I don’t believe the purported South African peace plan stands a chance

The July 7 edition of the UK paper The Guardian had a story about a claimed peace plan for ZANU-PF and the MDC brokered by South African president Thabo Mbeki which the opposition party is is said to have been pleasantly surprised it could live with.

The plan which is said to have been presented to Zimbabwe’s political leaders “would allow Robert Mugabe to remain as a titular head of state but surrender real power to the opposition leader, Morgan Tsvangirai, who would serve as prime minister until a new constitution was negotiated and fresh elections held.”

One can immediately see why MDC leaders would eagerly find an easy way out of their problem of failing to budge Mugabe out of power in such a plan and jump to embrace it. Indeed, “Chris McGreal in Harare” quotes his MDC source as saying “all the basic ideas of the MDC are there”, including a recognition of the results of the first round of elections in March won by Tsvangirai, which would be met by making the MDC leader an executive prime minister.

“The important thing is that it recognises the outcome of the March 29 election, and that any government will be transitional on the way to new elections,” the article quotes the source as saying.

As an aside, it is interesting how the The Guardian seems to have embedded itself within the MDC and become the party’s official mouthpiece. One can see how the recent call for military intervention under Tsvangirai’s byline mysteriously appeared in the paper, only to be hastily repudiated by Tsvangirai and quickly taken down from the paper’s website. The MDC’s closeness to The Guardian may yet come back to haunt it.

It seems incredibly far-fetched to believe Mugabe would accept any power-sharing plan that gives real power to Tsvangirai and merely ceremonial power to him. The very thing about the plan that Tsvangirai and the MDC would find so attractive is precisely why any such plan would be rejected out of hand by Mugabe and ZANU-PF.

If Mbeki did indeed present such a proposal, it would represent a fundamental misreading of the reasons for Mugabe’s intransigence about gracefully leaving power. The plan seems to assume that it is merely a matter of ego, and that Mugabe would respond to growing international pressure on him to accept some kind of deal with Tsvangirai by a ‘face-saving’ offer to give him a title with no real power. There is nothing at all in Mugabe’s past to give any inkling that he could live with an arrangement in which he was a window dresser. This is especially so in a situation where real power was held by someone for whom he has as much genuine contempt for as he does for Tsvangirai.

The egotistical reasons for Mugabe clinging on to power only partly explain his actions. Power for him  and his cronies has to a large extent become a matter of access and retention of privilege and impunity it is true, but it would be a mistake to under-estimate their genuine determination to resist any arrangement that threatens a wholesale reversal of “the gains of the revolution.”

What gains in a non-performing economy, one may ask? The main one they would find difficult to swallow would be the wholesale return of farms to their previous white occupiers. And this is a worry that would be shared by many of the recipients of land who are not Mugabe supporters. Focus is usually on the relatively few well-developed farms that were taken over and often run down by the politically well-connected. But what is forgotten are the many more bare pieces of land that many ordinary people of all political persuasions also eagerly applied for and received.

Many of the very same people who voted for Tsvangirai and the MDC and would be happy for them to form or dominate the next government would be up in arms at the idea of their land simply being returned to the white farmers. Assuming the MDC could pull that off at all, it would be politically crippled before it even got started, seeming to confirm the constant Mugabe refrain that the MDC was nothing but a  black-fronted project for British and white interests.

The bitter apathy to the MDC by Mugabe and ZANU-PF diehards is not just selfish and personal. It is also deeply ideological in a way that Mugabe would be very unlikely to accept a power-sharing arrangement such as that The Guardian says Mbeki is proposing.

Perhaps no one will ever know whether the long-delayed results of the March 29 election were genuine or not. Initially the MDC claimed that its own figures showed Tsvangirai breaching the required minimum of 50% of the vote and earning the right to be declared president at that first round. The official figures showed Tsvangirai several points ahead of Mugabe, but without achieving 50% of the votes cast, hence necessitating the infamous run-off election that Tsvangirai pulled out of at the last minute. And the official results also show an almost 50/50 split between the two main parties in parliamentary and senatorial seats.

What this means is that in the unlikely event that Mugabe and ZANU-PF were to accept a junior (as opposed to equal or more senior) role in any power-sharing arrangement, things would be far from easy for a Tsvangirai-led government. For one thing, half the cabinet seats and other formal spolis of power would be retained by ZANU-PF. For another, all the security forces who wield the guns would likely remain loyal to ZANU-PF. I am not sure Tsvangirai would be able to wield enough patronage-dispensing power of his own to break this ZANU-PF lock on the support of the security forces, even those who are tired of Mugabe but deeply suspicious of Tsvangirai. This is not merely a matter of Mugabe having tried very hard to keep his top military men happy over the years, but also because of shared experiences and ideological/nationalistic orientations from the liberation war that cannot just be bought off with positions, cars and houses.

I would not be surprised if the MDC’s strongers backers, the British government, have not already cooked up a scheme as part of their proposed aid-to-Zimbabwe-under-a-Tsvangirai-government plan to helpfully “professionalise” the armed forces for us, but that’s a rant for another day, my blood pressure is constantly high enough over my homeland as things are already.

I’m sticking my neck out and guessing that there is no way Mugabe would accept being figurehead president to Tsvangirai’s executive prime-ministership. At the very least, Mugabe would insist on equal power with Tsvangirai, which would cause all kinds of problems for the coalition because of the deep, fundamental incompatibility of the two men and their parties, and the upper hand ZANU-PF would continue to enjoy in many unofficial ways.

I would actually even be surprised if such a power-sharing proposal really did emanate from Mbeki. Whatever his faults, I believe he knows more than most what Mugabe would be likely to accept or reject.

Perhaps it is just The Guardian flighting a trial balloon on behalf of the MDC to see if it could actually stay afloat! It sure as hell is interesting to see that paper increasingly become the party’s public relations arm.

Would a pullout of Shell Oil from Zimbabwe amount to anything?

From the recycled-news-as-new-news department: Shell was considering pulling out of Zimbabwe amid claims that President Robert Mugabe was reserving the distribution of fuel at petrol pumps for party supporters.

According to The Observer, a source at the oil giant said it was looking at a plan to halt activities in the country, which are overseen in a joint deal with BP. One option being canvassed is for Shell to sell its stake to a third party.

Shell and BP supply 74 independent petrol stations in Zimbabwe. Supplies are piped from Mozambique and stored at four oil terminals. Both companies have bitter memories of the hostility they drew during the apartheid era in South Africa and minority rule in Rhodesia.

The political instability since last month’s rigged presidential election was one factor under consideration by Shell, the source said. ‘We have withdrawn from countries in the past where the situation was delicate,’ he said. ‘We are actively looking for a new solution.’

Y-a-w-n! Where is the beef in this story? Where is the news?

Favouritism in fuel allocations has been the order of the day for the eight years that Zimbabwe has been experiencing shortages. As someone who, like most other Zimbabwean motorists, has bitter memories of hours, and sometimes whole nights at service stations including Shells, only for the fuel to allegedly “run out” just before one’s turn at the pump, I am offended at the suggestion that the reserving of fuel for ’special customers’ is anything new discovered by the crack newspaper The Observer. Please!

If Shell is indeed mulling pulling out of Zimbabwe, it is out of viability concerns or the increased sanctions pressure since Mugabe’s awkward one-man re-election, not because of any governance concerns. My ass, the situation in Zimbabwe has been “delicate” for many years in which Shell held on very tightly to its investments, hoping for better times.

And I stand to be corrected, but the last time I checked, the pipeline that used to deliver oil from the port of Beira in Mozambique to storage facilities in Zimbabwe has not been operational for many years. I’m reasonably confident that all of Zimbabwe’s oil is now trucked in from Mozambique or South Africa. So The Observer’s report is misguided/false on that basis as well. Plain sloppy journalism, or propaganda targeted at readers the paper knows do not know enough about the facts of the situation being reported to question anything?

Selling off to third parties is something many of the multinational oil companies that once completely dominated that sector have done over several years. As a result, in less than ten years this sector now has substantial black participation whereas before bringing in and peddling oil somehow had the false mystique of being a terribly sophisticated business that only the big multinational companies could do.

When the oil sector was liberalised at some point in the last eight years, the messy politics and the difficult econmic operating environment meant the big oil companies no longer had a competitive advantage over the many smaller indigenous players who suddently got into the company. This was partly because the “liberalization” was limited, only opening up the possibility of oil importation to more players. But the selling price was still controlled, usually to below the cost of procurement!

These pricecontrols meant that even with the forex ’shortages’ that had begun to plague the economy, big companies like Shell with access to plenty of hard currency outside the country did not find it made sense to use it to bring in oil into the country, only to sell it at a loss. This shifted the oil procurement advantage to the politically well connected who were able to access hard currency from the central bank at ridiculously low rates, so that even if they sold the oil at the ridiculously low controlled prices, they stood more chance of making profits than would companies like Shell that had to more or less do (or be seen to be doing) straight business.

