Mthulisi Mathuthu
Mthulisi Mathuthu is the news editor of New Zimbabwe.com. He is hooked on Russian literature and also enjoys the works of John Maxwell Coetzee, Eduardo Galeano and Salman Rushdie. He is an A-Z on Afro-jazz and has recently taken a keen interest in issues of climate change and international development. In Jose Mourinho, he sees his ideal self: "a character who doesn't care about anybody but gets things going for himself"
AS THE Zimbabwean crisis drags through its full tenth year, it has become de rigueur for political commentators, journalists and think-tanks to offer what is now something of a gospel to be questioned at one ‘s own peril: Robert Mugabe, he alone, has destroyed Zimbabwe, a sin for which he must hang.
Repeated often around the world is the mantra that Captain Mugabe set sail smoothly, but lost his head halfway through the voyage – single-handedly dragging the country into a hole where he and his retinue have been digging since.
In a recent pathetic pot-shot at South African President Jacob Zuma for his refusal to chastise the Mugabe, the Times of London reported: “It is now 30 years since Mugabe seized power, during which time he has personally orchestrated the most dramatic peacetime collapse of any country since Weimar Germany”.
Zimbabweans themselves have lined out of the country to shout from all over the world, blaming Mugabe for their misery and many still dance and capper from the foreign cities imploring Pretoria and whomever is there to scapegoat or persuade to “please do something about Mugabe”.
The impression painted is that everybody else in Zimbabwe and elsewhere is pulling the right direction — only Mugabe and his cabal, blinded by power, are headed down the wrong route.
One gets the sense that Zimbabwe was once a flourishing democracy wilfully despoiled only by a venal leader. What unalloyed propaganda!
Argument by smear has had its day and it’s time to face the facts in the face. This flawed narrative that nobody else is to blame for Zimbabwe’s degeneracy but the incumbent political authority has held sway for no reason other than that it serves as a shield for those who for many years championed, cheered, protected and assisted Mugabe even as he was setting the country on the wrong route, diving the country on tribal lines and cultivating a culture of violence and impunity, for example.
Few, basic but vital questions must be answered anew: Just how did we fall into this hole inside which an oligarchy has colluded with varying external interests to inflict damage on our country? Who dug this hole? Just who is still digging?
“If it is a despot you should dethrone,” says Almustafa in Gibran Kahlil’s book The Prophet, “see first that his throne erected within you is destroyed … And if it is fear you would dispel, the seat of that fear is in your heart and not in the hand of the feared”.
Written almost a century ago, these words remain a genuine indictment of the people of Zimbabwe — a people who, while they find it easy to complain about Mugabe and Pretoria’s alleged complicity in propping him up — have yet to accept the role they played and continue playing in ensuring that Mugabe remains in the driving city to this date.
When Mugabe’s goons were out in rural Midlands and Matabeleland in the 1980’s, he was consistently given fresh mandates and the commercial farmers came out on the BBC defending Mugabe’s crackdown on the civilian population. Their thinking then was that Matabeleland massacres were a little local difficulty, convinced that Mugabe would never touch them.
Bodies such as the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions never uttered a word when some among their membership such as rural teachers and mine workers were hacked to death and their remains scattered down the mine shafts and the flowing rivers.
Anybody complaining about the gross human rights violations in the Matabeleland and Midlands regions then was a dissident. All those young people from the western parts of the country who sought economic refuge in apartheid South Africa were denigrated as lazy, uneducated scum of the nation. And yet today, South Africa hosts millions of Zimbabweans most of whom were vowing they were never going to set foot there and were singing praises for Mugabe.
The reason for this is not because anything ever changed about Mugabe, but that his malevolence finally caught up with his earlier minders only for them to flee.
Mugabe’s earlier champions — the Zimbabwean electorate and the western liberals and the former commercial farmers — are so troubled by their guilty consciences that they have not only erected stonewalls around their consciences but they have even criminalised any other narratives. Question their interpretation of Zimbabwe’s decline and they descend on you like a tonne of bricks.
It has become almost a circus: Zimbabweans who continuously handed Mugabe fresh mandates over the years flee the country to dance and denounce Pretoria. The west and the business people with connections to white farmers sponsor a handful of activists to shout the loudest.
Western politicians, journalists and diplomats insist everyday and everywhere and in every way that South Africa, the African Union and the SADC must take the lead in the fight to oust Mugabe.
African leaders, the song goes always, are a disgrace and are complicit in the “genocide” unfolding in Zimbabwe. Africa, says the Economist, has demonstrated “a woeful reluctance … to chastise, ostracise or help to oust villainous leaders such as Mugabe or Sudan’s Omar al-Bashir …,” and the AU must be cajoled into action.
But the question is: If Africans in general and South Africans in particular are so important in the fight against Mugabe, were they ever consulted when western institutions and governments were honouring, garlanding and knighting Mugabe?
It is telling that no other African state of note, save for Malawi with whom Mugabe has said he has a “common ancestry”, and Sam Nunjoma’s Namibia (and perhaps a few less significant others), has ever honoured Mugabe.
Indeed all Mugabe’s major awards and honours were from the west and were granted in the wake of one of the worst horror shows ever conducted in modern Africa – Gukurahundi — and without consultation with the people who are today being cajoled into ostracising him.
Africans are now being squeezed and shouted at to shed tears for the guilty to wash their hands soiled by pampering an evidently vile Mugabe over the years.
Pot-shots such as the Times of London’s attack on Zuma are awash in the western press signalling the revival of the old habit of the earlier era of rubbishing and denigrating Africans as long as they are unwilling to bend to unreasonable demands. In this case, Mugabe has become the reason to revisit the old trick.
Recently, BBC Newsnight showed a range of Rwandese rights activists alongside the Human Rights Watch representatives complaining bitterly about how western nations bail out President Paul Kagame’s demonstrably vile dictatorship.
Which African was consulted before a decision was made to shield and prop up Paul Biya and Kagame and Yoweri Museveni? Just as Mugabe was forced down on the African conscience as an exemplary leader, Kagame and Museveni are having their turn at enjoying the western blind eye, thanks to the same forces and tactics.
Vile as he is, Mugabe has, sadly, not let go of his hold on the thinking and general world view of Zimbabweans. Having been in power for more than a quarter of a century, he has managed to instil in the electorate a culture of hate, violence, obsequiousness and foster a climate of ignorance.
Try to start a discourse with the many activists dotted around the globe or to listen to the statements of those still at home and you will be shocked to see how Mugabe’s thinking reigns supreme in Zimbabwe.
Clearly, Zimbabweans dug their own hole and even as they say they are tired of Mugabe, one can still hear from the bottom of the ever deepening hole the clanking of picks and shovels. Mugabe was made in Zimbabwe by the Zimbabweans. The British, the liberals and the west in general seized the opportunity to paint, decorate and offer him to the world to marvel at.
When he was showing signs of cracking under pressure from democratic demands, they continuously repainted him, pampered the cracks over and ignored the warning from some indigenous Africans that he was an explosive steadily spilling poison.
Now that the poison has decimated the farmlands and displaced populations across Zimbabwe, the explosive has been hurled at other Africans to detonate. How cunning!
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