 |
Al-Ahram Weekly 20 - 26 April 2000 Issue No. 478 
|
||
Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
| ||
|
Al-Ahram Weekly 20 - 26 April 2000 Issue No. 478
|
||
| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
| ||
Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Heritage Features Travel Living Sports Profile People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters April is the cruelest month
By Gamal Nkrumah
It was a poignant moment. On Monday, Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe cancelled the scheduled three-day official celebrations marking two decades of independence from Britain and said in a televised speech that the money saved would go to victims of recent floodings, which have destroyed crops and further aggravated social tensions arising from acute land shortages.
The problem of landlessness has brought matters to a head. The indigenous black African people of Zimbabwe have spelt out their demands: Mugabe and his ruling party, the Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF), must confiscate white-owned farms.
"Our forefathers were vicitimised by those farmers. If those farmers think they are Zimbabwe-British, we would prefer they go back to Britain," warned the controversial "Dr Hunvi," the war veteran who has allegedly masterminded the seizure of white farms. Some 600 white-owned farms are currently occupied.
The Lancaster House Agreement ended Zimbabwe's war for liberation in 1979, apartheid and the white-minority state of 1965-80. But twenty years later, it is clear that the conditions were nonetheless unjust. The agreement was a dangerous compromise and today Zimbabwe reaps the bitter harvest of Lancaster House. One million African peasants own 16 million hectares of the most desolate and drought-prone land. Some 4,500 white farmers, many absentee landowners, retain 11 million hectares of the best-watered and most fertile soil. Much of this prime land is devoted to the cultivation of tobacco, the country's principal export crop and foreign exchange earner. Tobacco is widely acknowledged as a crop that does much damage to the soil and compounds the country's land erosion problems.
The rest of the land, when not left fallow for ostensibly environmental reasons, is given over to horticulture. Black African peasants working on white farms are invariably not permitted to grow maize, a staple crop. In the meantime, the army of hungry and landless peasants is growing ever larger. They have long ceased to drift to the cities because urban unemployment has reached an unprecedented 60 per cent. Contrary to the claims of Britain, white farmers and the international media, Mugabe is not just stirring up trouble. Let us give the people of Zimbabwe more credit. Mugabe, contrary to Western mythology, is now forced to listen to his people. He has in the past pussy-footed over seizing white land, but this was in essence delaying the inevitable. But Mugabe has clearly chosen to seize the issue by the horns, and he may well end up reading the last rites for Zimbabwe's white landed aristocracy.
The principle of reclaiming ancestral lands was at the heart of Zimbabwe's national liberation war, the Chimurenga. The war left over 40,000 dead, and hundreds permanently disabled, but there was nothing in the Lancaster House agreement that stipulated that they be compensated -- as was the case with white land-owners.
Politics often proceeds from a particular predicament. Liberal democracy cannot be maintained if a permanent minority that is hostile to the government controls the country's economy, accounts for over 90 per cent of the country's external trade and owns 70 per cent of the best farmland. The 12 million black African inhabitants of the country are virtual hostages to fewer than 70,000 whites.
"We have a history of fighting for our land. We have reached a point of no return," said Agrippa Gava, of the Liberation War Veteran's Association. "We don't want a donor republic," read one of the placards brandished by thousands of supporters welcoming Mugabe at the airport on his return from the G77 summit of Third World leaders in Cuba.
Critics claim that ZANU-PF can only maintain power by falsifying history and through terror and corruption. We hear this same charge all the time in Africa -- and elsewhere. Western allegations of rampant corruption in Zimbabwe are not to be brushed aside, but why is Mugabe's Zimbabwe singled out for recrimination? Are all Africa's leaders not corrupt according to Western reckoning?
Here is the crux of the matter: Zimbabwe's ruling party and the nascent Western-backed opposition have more in common than at first meets the eye. They agree that the economy should be privatised -- what they don't agree on is how it should be privatised, and who should reap the benefits. The opposition wants fast-paced privatisation that will open up Zimbabwe to their Western backers. Mugabe wants those who stood by him to reap the benefits of privatisation, and naturally, for ZANU-PF to consolidate its control over the privatised economy.
Mass privatisation, as advocated by the opposition, will further aggravate the already unacceptable unemployment levels, but unlike Mugabe, the opposition refuses to play the race card. Careerism and personal ambitions have taken its toll on ZANU-PF. There are comrade capitalists galore among the party's upper echelons, and the formal abandonment of Marxist-Leninism as the party's guiding ideology is a foregone conclusion.
The Western media depicts Zimbabwe as a totalitarian, authoritarian and undemocratic country. Yet, it is still democratic enough for Mugabe to have lost a referendum last month which contained elements judged by an Amnesty International report released in February as representing "major human rights improvements compared to the present constitution -- particularly with regards to women's rights."
The opposition to the draft constitution was led by the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), headed by labour leader Morgan Tsvangirai and largely drawn from his own labour base. The argument was that the draft entailed strengthening Mugabe's powers. It also would have paved the way for the confiscation of white farms. The Zimbabwean electorate was discriminate enough; they refused to give Mugabe more power, but they also took the law into their own hands by occupying white farms and forcing Mugabe to champion their cause.
Tsvangirai, on a tour of London and other Western capitals to drum up support for his cause, told his British hosts precisely what they wanted to hear. "We cannot kill the goose that laid the golden eggs," Tsvangirai said, referring to white farmers. Sell-out, retorted ZANU-PF.
A former secretary-general of the Zimbabwe Confederation of Trade Unionists (ZCTU) and ZANU commissar, Tsvangirai has emerged as the darling of the West. This week he continues his tour of Western countries and was given the red carpet treatment often reserved for visiting heads of state.
"We must de-politicise the War Veteran's Association. First and foremost, we need to de-politicise the land issue," Tsvangirai said. Tsvangirai was catapulted into the political limelight in December 1997 when he orchestrated nationwide strikes against tax increases. He was promptly imprisoned and pronounced a "South African spy."
Zimbabwe is not a model democracy, but it is still a democracy of sorts, very similar to the nascent quasi-democracies that are found all over the African continent. Yes, Mark Chavhunduka, editor of The Standard, was arrested in January 1999. Gay rights activist Keith Goddard was also imprisoned and harassed. Many Zimbabweans resent the fact that 10,000 Zimbabwean troops are stationed in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) -- it is a war Zimbabwe can ill afford.
Democracy without any socio-economic equality is a farce and an insult to the people. Some ZANU-PF officials have obviously used the farm seizure campaign to settle personal scores. Others acted out of sheer vindictiveness. Tsvangirai's caution fell on deaf ears. It is not enough for the indigenous black Africans to have achieved political democracy if they are still poor and unemployed. Economic and social democracy is what they yearn for. Land has always been an emotive subject and still sets many pulses racing. An astute politician, Mugabe has made much political capital of the issue. Zimbabwe's future prosperity does not lie with antiquated tobacco farms, but in new service-based enterprises of the contemporary global economy.