Besides, the new operators (and many of the old ones as well) would get around the issue of unviable imposed selling prices by selling a little at the offiical prices, quickly claiming the fuel had “run out” thenselling the rest at much higher prices at night or in containers off the filling station, the famous and thriving “black market.”

Because of all the problems and confusion with forex rates  and controlled selling prices, there was a time when all fuel vendors including Shell sourced their fuelnot by direct exports, but from the state’s fuel then- monopoly, NOCZIM, which could afford to continue importing fuel because it had access to cheap “political” forex from the central bank that no one else had access to. At some point it was far cheaper for the oil distribution companies to just wait for the ocassional allocation of cheap fuel from NOCZIM (’occasional’ because the arrangement was so economically unrealistic and even the central bank’s cheap forex so hard to come by that it could not work to supply the country all the fuel it needed) than to buy forex on the expensive open market (or use offshore forex) and then be forced to sell it at unrealistically low ‘political’ retail price.

All these things have eroded the dominance and advantage of companies like Shell in Zimbabwe’s oil sector. Additionally, at some point the not completely stupid Mugabe government realised that having the country’s oil supply be completely dependent on foreign companies based in nations hostile to it was strategically dangerous. So there was also a political dimension to having indigenous business people beholden to the ruling party to have more control over fuel importation and distribution.

As sanctions talk from the EU and the US increases, that decision may be looked back on as prophetically brilliant, even though open sanctions will mean where even the new players can source oil from will be limited. But then again, for several years Zimbabwe has not been able to get oil on short term credit terms from the usual big world suppliers because of it known hard currency problems and poor payment record. So the oil trickles in from thefew remaining friendly countries like Libya and Iran, and even then they often demand to be paid up front. All this is part of why there is a continuing fuel crisis. Under these difficult conditions it has simply not been possible to regularly and reliably bring in as much fuel as the country needs or to build a significant reserve.

Apart from most of the big oil companies selling off a lot of their stations to new independent operators, these new operators have in the main been the only ones building new storage infrastructure. This did not have to be huge because there has simply not been much fuel entering the country at any one time. Most fuel stations are usually empty now, with most of the country’s fuel being sold in various “off-court” ways.

I have to believe that Shell and other companies like it have held on not because their Zimbabwe enterprises were still hugely profitable, if at all, but in the hope that ‘regime change’ could happen at any time and that things business would get back to fairly normal for them thereafter. It must be obvious after Mugabe’s recent election ‘win’ that ‘thereafter’ might not be any time soon!

The Observer could not be expected to know all these details about the big changes that have taken place in Zimbabwe’s fuel sector in recent years. They can therefore be forgiven for the naive belief that the pullout of companies like Shell will suddenly bring Mugabe’s regime to its knees. It won’t.

The uninformed twaddle of The Observer’s non-story may excite some of its readers into believing that a pullout would represent “doing something” against the Mugabe regime, but the situation in Zimbabwe has changed so much in the last few years that such a pullout would probably mean nothing at all.

Next excited Zimbabwe non-story please!

On Britain’s condition for Zimbabwean economic aid

I have made no secret of my deep cynicism about the reasons for the unusual interest of the British government and media in “the Zimbabwe crisis.”

Not only is that country’s history in Rhodesia and in Zimbabwe messy and dishonorable, the shrill racial (to sensitive readers, sorry, but it is impossible to discuss Britain and The Zimbabwe Crisis without race looming large) shrillness of the English establishment to Zimbabwe in general and Mugabe in particular is not only not helping the situation, it is worsening it.  Zimbabwe is in even bigger long term trouble than it is under Robert Mugabe now if it is to be “saved” by Britain.

Eager British foreign minister David Miliband is in South Africa for some meeting or other. Over the weekend he went to a camp of the victims of SA’s recent violence against African migrants to shed crocodile tears over the plight of Zimbabweans and take some pot shots at Mugabe.

It was “imperative” that a solution be found to the worsening crisis in Zimbabwe, Miliband is reported to have said after visiting the camp, which housed people from many nations, but whose propaganda value for him was clearly Zimbabwe.

Miliband is said to have added that Britain would intensify its efforts to ensure Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe’s regime was not seen as “a legitimate representation of the will of the people of Zimbabwe.” He is said to have also called on the international community to support United States-proposed sanctions on Zimbabwe to be tabled at the United Nations Security Council in New York.

Largely harmless enough twiddling of the thumbs by Miliband.

But it is the last line of the June 7 article by SAPA, the South African Press Association, that made me sit up and take notice:

Britain does not want Mugabe to be part of any power-sharing deal, as a condition of economic aid.

Now SAPA does not explain if this has been explictly stated by any British official, but it would not be surprising if this were the official position of the British government on conditions for releasing the one billion pounds they crudely dangled as aid during both the March 29 and June 27 elections if the right result was achieved. Clearly the Brown regime wants the Mugabe regime to go, and this is not at all surprising, quite apart from whether or not Mugabe has stolen another election. The British have many other reasons for hating Mugabe’s guts than the fact that he has been disastrous for Zimbabwe.

And I guess they are entitled to impose their own conditions for aid. But if the last sentence of the SAPA article is official UK policy, it helps to firm up my increasing opposition to Britain having any appreciable or special role in Zimbabwe, now or in the future.

Who are they to demand who will or not be part of a power-sharing deal? Mugabe may be a nasty fellow, but the over-riding concern of Zimbabweans is to find a resolution to their all-encompassing crisis. Mugabe is the person with the guns now and he is not willing to quietly go off into the sunset. As things stand now, therefore, it is simply not possible to totally rule out a role for him in some sort of power-sharing deal for the sake of moving the country forward.

What the British position suggests is that if the MDC looked at its options and decided to swallow its pride and unhappily accept a power-sharing deal that includes Mugabe (one that doesn’t seems unrealistic now, except perhaps in the minds of Brown and Miliband), Britain would with hold its toys and go off and sulk in anger at not having been able to completely ‘regime-change’ Mugabe. If this is the position, it is not only incredibly arrogant intervention in the nuts and bolts of how Zimbabweans choose to find a way out of their political impasse, it compromises the hapless, bungling MDC even more than before.

The MDC-led government that received British largesse under these conditions would do so with the deep suspicion and resentment of Zimbabweans like myself, who want Mugabe to go but who are disturbed at how the British establishment treats Morgan Tsvangirai and his MDC party as their poodles, with not a squeak of protest from the poodles! Sure Mugabe must go, but what the hell would Tsvangirai be getting us into?

It is bizarre how Mugabe’s self-serving rhetoric about Zimbabwe never being a colony again rings true when the bungling British government and the MDC seem determined to make his pronouncements a self-fulfiling prophecy!

This is why people like me feel politically homeless. There is a sense of despair about the country’s prospects with every additional day under the ruinous Mugabe, and yet there is increasing worry about what a compromised Tsvangirai would do.

The British anti-Mugabe agenda is driven partly by racial “kith and kin” considerations occasioned by Mugabe’s unprecedented drive against the white farmers (the Western world is used to dismissing ‘natives’ mistreating or killing other natives, or white people killing natives, but all hell breaks loose when white people are also brutalised by natives, especially led by one as ‘uppity’ as Mugabe). Their all-consuming ‘no deal at all with any dispensation in which Mugabe is a part’ is churlish and would significantly reduce the options that Zimbabweans must keep open to resolving their problems.

In the most polite way, I suggest we say to the British “thanks but no thanks for your bribe of aid, but your conditions for it are unccaptable for the difficult task ahead of us.”

The bloody, arrogant cheek!

John Pilger speculates on reasons for Mbeki’s approach to Mugabe

It is not easy these days to find calm voices on either or any side of “the Zimbabwe crisis.” Everyone seems to be competing to be louder and more emotional than the other.

Most people remain perplexed, and many outraged, by the perception of South African president Thabo Mbeki as soft on or sympathetic to Robert Mugabe. Whatever the reasons for it, it seems pretty clear to me that the reality of whatever Mbeki’s true feelings towards Mugabe is not going to change any time soon. So while I understand the fascination with the question, I’m not sure posing it repeatedly with anguish is very important to solving Zimbabwe’s problems right now. But it is admittedly an interesting issue, if only as a debating point.

One of the most calm and lucid people to ponder the issue is writer John Pilger in his article ‘The silent war on Africa.’

Says Pilger, “That Mugabe is an appalling tyrant is beyond all doubt; yet there is a subtext to the overly enthusiastic condemnation of him by the “international community”, notably in Europe. “Unacceptable!” says British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, having personally distinguished the campaign to morally rehabilitate the concept of empire.”

He points out the hypocrisy of Brown’s “highly selective condemnation of uppity despots like Mugabe while fawning before equally awful despots such as the Saudi Royal family?”

“If nothing else, Mugabe has provided retrospective justification for the glory days. And perhaps his greatest crime is having slipped the leash. After all, both despots and democrats in Africa provide an essential service, or as Frantz Fanon put it in The Wretched of the Earth, “the transmission line between the nation and a capitalism, rampant though camouflaged. [They are] quite content with the role of the Western bourgeoisie’s business agent.” Those who refuse the role of business agent have often paid with their lives: from Patrice Lumumba to Amilcar Cabral, Ken Saro-Wiwa to Chris Hani.”

