Robert Mugabe couldn't be more different to the man who offered great hope when he came to power 25 years ago
There were always silly rumours that a ghost writer, such as the last British governor Christopher Soames, had written Robert Mugabe's speech of reconciliation after he won the first general election in 1980. That speech that he made 25 years ago today (April 17) - on the eve of independence - always stuns young Zimbabweans when they see the black and white footage for the first time. "If yesterday you hated me, today you cannot avoid the love that binds you to me and me to you. Is it not folly, therefore, that in these circumstances anybody should seek to revive the wounds and grievances of the past?" Mugabe said. Among those who questioned his authorship were vanquished whites, mourning their dead and scared after decades of demonising propaganda by the Rhodesian Front-controlled media. Others who questioned the speech, were the left wing of Zanu PF, many of whom had been detained by Mugabe in Mozambique during the war, and of course, the towering Joshua Nkomo, who led the original liberation movement, Zapu.
But Mugabe wrote the speech himself, according to a former Rhodesian senior civil servant who stayed on in his office after independence. And it needed little editing. If many questioned it then, almost everyone now finds it hard to believe, so far does Zimbabwe seem from those emotions today. They were directed mainly at whites who controlled much of the economy at independence. But Mugabe quickly made them politically irrelevant. Many of the racists and the heartsore slunk off to South Africa. Those who stayed, largely disappeared from the political scene. A few months after independence, Mugabe still had a positive message for whites, though rather less so that in that April 17 speech. He told a group of white farmers in a hall in Chinhoyi, 100 kilometres north of Harare: "You will need shock absorbers, as you will hear many things about yourselves, but just keep going." They heard the message in a province which provided 70% of agricultural foreign currency earnings. Agricultural expansion, which spread into an increasingly sophisticated and growing peasant sector who quickly became the largest maize producers, seemed set to provide food security for ever and ever, even in drought years when there was enough foreign currency for short term imports of grain in 1991.
This sector drove the economy so fast it was almost breathtaking and Mugabe invested the proceeds in health and education. According to the United Nations, Zimbabwe achieved 85% literacy within 15 years of independence, and health care was up there too. Even now, when the country is mired in staggering domestic and foreign debt and a collapsing infrastructure, there is still zeal and dedication among many public health workers struggling to alleviate the suffering of those affected by HIV/Aids. "They are surprisingly committed, hamstrung by lack of resources, of course, but their data collection, for example, is really good," said a foreign doctor, seconded to the department of health. "Despite everything, many African countries could learn something from the Zimbabweans." By 1990, a decade after independence, infant death rates had been reduced by more than 16%, maternal deaths were more than halved, and immunisation and nutrition levels had soared. After free and compulsory primary education became law, the number of primary schools nearly doubled - from 2401 to 4324 - between the last year of minority white rule in 1979 and 1985. Zimbabwe more than doubled its number of trained teachers between 1980 and 1995. Secondary schools sprung up everywhere.
But if things looked good at the start, it was because Mugabe's essentially autocratic, undemocratic nature had not fully revealed itself. Mugabe's political plans were always to establish a one-party state under the comfortable cloak of his allies in the eastern bloc. Zapu leader, Joshua Nkomo, stood in his way. Zapu won 20 of 120 elected seats in the liberation election of 1980. Shortly after independence, fighting broke out between Mugabe's former combatants and those loyal to Joshua Nkomo's Zapu in post wartime assembly points. Former Rhodesian soldiers, mostly black, restored an uneasy peace but the wound ran too deep to heal. Former Zapu combatants struggled for places in the Zimbabwe National Army and many of those who did get recruited and who were manifestly better trained than those loyal to Mugabe, found themselves stuck in junior positions. They left in droves. Top Zapu leaders were arrested and tried for treason, acquitted and detained under emergency regulations for a further four years. A mysterious force, known as the "dissidents" began killing a few white farmers and some Zanu PF members in Matabeleland province. Many of Mugabe's opponents suspected that this was a "dirty trick" by Mugabe himself to give him ammunition to crush Zapu, which he in any case did.
Mugabe accused Nkomo in the following provocative terms: "Zapu is irretrievably bent on its criminal path ... time has now come to show this evil party our teeth. We can bite, and we shall certainly bite." He told his supporters to "weed them out of your gardens." He sent in the North Korean trained Fifth Brigade, and for five years parts of the Midlands and the two Matabeleland provinces were consumed by violence in remote villages and journalists who reported it were routinely deported. Food in those dry and hungry areas was used as a weapon, development was withheld, and the state controlled media was used, much as the Rhodesians had used it, to persuade the dominant Shona tribe that Zapu and Ndebele speakers in general were the enemy. Many Shonas outside of Matabeleland didn't know, or didn't believe, what was going on in the south of the country, and peace, development and growth continued in the provinces closest to Harare. But Zapu had been quietly vanquished, and Nkomo, who had fled Zimbabwe three years after independence, returned, and he and his party retreated into a junior partnership with Zanu PF. Zapu died when Nkomo reluctantly signed a unity accord with Mugabe in 1987. The massacres in Matabeleland left unknown thousands dead, many injured and thousands fled from the rural areas.
The economy, now struggling with outdated capital equipment from years of sanctions against Rhodesia began to falter, and then in 1997, Mugabe made a huge unbudgeted, pension pay-out to restless, unemployed war veterans which sank the value of the Zimbabwe dollar overnight. Foreign currency became scarcer and the International Monetary Fund's structural adjustment programme in the early 1990s, which facilitated cheaper imports, and led to factory closures and massive job losses, ripped the social infrastructure further apart. So, when a growing, well educated urban society began questioning the loss of civil liberties and the trade union movement grew in protest against the economic hardships of structural adjustment, it was inevitable that a new opposition would emerge. Several small parties came and went, and only one, the Zimbabwe Unity Movement, lead by former Zanu PF heavyweight Edgar Tekere, made any impression. But it was demonised and made a foolish alliance with conservative whites, fought an election in 1990, won two seats, and disappeared before the next poll.
The new party, the Movement for Democratic Change, (MDC) as in the early days of Zapu when it was still a liberation movement, would emerge cutting across the lines of tribe, clan, class and province. When the MDC mobilised the population to reject Mugabe's proposed new constitution in a referendum in February 2000, Mugabe was caught by surprise. His old international allies in the Soviet bloc had become multiparty democracies, the world had changed, so dealing with the MDC in the same way as he had crushed Zapu was not an option. So, Mugabe played his last card - the card which some believe he had always kept at the bottom of the deck for an emergency like this - the white farmers whom he had always berated verbally when he needed a scapegoat, but whom he had basically left intact. Some say that the farmers "brought it upon themselves" by providing financial and logistical support for the MDC. In any case, now he needed their land and he unleashed his war veterans and unemployed youths onto well developed farms, evicting white farmers and their workers. Commercial agriculture shrank and the peasant farmers who grew the maize were collateral damage as tractor mechanics left, foreign currency for fertiliser dwindled, reliable seed was no longer available. But that was okay for Mugabe because his objective was political not economic. With civil liberties largely extinct, collapsed education and health sectors, a constitution so massively amended and often ignored, a justice system mired in political patronage, Zimbabwe's future is as breathtakingly perilous as it was bright when Mugabe made that speech 25 years ago.
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