Mugabe and the Credibility of the African Union

 

If there was any residual hope that about the African Union has the desire, the capability and the leadership to undertake any of the crucial work needed to turn Africa into a place where civilised people would wish to live, the performance of Robert Mugabe, in his capacity of Chairman of that body, has confirmed that Africa has far to go, and much to suffer before it can join the ranks of modern civilized nations.

Mugabe is a man who, for decades, has enriched himself at the expense of his nation, once one of the hopes of Africa.  He has brought Zimbabwe to its knees with ‘redistribution of the productive farms’, taking them from the efficient White farmers who built from bare land a capacity to supply huge quantities of food to the rest of Africa, handing them to his cronies, who did not have the ability, or even the desire, to operate them with any discernible level of skill or knowledge.  That single move brought Zimbabwe to the brink of starvation, forcing thousands of Zimbabweans to escape his brutal form of ‘democracy’ by moving to South Africa.  The official figure for Zimbabwean expatriates in South Africa is over 500 000, but the real figure is probably in excess of a million.  Mugabe followed that lunacy with the next, the ‘indigenisation’ of mines and the few productive industries that remained in the country, exciting another wave of emigration.  It should be noted that many thousands of Zimbabweans flocked to Apartheid South Africa before 1994, to escape the despotic rule that Mugabe imposed.  Those refugees obviously believed that South Africa at that time was better than the workers’ paradise that Mugabe claims the country to be.  America provided vast quantities of food aid in the form of grain, which was transported in bulk to Durban, for packing into bags labelled “Gift of the American People – Not For Sale’.  Mugabe did not like this, because America, alongside Britain, is, in his twisted mind, responsible for everything that has gone wrong in Zimbabwe under his rule.  He insisted that the grain be packed in plain bags which he supplied, and he then sold that grain to the favoured people in Zimbabwe, refusing to deliver any grain, free or sold, to areas in respect of which which his Party did not hold a seat in Parliament.  Mugabe, in his recent tirade in South Africa, which was watched with sniggering approval by Jacob Zuma, stated boldly that the previous regime had killed thousands of Zimbabwean Blacks, and dumped their bodies down a disused mineshaft.  The truth of that matter is that Mugabe’s ‘freedom fighters’ slaughtered some 40 000 of their Black Matabele opponents and dumped their bodies down the mineshaft of a mine which had been in operation until some years after the accession to the Presidency of Robert Mugabe.  Now, Mugabe has had the arrogance to declare that none of the people who emigrated from Zimbabwe in recent years has done so as a result of the catastrophic economic conditions he and his Party have brought about.

The rapidly-growing flight of refugees from Africa to Europe must surely be seen as an indicator of an escalating disaster in Africa, one that is perhaps more visible to the World than the flow of refugees from Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Malawi, Nigeria, Sudan and numerous other countries.  However, while those flows are less visible, they are no less there.

Many people simply accept that ‘this is Africa’, and ignore the bald-faced lies told by Mugabe.  It is true that if you tell a big lie often enough, it becomes the truth.  Anyone with an understanding of what Adolph Hitler and his gang of Nazi lunatics did to Germany and to Europe will recognise that our meek acceptance that ‘this is Africa’ is putting us all firmly on a path to catastrophe on a world scale.  The sniggering obsequiousness of Jacob Zuma, Julius Malema and other aspirant African billionaires, their abject hero worship of Robert Mugabe for the example he has set in his rise to power and obscene wealth by means of corruption and outright theft, and his self-serving stance of hatred of the Whites and the West, must surely be a warning to the world that a cancer is growing within Africa.  The cancer has taken root in South Africa, where the ANC has been single-minded in its support for the corruption headed by the State President and strongly supported by the Speaker of the House of Parliament in her views that he is not subject to the same rules as other citizens.  That cancer will continue to grow, accelerating its destruction of the hope for peace and prosperity in Africa that drove the West to support the independence of the former colonies.  That cancer has the potential to bring the hopelessness of Africa to the West, just as the acquiescence of Britain and the United States to the development of the cancer of the Nazi threat under Adolph Hitler, their desperate desire for ‘peace in our time’ epitomised by the speech of the British Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, plunged the world into a war that changed the lives of millions.  As Roman Herzog said in his first speech as President of West Germany, ‘we must solve the problems of Africa in Africa, otherwise we will have to solve them in Europe.’  Now is surely the time for the Western world to formulate a set of principles to be applied to their dealings with Africa and its dictators, under whatever guise they may hide.

The problems of Africa are clear to see by anyone with the interest to look.  They are not problems of race or religion.  They are problems of dictators grabbing whatever there is, leaving the people to starve and to provide a fertile ground for extremism in every form.  They are the threat that the rest of the world has to deal with, now under principles, or in the future under arms.