Pilger then goes on to chronicle a litany of ways in which the Western world is fully implicit in Africa’s many messes. Most readers will be familiar with the arguments, from the aforementioned hypocrisy in deciding who is a “good guy” in the world and who is not, to cynical trade terms and cynical development policies.

“None of this excuses the outrages of Mugabe. But look beyond the West’s whipping boy and mark the enduring outrage of an imperial past that remains (enaaged in) a war against Africa that Africans must win,” he writes.

Then he gets to the crux of his article.

“Why is Thabo Mbeki so soft on Mugabe? Is it simply loyalty to a past of “joint struggle”, as has been suggested?.”

Pilger describes how the hopes of the South African poor for a meaningful improvement in their post-apartheid, post-1994 situation have been betrayed under first Mandela and now under Mbeki.

He concludes, “When Robert Mugabe attended the ceremony to mark Thabo Mbeki’s second term as President of South Africa, the black crowd gave Zimbabwe’s dictator a standing ovation. The embarrassment and message for Mbeki was like a presence. “This was probably less an endorsement for Mugabe’s despotism,” noted the writer Bryan Rostron, “than a symbolic expression of appreciation for an African leader who, many poor blacks think, has given those greedy whites a long-delayed and just come-uppance.”

It was also a warning.”

Well, while I think Pilger’s conclusion is correct, there is also nothing earth-shakingly original about it. The vision of a happy-ever-after “rainbow nation” was too much of a hopeful fantasy given the water that has gone under the bridge in South Africa over the last few centuries. Perhaps even more so than Zimbabwe, the deep wounds of a very violent recent history could not just be swept under the carpet by having a smiling, well-liked president like Mandela for a few years.

There are already many signs of the bubbling to the surface of many long-simmering resentments, compounded by the disappointment of failed (and unrealistic) expectations of what could be quickly achieved in the post-apartheid era, that may eventually make South Africa not quite the miracle nation many hope it can continue to be.

Pilger builds and concludes his argument well, but for me has not delivered any dramatic new insights into exactly why Mbeki has seemed to remain so partial to Mugabe.

Reasoned call for negotiation from a surprising quarter

If there are any ‘good guys’ at this stage of the Zimbabwean political impasse, it is difficult to recognise them.

Even by his own impressive standards of violence and cynicism, Mugabe has sunk to a new low in the thoroughly crude way he has engineered more time for himself in power.

I did not expect anything meaningful from the African Union, and indeed they have not delivered anything meaningful.

I find the idea of our ’saviours’ being Gordon Brown, David Milliband and Malloch Brown, or George Bush via Condoleeza Rice, absurd. There is bad overall political history towards Zimbabwe by both Britain and the US,  and both are compromised by their bloody Iraqi adventure and their support of many Mugabe-like but more obedient despots. So their statements about what the African Union or the two main parties in Zimbabwe “must do” have a hollow ring even when they are stating basic truths.

And is Thabo Mbeki a good guy or a bad guy in regards to Zimbabwe? I guess we will only be able to properly evaluate this conundrum in hindsight when the nightmare is all over.

But surely Morgan Tsvangirai and the MDC are the good guys in this drama, are they not? After all, have they not played a very tough game on uneven ground strictly by the rules against their tormentor and won, only to have their victory unfairly snatched away from them? Are they not the victims here?

As the situation changes very rapidly, it is not at all clear they will ultimately emerge as the good guys. After being so physically brutalised and humiliated in the shocking manner Mugabe has chosen to re-install himself, they are understandably not inclined to accept their tormentor’s cynical offer of talks now. To reports of ZANU-PF and the MDC somehow ruling together, MDC secretary-general Tendai Biti responded, “Nothing can be as malicious and as further from the truth,” Biti said. “As a matter of fact, there are no talks or discussions taking place between the two parties and most importantly, there is no agreement in the offering.”

“While the MDC (Movement for Democratic Change) has pursued dialogue in a bid to establish a government of national healing before June 12, the sham election on June 27, 2008, totally and completely exterminated any prospect of a negotiated settlement,” MDC  Tendai Biti said in a statement in Harare.

Tough talk, but what follows from it then? What next? When you “totally and completely exterminate any prospect of a negotiated settlement,” what are you proposing in its stead? The MDC may for now enjoy the moral high ground of the shamelessness of Mugabe’s recent electoral antics, but how far will that get them or the country?

It is equally confusing that after Mugabe’s self-serving and not entirely convincing call for dialogue at his self-coronation four days ago, his mouthpiece George Charamba is enjoying the limelight to talk tough about how ‘talks’ will not necessarily lead to anything!

So the beaten and bruised victim party is understandably sulking and also talking “no negotiations” tough, but with no real leverage of any kind to do anything. The party with the guns is not now more willing to talk in good faith after crowning its leader for five more years, as had been hoped. If this is not an impasse, I don’t know what is.

All the many interest groups that have given themselves a role in commenting with tremendous authority about Zimbabwe have their own tough positions about what “must” happen, but none of them have been able to then follow that up with a convincing “or else we will…” The British political and media establishment feels so provoked by the continued presence of Mugabe on the scene that the fury of its reaction is frightening to see and watch. I am truly awed by their concern for us. Its strange, but I had no idea they liked us that much and were so concerned for our suffering. Unless of course the concern is not entirely selfless and humanitarian, but it would be cynical and unkind  to even think that.

Into the tough talking madness steps a voice of reason from a  most un-expected quarter. “I don’t think it is too late for there to be a political resolution to this crisis,” US State Department spokesman Tom Casey said. “In fact, I don’t think you can have a resolution to this crisis if it does not come through some sort of political process.”

This is pretty obvious, but it is startling to see the George Bush administration strike a tone of reasonableness so different from the macho, emotional and completely unhelpful posturing of the English government in London, so blinded by hate for Mugabe they can’t think straight anymore.

It seems bizarre that the most reasonable sounding voice about the situation is from a US State Department official!

A predictable but fascinating AU summit in Egypt

I am surprised that there are some people who really hoped African leaders attending the African Union summit in Egypt would pull some kind of Zimbabwe crisis “solution” out of a hat.

The AU is not famed for taking strong stands on anything, for one. Two, the AU has no real leverage over Mugabe. Even if they had uncharacteristically chided him publicly, how would they effect any decision taken against him?

Three, our old colonial masters the British and the current world emperor the US have just never learned how much their treatment of Africans in the not too distant past still elicits very strong emotions against them when they are perceived to be throwing their weight around . The shrill carping from their capitals of UK prime minister Gordon Brown and US secretary of state Condoleeza Rice about what the gathered AU leaders “must do” about Mugabe was not at all helpful. It simply gave the leaders a splendid reason to withdraw into their “anti-colonialist” psychological bunker.

Why is it that despite centuries of close proximity to us as our lords and masters, the Western world has learned so little about the lingering psychic effects of their controlling every aspect of our lives, and the instinctive resentment against a perceived replaying of old roles? If they really wanted to be helpful at the AU summit, they went about it exactly the wrong way.

Is it really possible in 2008 that Mr. Brown and Madame Rice, herself of African stock, did not understand that their kind of megaphone ‘diplomacy’ of ‘you must do this to Mugabe’ would not only fail, but even cause the defensive rallying around Mugabe of even those AU leaders who realise how much catastrophe the man has caused?

Four, very few of the AU leaders have electoral credentials that are any better than Mugabe’s, so it was rather optimistic  to expect that they would take him on. Prior to his departure for Egypt he had effectively blackmailed the AU leaders by challenging those who felt they had cleaner electoral records to speak up, with a rather predictable silence as the response.

Prime minister Raila Odinga of Kenya, the only leader to publicly lament the crooked electoral process by which Mugabe claimed his 6th term in office two days ago, was strangely but not surprisingly not in Egypt to face the fierce Mugabe, who loves a brawl and is not at all embarrassed to fight rough.

Previous mild critic Levy Mwanawasa of Zambia, who predictably was called all sorts of names by Mugabe regime officials when he correctly referred to Zimbabwe as a “sinking ship” last year, would have sat next to Mugabe at the summit, according to alphabetical seating by country name.

But strangely the ailing Mwanawasa, 59, suffered a stroke immediately on arriving in Egypt and spent the duration of the summit in hospital! It was almost as if the thought of sitting next to the fit, spry and currently livid and combative Mugabe, 84, was too much for him.

Did Madame Rice really expect that the best Arab friend of the US, Egyptian host president Hosni Mubarak, no stranger to fixed elections in his 27 years in power, was going to be in a position to spank Mugabe for holding a crooked election?

The predictability of the summit not taking any kind of strong stand against Mugabe did not mean the meeting was dull or lacked drama.

Some British journalists provoked Mugabe into a sputtering rage by one of them asking him how it felt “to have stolen the election,” and by what right he claimed to be president of Zimbabwe.

