wasn’t Ivorian; Mr. Mugabe disenfranchised black Zimbabweans who had blood ties to neighboring states (even though his own father is widely believed to have been Malawian).

The two countries have also been similarly plagued by north-south conflicts. And when they spiraled into failed statehood, both leaders blamed the West, in particular their former colonial powers – France and Britain – for interfering to promote regime change.

Finally, the international community imposed sanctions against both countries, including bans on foreign travel and the freezing of bank accounts that have largely proved insufficient.

But here’s where the stories crucially diverge – why Laurent Gbagbo is no longer in power, while Robert Mugabe, who lost an election in 2008, continues to flout his people’s will.

The most important point of departure was the sharply contrasting behavior of regional powers. The dominant player in West Africa, Nigeria, immediately recognized the validity of Mr. Ouattara’s victory in United

Nations-supervised elections, and worked within the regional alliance, the Economic Community of West African States, to unseat the reluctant loser. But Zimbabwe’s most powerful neighbor, South Africa, played a very different role. Instead of helping to enforce democracy, it has provided cover for Mr. Mugabe to stay on.

Partly this is due to what is called “liberation solidarity.” Most of the political parties still in power in southern Africa were originally anti-colonial liberation movements – like those in South Africa, Mozambique, Namibia and Angola – and they tend to abhor the aura-diminishing prospect of seeing any of their fellows jettisoned.

It is also because South Africa eyes the Zimbabwean opposition – which morphed out of a once-loyal trade union movement – through the suspicious lens of its own trade union movement’s contemplation of opposition politics.

As a result, instead of supporting the Zimbabwean opposition in 2008, Thabo Mbeki, then the South African president, bullied it into a power-sharing government of national unity headed by Mr. Mugabe. This democracy-defying model has threatened to metastasize into the mainstream of African politics; that same year it was also applied to Kenya, where a unity government was set up to end post-election bloodshed. When Mr. Mbeki was deputized by the African Union to broker a solution in Ivory Coast, that was the Band-Aid he reached for – but it was rightly rejected by Mr. Ouattara.

Of course, the other crucial difference is that in Ivory Coast, the dictator’s ejection came at the hands of men with guns. The northern rebels moved on Abidjan. The United Nations peacekeepers, trussed by restrictive mandates as always, nevertheless protected Mr. Ouattara until the French expanded an airport-securing operation into something altogether more ambitious. They basically prized Mr. Gbagbo from his bunker, though to avoid bad postcolonial optics, they brought the rebels in to make the final move.

In contrast, for refusing to plunge the country into a civil war, Zimbabwe’s democratic opposition has been rewarded by the international community by being largely ignored.

Next month, a group of southern African nations will discuss Mr. Mugabe’s continued resistance to agreed-upon reforms intended to pave the way to free elections. Either South Africa must get Mr. Mugabe to honor them, or it must withdraw its support for him. If it won’t, then the international community needs to push South Africa out of leading the negotiations, and engage more directly.

Zimbabweans need help if their voices are to be heard. If the United States wants to prove that Mrs. Clinton’s words were more than empty rhetoric, it should begin by pressuring South Africa. Otherwise Zimbabwe’s hopes for freedom will founder, even as Ivory Coast regains its stolen democracy.

Peter Godwin is the author of “The Fear: Robert Mugabe and the Martyrdom of Zimbabwe.”

Source

Zimbabwe’s President Robert Mugabe has a tendency to use funeral speeches to attack some target or other, typically The West. There is even a name for this. Type in a Google search for “Mugabe funeral rant” and you’ll be amazed with what you find – for example, the Sabina Mugabe rant (“‘To hell’ with Europe and America) and the Joseph Msika rant ([The West] are not the people to deal with).

Yesterday, he gave the Menard Muzariri rant. According to AFP:

Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe on Thursday condemned gay “filth” in Europe, as he lambasted Western powers for maintaining their asset freeze and travel ban on him and his inner circle. “We don’t worry ourselves about the goings-on in Europe,” he told thousands at the burial of deputy intelligence chief Menard Muzariri, who died Monday. “About the unnatural things happening there, where they turn man-to-man and woman-to-woman. We say, well, it’s their country. If they want to call their country British Gaydom, it’s up to them. That’s not our culture. We condemn that filth.”

I haven’t heard about the upcoming referendum to change the name of the United Kingdom to British Gaydom, but clearly when you’re in the diplomatic circles you have more inside information on these sorts of things.

Read the Gays and Lesbians of Zimbabwe (GALZ) statement about the Muzariri rant:

Statement on President Robert Mugabe’s threats at the burial of Menard Muzariri

Statements by President Robert Mugabe castigating gays and lesbians at the burial of Menard Muzariri at the National Heroes Acre on Thursday 14 April are nothing new and only serve to reinforce our call for constitutional protection of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgendered and Intersex people that has been met with state sponsored homophobia of alarming levels.

It is time for the Zimbabwean government to reflect seriously on its thinking around human rights including those of its lesbian and gay citizens and Government should be implementing measures which proactively encourage a culture of meaningful human rights protection in this country.

Statements by the President are a contradiction of article VII of the Global Political agreement in which the President pledges to promote equality, national healing, cohesion and unity. The President should strive to “create an environment of tolerance and respect among Zimbabweans and that all citizens are treated with dignity and decency.”

Activists in Zimbabwe are not puppets of foreign forces, as government would have everyone believe: we want a responsible government that is responsive to the needs of all Zimbabweans and we are fighting for our own good and for our own benefit as citizens of Zimbabwe.

The President needs to provide leadership in overcoming Zimbabwe’s challenges in areas such as violence, unemployment, education and health rather than fostering antipathy and intolerance.