Oh boy, that did it, as the journalists knew it would. Mugabe’s enraged response and the journalists being wrestled away by security staff were filmed for posterity and broadcast around the world. At home Emperor Mugabe is accustomed to only being asked reverentially posed softball questions by a compliant state propaganda media. But apart from that, Mugabe would have found the ‘provocation’ of being asked what he called “stupid questions” by British journalists, and at an African Union summit, a little too much to bear. The apoplectic Mugabe’s voice shook with rage as he found yet another excuse to rail against the British.

If the journalists were looking for gripping footage for their news broadcast, they got it alright. No doubt many of their viewers in the UK and much of the West and in many sections of the rest of the world will find the exchange to be confirmation of their view of Mugabe as a rogue. But I’m willing to bet that there are also many parts of the world where the British journalists handed Mugabe a major propaganda coup.

To the ‘Mugabe is right’ brigade, his ‘performance’ was classic, vintage Mugabe at his best and precisely what they love the man for: telling off the British.

The drama with the journalists could not have been expected, but everything else that happened was entirely predictable.

As far as contributing anything meaningful at all to the resolution of “the Zimbabwe crisis” the AU summit  was an absolute, predictable non-event.

Zimbabwe’s many symbolisms

Morgan Tsvangirai has long had reason to be worried for his life under the Mugabe regime. The incidence last year in which he was brutally beaten by the police, with Mugabe then delightedly crowing about it instead of seeking to dissociate himself from it, is just one of many examples of the hostile operating environment in which Tsvangirai has tried to do his job of leading the main opposition party.

So when Tsvangirai says he sought refuge at an embassy in Harare after hearing word that soldiers were on their way to his house, I can well understand how he would not stick around at home waiting to possibly be brutalised for the umpteenth time. His bravery over the years is not in doubt, and he has learned the hard way to be judicious about trying to balance leading his followers and not volunteering for the abuse which the Mugabe regime has made it so clear it is willing and eager to mete out to him.

I have not read or heard any details of the process and time line between his getting word of the alleged band of approaching soldiers and his fleeing for safety, but perhaps he had very little time and felt he had to move very quickly. Given what he has been through at the hands of the authorities, I could well understand if there was not enough time to think things through in the scramble for sanctuary.

I have prefaced my thoughts about his choice of the Dutch embassy for refuge with some reasons why this choice may have been made, when I presume in other circumstances it would have been seen by Tsvangirai and his advisors that this was an unfortunate choice. This was not just walking into temporary safety, it was also walking into the long-term trap of having Mugabe’s charge that Tsvangirai is merely a front for Western and white interests stick to him.

Given the MDC’s expressed distrust for Thabo Mbeki’s impartiality as an intermediary between the opposition party and the ruling party, I can understand why Tsvangirai would have been leery about seeking safety at the South African embassy, for example. And his choice of the embassy of the Netherlands, a country with an honorable history of support for Zimbabwe’s liberation struggle and of support for the country in many ways since independence, is not as symbolically disastrous as would have been the case had he sought refuge under the skirts of Britain or the US, the detractors whose support of the MDC Mugabe is most enraged and paranoid about.

But in the context of how Mugabe has loudly sought to frame “the Zimbabwe crisis” as primarily between the white West through their claimed MDC proxies and him for taking over white farms, Tsvangirai’s choice of the Dutch embassy for sanctuary will haunt him even if he eventually wrings power from Mugabe. It will be one reason for suspicion and one more tool of propaganda against him by his detractors in a ZANU-PF that would not simply disappear into thin air under an MDC government.

Mugabe and ZANU-PF use election posters of a grim-faced Mugabe with a raised fist to project strength and power. There was a time when this would have seemed more appropriate, for example as a symbol of resistance against the old Rhodesian government during the first independence-era election. Now in “peace time” when the issues are/should be the bread and butter ones that Zimbabweans are grappling with daily, the fist is more a symbol of menace than one of persuasion in an ostensibly democratic era in which the main contest should be between competing ideas, not competing fists.

The fist is further inappropriate in being directed at the voters who dare disagree with Mugabe, rather than at any claimed external enemies. It is Zimbabweans who are being hammered by the fist for daring to disagree with it on how their country should be ruled, not the purported external enemies. The need for the intimidating symbolic message of the fist if the voters don’t “do the right thing” by Mugabe is a tacit admission of having lost the ability and confidence to win those voters by persuasion. It is merely another indication of how the Zimbabwean electoral process was a “sham” long before being declared so a few days ago by outgoing US President George Bush, whose own electoral credibility at home and in the regimes he supports abroad makes his finger-pointing ability in this regard weak.

MDC Secretary General Tendai Biti has been in jail for some weeks (before winning bail a few days ago) for announcing the results of the March 29 election ahead of the official election body. Whatever the legalities of the charges against him, they appear as petty harassment by the Mugabe government. The MDC was partially successful in using data posted at polling stations to compile its own national vote figures and avoid any official hanky panky with the figures at that level.

Pictures of his being taken to court during the time he was held show him in an Arsenal football club hooded jersey on several occasions. On the one hand this was the harmless display of loyalty to a football club by an apparently ardent fan, one no doubt shared by many of his supporters (and by many of his detractors alike for that matter.)

But if a person in his position (in terms of the party and the occasion) chooses to make a statement on his jersey, that Biti’s choice was of his support for a football club, and of a British one at that, suggests the MDC pays far little attention to the kind of symbolic messaging that Mugabe has largely been brilliant at. This was a lost opportunity for Biti to have chosen another  more politically and propaganda-wise appropriate message for his party. It was also a sign of how carelessly the MDC allows themselves to be continually tarred with the broad brush stroke of their orientation  being more towards their claimed European backers than by what is best for Zimbabwe.

That charge may be nonsense and in this particular case there may be as many Arsenal admirers among ZANU-PF supporters as amongst MDC supporters, but that is not the point. The point is the subtle and not so subtle messages one in as prominent a position as is Biti, and at as critical a time for his party as this,  communicates by everything one does in the spotlight, and paying attention to how those messages can further or detract from your agenda.

Several Zimbabwean commentators have pointed out the confusing symbolism of MDC leader pulling out of the June 27 presidential run-off a week before, for reasons many of his supporters can understand, even those who are disappointed that things have come to this pass, but yet still fielding candidates in a number of parliamentary by-elections being conducted at the same time. In at least one of those constituency in which such a by-election was held, the MDC’s candidate beat Mugabe’s prominent information minister.

What are we to make of this? That the MDC believed the playing field to be uneven enough to withdraw from the presidential contest, but not from accompanying contests at the same time? And should the MDC accept its parliamentary candidate’s victory, or dismiss it as a result of the same flawed presidential contest it has pulled out of? At best, the MDC is sending out very mixed, inconsistent messages.

Days before Mugabe’s one-man June 27 run off, soon after Tsvangirai had pulled out of contesting, The Guardian newspaper in the UK carried an article purportedly written by the MDC leader in which he called for an international peacekeeping force to ensure a free and fair election. Recognizing that such military talk is a red flag to a Mugabe who may be at his most besieged, paranoid and dangerous, Tsvangirai hastily issued a denial of the idea that he advocated any military intervention in Zimbabwe.

Even if he does secretly believe military intervention to be called for, doing so openly at this time and in a British publication would not be the smartest tactic for Tsvangirai to try to work his way into the presidential palace. So the denial was the right thing to do. But Tsvangirai did not claim the article was fraudulently submitted in his name, only saying that although “credible sources” had told The Guardian he was the author, “this was not the case.”

“An article that appeared in my name, published in the Guardian … does not reflect my position or opinions regarding solutions to the Zimbabwean crisis,” he was reported to have said.

The Guardian acted coy and refused to clear up the circumstances of the mysterious confusion, although it also took the article off its website!

All this only served to thicken the plot. Did the article emanate from Tsvangirai’s camp or not? Was it a forgery or not? Would The Guardian have published it under his name without being sure that it did indeed come from Tsvangirai’s camp? Does Tsvangirai write or approve important documents that go out into the public domain in his own name or that of the party, or are there loose cannons within the party who are able to spout off as they like and affix his signature?

To people to whom these things matter terribly, The Guardian is a “leftist” publication, as opposed to “rightist” publications such as The Times and The Telegraph. Given the British media’s general shrillness towards Zimbabwe I can’t tell if these distinctions count. But I am given to understand that vaguely speaking, as an African I should consider the British “left” to be good guys and the “right” to represent those who pine for the old order in which Africans knew their place in relation to massa and everything was ‘right’ with the world.

It is hard for me to make these latter distinctions from reading the left and right British press about African, and particularly Zimbabwean issues, which for some reason seem to account to a significant degree for general British high blood pressure. But whether or not the left-right media distinctions do mean anything, I wonder who Tsvangirai would have been addressing by making what would have been a major policy statement in British media of any ideological orientation.

Whether he was appealing to the UN, the AU or any other multi-national body, his choice of a British publication to speak from is an oddly interesting choice given how his nemesis has framed the battle taking place in Zimbabwe. Mugabe repeatedly accuses his opponent of being a front for British interests. Tsvangirai seems to dutifully want to confirm Mugabe’s suspicions and feed his paranoia!  Somebody please explain to me the ’strategy’ behind this, if any.

Is the MDC oblivious of the import of these things, the symbolisms that will be read into what, how and where they say things?

The Western media have excitedly played up Nelson Mandela’s comment about the problems of “failed leadership in Zimbabwe.” But what surprised me is that having chosen to say something on the subject, Mandela’s statement was as mild as it was. It was hardly the “attack on Mugabe” the Western media was itching for, and was made in the same breadth Mandela lamented the recent horrific xenophobic attacks against fellow Africans in South Africa. Mandela did not say so, but those attacks could also said to result from “failed leadership.”

It was almost as if Mandela carefully meant to balance his mild criticism of the regime in Zimbabwe with chiding his own society. He knew he would be dismissed by the Mugabe government as pandering to Western whims and pressure, which is exactly how Mugabe’s information minister characterised Mandela’s comments.

Mandela’s expressed regret at the xenophobic violence in South Africa and the failed leadership in Zimbabwe are hard to fault. His juxtaposition of the two as well as his very careful phraseology underscored his realization of the delicate nature for him of saying anything about either issue. He would have been well aware that as nasty as the Mugabe regime has become, there is an additional Western anti-Mugabeism that transcends the man’s nastiness.

The brevity of Mandela’s comments and their wording suggests a keen awareness that he as an African icon must be wary of the pitfalls of giving the impression of buying into the reasons for the shrillness of Western anti-Mugabeism that go beyond his being bad for Zimbabweans. The reasons that Zimbabweans and an increasing number of other Africans want Mugabe gone may be quite different from the reasons Britons and other Westerners have such a viscerally negative reaction to Mugabe.

The careful way in which Mandela made his comments show an awareness of the importance of symbolism in how one gets one’s message across, only reduced somewhat by his using a British platform to make his comments on high-profile African issues. In the current heated atmosphere surrounding anything to do with Mugabe, where one makes one’s comments is as important as how it is done.

This seems lost not just on top MDC officials, but on well-meaning non-Zimbabweans like the somewhat excitable, attention-seeking South African Anglican Archbishop Desmond Tutu. He was one of the few and the first prominent Africans to risk Mugabe’s ire and shamelessness at hurling invective at his detractors by calling him an embarrassing caricature of an African dictator some years ago.

Yet there is something at best messy about people like Tutu going on rabid anti-African media like CNN and the BBC to make a case for military intervention in Zimbabwe, as has reportedly been echoed by Ugandan-born, UK-based Bishop John Sentamu. Here are two African bishops of the Church of England putting themselves in the rather awkward position of using the British media to call for an invasion of an African country. They were careful to say that any such effort should be led by African Union or UN troops, but few will be fooled by this. The AU and UN have not intervened in situations far more calamitous than Zimbabwe, and it will be very difficult for these two men to live down the rashness of their statements unless open warfare breaks out in Zimbabwe.

This is a failure to separate distaste for Mugabe from the the many racist sins of commission of such media, thereby compromising Tutu’s entirely valid criticism of the cynical Mugabe. How, when and where to say things are as important to saying anything at all, and both Tutu and Sentamu fail these tests in this case. Whether one agrees or not with their sentiments, that they are seemingly targeting them to a Western audience rather than the African audience they claim they would want to spearhead any invasion force is a sign of how they are seemingly oblivious of the many levels at which the battle for Zimbabwe is being fought. If you are genuinely trying to get the attention of the AU for what would be a controversial and at present reckless decision, surely doing so on the BBC, the broadcaster of a keenly interested party, Britain, whose hands are from from clean in Zimbabwe’s tortured history, is not the wisest course of action.

A few days ago Britain stripped Mugabe of a knighthood it had awarded him in the early post-independence love affair between he and the then UK political establishment, including still sitting Queen Elizabeth. Then there were the moves to ban the Zimbabwean cricket team from participating in matches in Britain.

There was a time when Mugabe would probably really have felt slapped on the wrist by a Britain and a British royalty he has long shown signs of adoring, despite his current rhetoric. But it is a sign of Britain’s  enraged sense of helplessness in regards to the strong intransingence of Mugabe in its dealings with them that they “chastise” him with such pathetic gestures. It may be why the British seem to be itching with barely disguised eagerness for a chance to be involved in taking him out.

If anything, Mugabe’s colonial fondness for things British has become somewhat of an albatross around his neck, a glaring contrast to the anti-British rhetoric he now spouts. Even in merely symbolic terms, Britain’s weak moves against Mugabe show how he has held the upper hand in the lovers’ spat between him and successive ruling UK establishments. It was increasingly awkward for the British establishment to be reminded how the Mugabe they now portray as global public enemy number one was once their model example of a “good” African and a triumph of their “civilizing” and religionizing mission in Africa. But at this stage of the game, the neither-here-nor-there gesture of withdrawing a knighthood an African nationalist like Mugabe should have politely turned down anyway in no way moves Mugabe. It may actually be a propaganda boon to him, by adding to his now prized anti-British credentials. The British move was a poor use of symbolism, the cricket ban only a little bit less so.

Having reluctantly accepted his divorce with his once-beloved Britain, Mugabe now thrives on being the anti-British rebel, and what remains of his irrational “Mugabe is the man at all costs” support in many quarters is precisely because of how he has masterfully tweaked the collective British nose and run circles around them. Mugabe is far more in touch with the sentiments of the world’s formerly colonized and brilliantly, if diabolically uses the symbolism of the lingering resentment and suspicion in a way that has left the British sputtering.

Any regime change engineered by the British would only make a martyr out of Mugabe and revive his waning star amongst many of the former admirers who have written him off as a power drunk despot. Britain may frustratedly grasp how Mugabe has used being anti-Britain into a club with which to beat them at their own game of demonizing the “enemy,” but they have shown no sign of understanding the deep, complicated well of mixed feelings, both love and hate, that are the result of Britain’s relations with various groups of “natives” over recent centuries around the world.

For a small and dwindling but very loud and abrasive band of “revolutionaries” scattered around the globe, support for Mugabe is the best symbolic proof of their ideological credentials to come along in a long time. As increasingly despotic and cynical as Mugabe has become as his country sinks, for these ideologues Mugabe’s unstinting message of rhetorically sticking it to the West every chance he gets justifies all his failures and his oppression of Zimbabweans. For them Mugabe as a symbol of their rigidly held ideological positions is far more important than his laying to waste of the country he rules. The increasing misery of Zimbabweans is merely being inconsequential ‘collateral damage’ to whatever ideological principle they feel Mugabe champions for them.

For these people, Mugabe is incapable of doing wrong. He walks on water for them and is more infallible than the Pope is said to be for Catholics. If they are forced to concede that Mugabe has so compromised the electoral process as to render it meaningless as a genuine referendum on how the majority of Zimbabweans want to be ruled, “Well, you can’t really blame Mugabe, he is operating under hostile conditions of sanctions and support for the opposition by the West, he has been forced to resort to his strong-arm measures.” This side-steps the question of why then such elections are held at all under such absurd conditions as Mugabe has done, giving his detractors far more evidence of a cynical power-lust that has nothing to do with his claimed African empowerment agenda.

For the right wing and racist, anti-African sections of the Western establishment, Zimbabwe’s symbolism is not so much for its repressions and impoverishment. Even now in its dilapidated and increasing dysfunctional state, Zimbabwe is “better” than many other nations who do not get anywhere near the same attention, and are in good books with the West as weak, dependent and obedient client states.

So we have the media-dominant section of the Western establishment that is outraged by Mugabe’s farm takeovers.We also have a hrill “support Mugabe at any cost” contingent whose motivations also have little or nothing to do with the welfare of Zimbabweans.

Over the years a prominent section of this group are various commentators at home and abroad eager to establish their “blacker than though” credentials for one reason or another. Some do it in an attempt to soften what they may consider too close of an association with the West. They feel a strong need to strike a pose of distance from that West (and hence to suggest ‘radicalness’ and therefore trustworthiness in circles in which at least a shrill rhetorical anti-Westernism is a valued trait.)

The sometimes absurd result is that  we have the quintessential ‘English gentleman,’ Robert Mugabe, being able to accuse any one who disagrees with him of being a British embed! You have ministers with long and deep personal, business and other links with the West needing to be seen to loudly repudiate the West, even if they literally “sleep with the West” daily in a metaphorical as well as sometimes quite literal sense.

For many black people Mugabe’s anti-Western rhetoric is a far stronger and attractive symbolism for the deep sense of grievance at the various historical slights at the hands of the West than is the negative symbolism of Mugabe showing as much contempt for Zimbabweans as the West has traditionally shown for Africans! These are complicated, selective emotional reactions to what Mugabe represents. The holders of these reactions, usually non-Zimbabweans and frequently blacks from outside Africa who continue to experience deep alienation in the West, the fact that Mugabe has stolen elections and the extent of his responsibility for his country’s condition are minor or non-issues.