Much has been made in the media over the weekend of the so-called unofficial coup dethroning Our Dear Leader and postulating that in fact it is the security forces who are really in charge of the country. In an exclusive interview with the daily News, the Prime Minister is quoted as saying:

In our bilateral meetings, I have discussed the issue of violence and implored Mugabe to deal with elements in the security organs. His response has always been that we don’t condone violence.  If he doesn’t follow up, it’s either he is in charge or not in charge. That leaves me with a question: Is he part of a conspiracy to undermine the government or his people are defying his instructions?”

It would be very convenient for both parties if Mugabe weren’t in charged wouldn’t it? They would both be exonerated for their failures in upholding their promises to the people of Zimbabwe, to stop the violence and resolve the current political stalemate.

By the end of my graduation day from Zimbabwe’s National University of Science and Technology (NUST), the 22nd of October 2010, all I could say was this was one of my best days ever! Just to see my siblings, relatives and friends with these huge smiles because I had made them proud made me feel like a little princess. I felt honoured to have His Excellency President Robert Mugabe cap me. I couldn’t even hide my smile when I heard him say, “Congratulations”. However, in the midst of celebrating and having fun my mind went back on a journey 5 months ago.

Monday the 31st of June 2010.

Exams were scheduled to start on that day at 9.00am. As usual students had spent the whole month, week and the weekend preparing for papers they were going to sit for. Not known to them was the fact that they weren’t going to do so. As students approached the examination hall, to their disbelief they were told that ‘only students with zero balance statements’ for their accounts were allowed to enter the examination room. Which meant one had to have cleared all their fees.

Students were baffled. I mean there was total chaos. Per semester fees range from $315 to $815 depending on the programme and whether one is in the convectional or parallel class.

A very few ran to the bursar’s office to collect their statements. I remember that only 10 students wrote their exam for a department in my faculty that had an exam on that particular day. Of the 10, many confessed that they only managed to enter by mere luck because the guard did not closely look at their statements. A few also managed to get in one and half hours late for a three-hour paper.

The majority, who did not make it into the examination room for their exams, stood by the entrance gate hoping for a miracle of some sort to take place. When they realised that nothing was going to happen, as the university’s authorities and security insisted they were not going to enter, they cried. It was so pathetic to see them and others, myself included, who did not have an exam that day cry at university. As final year students we wept, these were our last exams before graduating and we did not want to have our stay prolonged at the university.

All the time spent at university – for some four to seven years (depending on the programme) – seemed to be going down the drain just when you could smell the coffee.

Here’s a bit of background on fee paying at university.  For final year students the situation was bad. In the first semester fees had to be paid in Zimdollars and in the second semester dollarisation had taken place which meant we had to pay fees in foreign currency. That we did. However, when we got to campus to commence our first semester for our final year we were told that semester which we had paid Zimdollars for had been dollarised which meant we had to pay US dollars for it! The case was taken to court and the university authorities requested that students bring receipts showing payments made in Zimdollars together with their registration forms. Some students had lost their receipts and upon going to their respective departments to get their registration forms, some departments resorted to playing hide and seek with the papers.

I didn’t have an examination that day, but still my first exam was on Tuesday the following day at 9.00am. I got my statement from the bursar’s office stating that I owed the university US$485.00 which meant I had 24 hours to get that money and pay. You cry but you reach a time when you realise that tears won’t bring you anything. My parents are late, so I had to get in touch with my sisters and a few immediate relatives. They were all similarly shocked and ran around, but still they weren’t going to be able to get the money to me before 9.00am the following day. Luckily for me I was renting a house with first year students, my younger brother included, and their exams were scheduled to start two weeks later and because they were first years they were not implicated in the Zimdollar saga. Thus I borrowed money from them and also from a friend. I went and paid the balance before the exam with borrowed money, which meant I was in debt.

The following day police were all over campus and this was really intimidating. As I got my ‘zero balance statement’, I made my way to the examination room. A room, which is usually full, was literary empty. It was painful to see that the candidate, who sits behind you or in front or beside you, did not make it. I felt the coldest breeze pass over me not only because the room is exceptionally cold but also from having fellow students absent. We waited for nearly an hour hoping that other candidates would join us but only a few joined in after that hour had passed.

When it was time to start writing the exam, I realised my mind was blank. This was because instead of preparing for the exam the previous day, I had spent my time worrying and in tears. I had also spent my time visiting relatives around town, ‘begging’ for money. I had spent the day recounting the few notes I had and rechecking my statement to see if any miracle had taken place. I had spent the day with my phone in my hand, calling this person and the next.

Thus on my graduation I was over the moon not only because I had managed to endure the sleepless nights of reading and working on a dissertation, but because I had managed to sit for exams. Its sad to know that some students had to defer their studies because of the very short notice we were given to clear the fees balance.

I not only left the university on graduation day with a BSc degree but also with survival skills.

According to an article in The Zimbabwean “Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai is to embark on a diplomatic offensive to seek greater support from the SADC regional bloc, following an intense blitz on his party officials and activists by ZANU PF.”

He’d better include a national offensive as well. Many Zimbabweans are questioning the MDC’s effectiveness, and they’re losing support hand over fist (so to speak).

ZINASU recently gave Tsvangirai and the MDC this advice:

To the M.D.C we advise you to divorce yourself from this government of many names either in a smart or a dirty way and come back to the people. The people shall not spare you of their wrath as we launch a protracted struggle against tyranny and an anti-people government. The nation demands an immediate dissolution of that government you are part of to pave way for a genuine revolution that shall leave power in the hands of the working people. The roadmap that Zuma is proposing shall see the same fate as Thabo Mbeki’s initiatives that were stalled by the cunning Mugabe regime.