But it is not just blacks to whom Mugabe’s strong streak of racial resentment appeals. Somewhat amusingly, there are non-blacks who are also eager to play the “blacker than thou” card for their own complicated reasons. As with many of Mugabe’s most ardent black supporters, they wage their ideological revolution from enough of a psychic distance from the reality of dealing with the consequences of what Mugabe has wrought in Zimbabwe that talk of the suffering there is almost an abstract concept for them.

For the anti-Mugabe Westerners, the only acceptable Zimbabwean political outcome is one in which Mugabe is deposed from power, and somebody in the mould of Tsvangirai were at the helm. For the pro-Mugabeists, his holding onto power is more important than whether he does so through a clean election or not. Neither of these cynical camps care a hoot about the say or condition of Zimbabweans in their racist, ideological or romantic posturing about what thy would like to see happen there.

Acres of media space have been written about the possible reasons for Thabo Mbeki’s continuing strong support for Mugabe. There is no need to repeat those speculated on reasons here. Many of those guessed reasons for Mbeki’s stance involve personal as well as global and regional political, ideological and other considerations in which the welfare of the common Zimbabwean is very low. Many analysts take it as a given that the most likely reasons for his support for Mugabe have more to do with his personal feelings towards and/or against Mugabe and Tsvangirai, and his own vision of what he would like to happen in that country than what Zimbabweans have and are expressing in various ways. This is just one example of how for some, “Zimbabwe” has become a hot button issue that transcends what its people may want.

Recently installed Kenyan prime minister Raila Odinga has been one of the sharpest African critics of Mugabe, pointing out the venality of calling an election in which the incumbent declares he would not accept a result showing his defeat. While Odinga’s criticisms of Mugabe are on target, they could be thinly disguised symbolic attacks on his rival and the man he believes stole the recent Kenyan election from him, president Mwai Kibaki; Kibaki’s silence in the face of the electoral mess in Zimbabwe is also symbolically important and entirely understandable given his own damaged electoral credentials. When Odinga strongly comes out against Mugabe in a way that is unprecedented in recent African diplomacy, he is also using his attacks to fight his own battles at home.

The symbolic “Zimbabwe” represents different things to various interest groups. They find the crisis there an exciting platform from which to score points for reasons that have nothing to do with the welfare of Zimbabweans. “Zimbabwe” has become an epic battle of cynical competing forces far beyond the issue of the suffering of its people.

A thoroughly dishonorable Mugabe election ‘victory’

That Robert Mugabe had no intention of giving up power has long been clear. He has said so in so many words on several occasions and there was no reason to doubt he meant. Between the March 29 election and the run-off election of the day before yesterday he and his political and military enforcing machinery brutally backed that commitment to retain power at any cost.

But what an odd, messy way Mugabe has chosen to go about retaining the presidency. His method of coercing people to vote for him and generally conducting the election with his opponent effectively bound and gagged assures he has canceled out any legitimacy benefits that an electoral victory imparts.

Mugabe will not  sleepless nights worrying about whether his many and increasing number of critics approve of the manner he has ‘won’ his ‘victory.’ In fact, he seems to now thrive on a ‘what-can-you-do-to-me’ notoriety; to enjoy being considered the bad guy, especially by Britain, the US and the West in general, with everybody else who disagrees with him being dismissed as obviously being a stooge of the sinister global conspiracy against him! Pro-Mugabe columnists, the only kind to be featured in the government-owned Herald, have gone so far as to suggest that the loud Western opposition to Mugabe is proof that he must be doing something right.

So the determination to hold on to power regardless of what the voters think has never been in doubt.

Yet I can’t understand the insistence in doing so through such a bastardised electoral process. Mugabe has always been a stickler for rigid procedure and the appearance of acting within the law when it benefits him (simply ignoring or changing procedure and the law when they don’t benefit him) but the openly cynical way the run-off election has been conducted strips him of any hope of claiming electoral victory as a basis for staying on in power. It is almost as if the goal was not just the obvious one of staying in office, but also to rub in a contempt for the idea that the electoral process could oust him.

It is as if Mugabe means to say to Zimbabweans, “I know you have rejected me, but I will humiliate you by forcing you to go through the motions, the shell of an election in which I will show you that your petty desire to see me go counts for nothing.” If that is his goal, he has certainly succeeded.

But he has succeeded in a way that in the short term may achieve his desire of appearing invincible, but at the cost of also making him look utterly ridiculous. Mugabe until recently always gave the appearance of a certain sophistication and subtlety to his oppression. For a long time this allowed many people in Zimbabwe and beyond to say, “Yes, he is becoming increasingly despotic, but…”

The “but” included all manner of things including his eloquence, his fearlessness, the early appearance of post-independence success and so forth. What is different about the latest incarnation of Mugabe is how nakedly brutal and power-hungry without any “but” examples of success and subtlety to explain it away or justify it even to his die-hard supporters. There are simply too many contradictions for there to be any convincing claims that the project to hold onto power is primarily about holding on to “the gains of the revolution.”

Even for the pro-Mugabe diehards, the claim that his tactics should be understood and forgiven in the context of his being in siege mode because of a Western regime-change agenda are made to look increasingly like apologists for the destruction of a country. If the tactics of the Mugabe government against its a section of the citizens are to be justified on the basis of the “special circumstance” of a threat to “the revolution” by a neo-colonial West upset at Mugabe for dispossessing white farmers, I wonder if it would not have been more honest to suspend elections and the other shells of parliamentary democracy that exist on paper but that in reality have been so compromised as to be rendered meaningless.

Saying, “I’m suspending elections and openly ruling by decree because my enemies are using underhanded means to try to remove me” would have been almost more honorable as a gambit to stay in power by Mugabe than insisting on going through the motions of an electoral process that has been so crude and cynical that even African leaders with dubious electoral records like Rwanda’s Paul Kagame and Uganda’s Yoweri Museveni feel moved to comment on the crudeness! Yet these politicians and other apologists for strong-arm rule who nevertheless now cringe at Mugabe’s embarrassing pretence at upholding electoral democracy would likely have been able to live with some type of claim of a suspension of even the pretense of electoral democracy on the grounds of political, diplomatic or economic conditions not being suitable.

The West would have howled about it, but their support for many regimes much nastier than Mugabe’s would have rung as hollow as their claimed concern now for Zimbabweans’ stolen electoral rights. As crude as Mugabe’s electoral process has become, there are many governments the West is cozy with who do not even bother with the embarrassing electoral charade Mugabe has just engaged in.

By holding an election and declaring himself the winner under the kind of crude circumstances Mugabe has done, he actually gives credence to the Western criticism of that election, regardless of how hypocritical the criticism is.

For the Africans Mugabe has always been able to claim supported him, or at least did not oppose him, his electoral ‘victory’ has been so blatantly awkward that they look ridiculous for continuing to support him, no matter how much they might like to do so. From being able to claim support for him on the basis of genuine African solidarity with his agenda and against Western inteference, Mugabe has now sunk to the low standard of attempting to stave off African attacks against him with “my African critics are even worse despots than I am!” And the ever eloquent and combative Mugabe seems to relish the opportunity to go to Egypt for an African Union summit tomorrow to blackmail his increasingly uncomfortable fellow African strongmen with just that accusation.

The fact that the charge is true, just as the truth of the West’s hypocrisy in demonizing Mugabe while being comfortable with equally or more nasty regimes who are compliant, may make an interesting debating point and may silence the motley band of the AU’s dubious leaders, but it also illustrates just how low Mugabe’s claims to electoral legitimacy have sunk. I don’t understand why a normally diabolically crafty political operator would try to hold on to that veneer of electoral legitimacy in a  way that makes him look so crude, desperate and ridiculous, obviating all the usual benefits of an election victory.

His primary aim of staying on in power may have been achieved for now, but in the messiest possible way that gives more ammunition to his enemies than less, and weakens rather strengthens him.

Britain’s diplomatic ineptitude in Africa

by Chido Makunike

The article about Malloch Brown in The Guardian’s May 9 edition (Malloch-Brown’s vision for Africa: having an aid policy is not enough) shows what is so wrong with Britain’s general engagement with Africa.

Malloch Brown may be the UK’s grandly titled “foreign office minister for Africa, Asia and the UN,” but it is not for him to have “a vision for Africa.” Someone please kindly tell his lordship that the idea of a British “vision” for Africa is outdated by, oh, about 50 years. That is what the end of colonialism was about, for natives to do their own visioning! That the process is wrenching and difficult does not at all alter the desire of people all over the world to determine their own destiny.

Interestingly, within hours of its initial appearance, the heading of the article was changed to From the UN to Whitehall, with a will to change our view of Africa. Perhaps someone at The Guardian or at Whitehall noticed jut how patronising the original heading was.

Malloch Brown seems to think his title is an excuse to think and talk like a British colonial governor of old. Alas Lord Malloch Brown, I doubt that the natives today will take kindly to this. I am one native who does not.

The article mentions Zimbabwe as “the immediate preoccupation.” Whose? If the suggestion is that it is Britain’s special “pre-occupation,” that is utter nonsense, and a sign of how successive British governments have failed to get over a patronising colonial hangover with regards to Africa.

The Guardian says, “Britain, as the former colonial power, has to tread delicately.” The emotional British political and media frenzy over Zimbabwe in the last few weeks hardly qualifies as treading lightly. Zimbabwe is in deep distress but it is no longer Britain’s particular responsibility. British concern over events in Zimbabwe should not go beyond that of any other member of the world community of nations. It should not be that of a mother hen-picking a recalcitrant child.

Malloch Brown holds forth on Zimbabwe’s recent controversial election. In arguing for a run off election between Mugabe and Tsvangirai, which the opposition leader has now accented to, Malloch Brown makes the valid point that because of the closeness of the presidential election’s results, a run off would hopefully produce a decisive winner, “to prevent a weak compromise government.” He then shockingly goes on to pick sides with “the cleanest way is for a second round that gives a decisive victory to the opposition, which seems the likely

result.”

That may indeed be the likely result, but in what capacity is Malloch Brown, an appointee of a foreign government, showing a partisan hand like this? Is this an example of Britain treading lightly? This is shoddy from someone who earlier in the article speaks somewhat boastfully of his international experience at the UN. Regardless of Malloch Brown’s or official Britain’s preferred Zimbabwean ruler, surely they should limit any comments to a process that gives a decisive victory to the Zimbabwean people by enabling them to make their choice freely and having it respected. That choice may well be, and probably would be for the opposition but it is not Malloch Brown’s business to say so.

That Britain cannot stand Mugabe is no secret. Malloch Brown is probably not far off when he guesses that “true support for the MDC is running at 75%.” But how is that Malloch Brown’s business? Particularly given Britain’s unhappy engagement with Zimbabwe and Rhodesia before it, it is hard to see any way in which his haughtily speaking of the country’s electoral mess from the vantage point of a colonial administrator discussing events in a territory he governs helps. Not only is this an inappropriate role for the official of a foreign country, it is just such unhelpful comments from British officials over the years that have so compromised Tsvangirai and the MDC. One does not have to be a supporter of Mugabe’s to find Malloch Brown’s whole tone offensive, as I do as a Zimbabwean.

Malloch Brown says Southern African leaders “probably” have a better finger on the pulse than Britain does. Those leaders have fumbled helplessly over how to assist in trying to help prevent Zimbabwe’s implosion. But Malloch Brown’s casual insult disguised as a back-handed compliment is rich, given Britain’s long and continuing diplomatic ineptitude towards Zimbabwe. Whatever the Southern African leaders’ faults, they certainly do not suffer from the colossal British failure to understand African sensibilities in regards to Zimbabwe. That failure includes not being able to distinguish between the antipathies of many Zimbabweans to their ruler from a desire to determine their own fate without interference from other countries, least of all ex-colonial master Britain.

If his job is primarily that of a diplomat handling his country’s relations with other countries, it is hard to see how Malloch Brown’s comments and whole attitude can do that in regards to Zimbabwe. That attitude is why Britain’s levels of goodwill and influence in Africa do not match the level of “help” it renders.

Britain’s bond with its African ex-colonies has left enough in common between the two sides that in the post-colonial era could have been cultivated to build positive, mutually beneficial relations. That this has not happened is partly a result of Britain’s surprising failure to learn to deal with those countries in ways that foster genuinely good relations built on mutual respect even when there are areas of disagreement.

Added to the failure of many African countries to “grow up” into the responsibilities of self-determination has been Britain’s failure to get beyond thinking of Africans as still being under its charge. Even a supposedly enlightened “Africa hand” like Malloch Brown shows this attitude, which has helped make relative Johnny-come-lately China leapfrog over countries like Britain in its diplomatic and increasingly commercial relations with Africa. Despite all the unknowns of the developing ties with China, African countries have embraced relations with a country which is so much “stranger” to them than Britain partly because of how they chafe at Britain’s continuing nanny attitude.

Having no small role in the history of countries like Kenya and Zimbabwe that has partly contributed to their present-day turmoil, Britain largely fails to influence developments in them positively. The Guardian refers to frustration, apparently by bwana Malloch Brown, “that Zimbabwe is hindering a repositioning of Africa in the eyes of the west, as not just being this broken problem, this dependency region of catastrophe, aid and climate change.”

One wonders how much Malloch Brown has his finger on the pulse if he attributes Africa’s image in the Western mind, developed over centuries of stereotypes, to Zimbabwe’s travails of the last few years. Many elements of the turmoil in Zimbabwe are unfortunately the “normal” state of being in many African countries, though for some reason without quite the same level of British “concern” such as that purportedly being shown by his lordship for the oppressed Zimbabweans. The unusual levels of cynical British “concern” for Zimbabwe belie Malloch Brown’s contention in The Guardian’s article that “the dispute is no longer seen as between Mugabe and the colonial power, but between Mugabe and the world.”

In terms of image, Mugabe has increasingly become his own worst enemy, but the thinking of official Britain exemplified by Malloch Brown’s blatantly partisan and interfering comments leave one in no doubt that it has “concerns” in regards to Zimbabwe that go beyond the neutral, the benevolent and the humanitarian. To make that so apparent, as Malloch Brown does, is merely the latest example of the kind of diplomatic ineptitude that has helped leave Britain with little or none of the kind of leverage it would wish to have in Zimbabwe and others of its former colonies.

Perhaps if Britain tried much harder to get its finger on the African pulse it might have better relations with the natives, thereby also serving its interests better than even throwing aid money in order to buy influence has been able to do.

The complexities of Zimbabwe

by Chido Makunike*

A month after Zimbabwe’s March 29 elections, the winner of the presidential poll remains unknown. The delay adds considerable additional complexity to the many undercurrents of the country’s problems.

By virtue of the suspicious, poorly explained delay in announcing who won the presidential poll, the authorities in Harare have ensured that the only outcome that will be widely believed by a sceptical world would be one in which main opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai emerged the winner. Any other result would be widely dismissed as what the authorities were “fixing” to produce a favourable outcome for President Robert Mugabe in the time since the election.

Even a close result requiring a run-off election between Mugabe and Tsvangirai would be seen by many as engineered to give the ruling party a second chance to mobilise the state machinery to do whatever it took to ensure the “right” result for him. Yet the results delay and whatever other gambits the authorities are likely to serve up arguably can no longer serve to impart even the veneer of electoral legitimacy on Mugabe.

It would be one of many recent defeats for Mugabe to resort to out rightly thwarting the electoral will of the people. But he does nevertheless need a façade of democracy. He has often responded to his Western critics by saying they have no authority to chide him on the basis of his democratic credentials. “We brought democracy at independence in spite of Western support for the racist, anti-democratic government we replaced” has been his argument. He points out that by the measure of regularly held elections, Zimbabwe is far more democratic than many other countries that are in much better books with the Western world than it is.

Mugabe makes this point to bolster his argument that Western opposition to him is not because of any concern for the welfare of Zimbabweans, but is due to his stinging criticism of the double standards of the West, as well as his refusal to be compliant with Western expectations of how an African leader should conduct himself. It is precisely Mugabe’s fearlessly expressed, hard-to-fault arguments about the West’s relations with the rest of the world that makes him such a hero to many in Africa and beyond, even as Zimbabweans have suffered steep economic decline and increasing repression at home.

If the veneer of democratic legitimacy such as that imparted by regularly scheduled elections, no matter how flawed, has always been so important to Mugabe, why would he seem to risk throwing it all away now? Whatever the presidential results will show when released, the opposition MDC’s unprecedented win of a majority in the concurrently held parliamentary election is a convincing indication of the level of disaffection with the rule of Mugabe’s ZANU-PF. His actions since March 29 do not at all suggest a man who respects the right of the voters to choose their leaders.

For the three election cycles up to the mid 1990s, Mugabe’s desire for the perception of a strict adherence to at least the forms of electoral democracy, if not the substance, was relatively easy to achieve. Independence-era euphoria and “gratitude” may have been lifting with every election, but until about then, Mugabe could count on genuine popularity to make his party’s re-elections a foregone conclusion. Mugabe has now shown that his dedication to those electoral forms is not quite so strong after all, now that the evidence suggests a likely majority of the electorate want him gone.

Merely conducting an election cannot bestow democratic legitimacy when it is clear that the only results that will be respected are those in which the incumbent wins. By so awkwardly making this obvious, Mugabe’s government has trapped itself into the equally unhealthy situation in which much of the Zimbabwean electorate and the world would now only believe a result which showed Mugabe losing. This has made “the Zimbabwe crisis” take on a dimension far beyond what can be resolved by the much anticipated release of the results of the presidential poll.

The desire to hold on to power and privilege, and fear of prosecution for past crimes are the usually discussed reasons for Mugabe and ZANU-PF conducting themselves with so little dignity in the face of evidence of an electorate earthquake of rejection against them. But genuine revulsion at what Tsvangirai and the MDC are perceived to represent is no doubt also part of the intransigence of Mugabe & Company in conceding defeat.

There is a self-serving element to Mugabe’s painting of the MDC as stooges of the West who are bent on reversing the efforts to have Zimbabwe’s political independence also have economic teeth for its citizens. Yet Tsvangirai and the MDC have ineptly only fuelled these suspicions in their words and deeds over the years. Mugabe and ZANU-PF in turn have largely failed to convince a majority of Zimbabweans that the claimed slavishness of the MDC to their Western backers is the reason their country is in such poor shape. Mugabe & Co. may genuinely worry that Tsvangirai and the MDC wish to “sell out” the country to the West and “reverse the gains of the revolution” by restoring the economic dominance of whites in commercial agriculture and other sectors of the economy.

But if so, electoral democracy required that Mugabe sold that message to the electorate more convincingly than the MDC made its pitch of a need for change and renewal. The MDC has arguably won that battle for the hearts and minds of Zimbabweans, helped considerably by the country’s desperate economic state under Mugabe.

Instead of accepting his failure to sell his message of “Things are bad because we are besieged by powerful external foes, stick with me while I work out a plan to thwart them and improve things,” Mugabe has instead arrogantly chosen to accuse the electorate of not fully understanding what was at stake. His stance is essentially that the electorate are mistaken to buy Tsvangirai’s message and reject his. And if he can get away with it, he seems inclined to “correct” the misguided electorate by hanging on in power regardless of the popular will!

Yet the price one must pay for accepting a system of electoral democracy is to respect the will of the people even if one believes that will to be wrong. You then revert to opposition, sharpening your message for the next election. The current impasse is partly because of the refusal of Mugabe & Co. to respect this rule of the game because for the first time its result has been unfavourable to them.

The MDC had begun to make inroads into reversing the suspicion with which it was regarded in many African capitals by a belated diplomatic outreach to them. Those efforts have in recent weeks become compromised again by the over-the- top eagerness of the Western political establishment and media to take sides in the Zimbabwean election. In the days leading up to the election, and since then, the Western political and media establishment abandoned all pretence of merely being onlookers who were just interested in seeing that Zimbabweans were able to freely exercise their vote. Zimbabwe’s economic, political and humanitarian problems are severe enough, but the Western media, particularly that of ex-colonial master Britain, went into an absolute frenzy to depict the country as a virtual war zone.

Whether or not it was a coordinated campaign to give Mugabe that has made it so easy for the West to come to hate him the decisive final push out of power, in their shrillness the Western political and media establishment only served to give credence to Mugabe’s long-held claim of a Western conspiracy to depose him for not being pliable in the mould of most African leaders. Britain had kept a relative distance in the months leading up to the election, correctly fearing that any unusual interest would be used by Mugabe as proof of its dishonourable neo-colonialist intentions. But at the time of the election and immediately after,

Britain seemed to smell Mugabe’s blood and lost all self-restraint in the excitement of the prospect of seeing its old nemesis gone. It was almost as if Britain were so certain of Mugabe being deposed that it no long felt the need to maintain the façade of being a neutral observer.

Western shrillness has only grown since the election, with the Zimbabwean authorities also feeding it by the astonishing games over the election results, as well as the jailing of some Western journalists for slipping into the country to report on the election without getting accreditation to do so under the country’s tight media laws. But the effect of all this has been to justify the paranoia of the Zimbabwean authorities about a claimed coordinated Western “regime change” agenda.

Such an agenda could not justify the flouting of the popular electoral will, but it is not much of a stretch to guess that the unseemly eagerness of the West to interfere in and influence the election against him would only have made Mugabe and his whole political machinery feel inclined to dig in even in defiance of the voters. It is therefore quite plausible to speculate that the Western eagerness to “help” the MDC to ensure Mugabe’s exit may in the short term have served to do the exact opposite.

In the immediate term the desire of the West to see the back of a troublesome-to-them Mugabe probably overlaps with the wishes of many Zimbabweans who put the blame for the political repression and economic hardships in their country squarely at Mugabe’s door. But it is not at all certain that those similar desires perfectly coincide. Neither Britain nor the US have an honourable history in regards to Zimbabwe, so their posing as great champions of democracy and defenders of its peoples’ best interests have a hollow ring.

Mugabe has indeed degenerated into a despot who has refused to accept any responsibility for his country’s mess. But he is no worse a ruler than many others who dare not point out the West’s double standards and who are quite happy to have their countries be client states in return for being absolved of scrutiny over their governance records. Therefore the West and the Zimbabwean citizenry want a change from Mugabe for likely very different reasons.

If Mugabe somehow survives the electoral and diplomatic onslaughts against him and hangs on for several more years, the ill-advised Western intervention on behalf of the MDC would provide him considerable ammunition against the opposition party. This may make little difference to the voters’ feelings towards him if economic decline and hardship continue, as is likely to be the case in a situation where the Western world would be even more resolute in closing doors off to Mugabe’s government. Yet if Mugabe were able to stem the slide, say by paying serious attention to improved agricultural productivity, he might well be able to say “you saw how the Westerners behaved during the 2008 election; their conspiracy against me was not a figment of my imagination.”

With the economy continuing on its present slide, few outside his immediate circle and the die-hards in his party would listen to this argument. But with even modest stabilization, his idea of radical land redistribution remains popular enough amongst even his opponents that the argument could gain political currency to his benefit and at the expense of the MDC.

Even if Tsvangirai and the MDC assume office, their doing so with such open support for it as the West has shown will be a double edged sword. If the expected massive Western financial support flows in a way that quickly results in a stabilization of the economy that is widely felt at the grassroots, the whiff of the suspicion of the MDC having agreed to be “stooges” in return for Western support would be neutralised, at least in the short term. The need for a return to economic stability is probably the one issue that unites people across the country’s criss-crossing political divides.

But in the absence of either quick or widely-felt economic recovery, the tag of “Western stooge” around the necks of Tsvangirai and the MDC could remain a potent political weapon in the hands of a ZANU-PF that no longer dominates parliament, but nevertheless has only a handful fewer seats than the MDC. This assumes that ZANU-PF adjusts to being a minority party without disintegrating, which in turn also depends on how successfully they can choose a leader to fill Mugabe’s very large shoes. Without dramatic economic recovery, ZANU-PF in opposition could remain a formidable thorn in an MDC government’s flesh, with its Western backing becoming more of an albatross to it than a blessing.

Having won a majority, the MDC has not spent much time contesting the legitimacy of the parliamentary results. If they are considered to be a true reflection of the electoral will, it is astonishing that the ruling ZANU-PF did as well as it did, winning almost half of the popular vote and the number of parliamentary seats. With the rate of inflation said to be close to 200,000% and virtually every other economic index being strongly negative, one would have expected the ruling party to have been electorally wiped out.

Herein lie some of the nuances of the Zimbabwean crisis that much of the media we are exposed to is either oblivious of or simply not interested in relating. Mugabe has increasingly become repressive, he has been a brilliant ideologue but a very poor manager and he has simply stayed in power longer than was advisable for his own legacy. But his broad message of an unapologetic, assertively expressed desire for African empowerment retains its appeal and has led to a sea change in how black Zimbabweans think about what their independence should mean.

To say many and probably most Zimbabweans want Mugabe to step aside is not the same as saying his ideas have been largely rejected by them. For example, most would want his flawed land reform effort to be fixed to work, not for it to be reversed. The MDC was slow to understand this and other nuances of Mugabe’s complex legacy, losing it precious early time and support in Zimbabwe and elsewhere. Now the opposition party is careful to say it would not return land to its previous white occupiers, but would make sure it was productively used by the new black landholders. It remains to be seen if the MDC’s Western backers understand these nuances and would it to negotiate the minefield of balancing the need for reviving the economy with the political imperative of a strong desire for African empowerment that will remain one of Mugabe’s strongest legacies despite his failure to translate that desire into concrete, practical reality.

There has been talk of a Kenya-like ‘government of national unity.’ Both sides naturally posture against it. It may still be emerge as the immediate way out of the present crisis. But as in Kenya, such a compromise solution robs whoever the winner is of the spoils of electoral victory. When the game is played, all the participants are fully aware that they could lose by a mere handful of votes.

Whether in Kenya or Zimbabwe, another potential flaw of a GNU is to rob the electorate of two or more competing visions of how their country should be ruled. It may avoid conflict in the short term, but it also effectively allows political parties to put aside their competition for power because the GNU allows all of them a chance at the feeding trough. There is also

the potential of them collectively ganging up against the citizens they usually claim are their whole reason for being.

Resolving the current impasse is undoubtedly the most urgent order of business in Zimbabwe. But the country’s tortured and violent history, the cynical external interests seeking to exert their influence for their own ends, the huge ideological gulf between the two main political parties and the closeness of the results announced so far suggest that whichever way the immediate crisis is resolved, there is much difficult long term ahead to getting Zimbabwe back on a track of political stability, psychic healing and economic growth.

*article originally published on Pambazuka News, May 01 200