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Zimbabwe:The gathering
storm
By Sun News Publishing
Friday, April
25, 2008
Zimbabwe is on a course to serious self-harm and it would
seem that it is in a hurry to achieve that. If this grim prediction
happens, it wouldn’t be because the ordinary Zimbabwean
wished or desired it.
If it does, it would be because their president, Robert Mugabe
and his ruling Zimbabwe African National Union – Patriotic
Front (ZANU-PF) worked very hard at it by an act of perfidy
and a vehement desire to hold on to power, no matter the cost
on the country. Already, the country has paid so much, but
that much is not enough, going by Mugabe’s devious manoeuverings.
Or how else can it be said of an 84-year old man who has ruled
his country for 28 years, conducted an election in which he
was a presidential candidate yet and at the end of the day,
he forbade the electoral body from announcing the results
because he knew he had lost the election to an opposition.
Now the country is in a dire strait.
The main opposition party, the Movement for Democratic Change
(MDC), is heading for the trenches, calling for mass action
of the most ugly. The government, on the other hand, is belching
threats and has even begun an assault on the opposition. By
last weekend, opposition MDC claimed that over 200 of its
members had been arrested, brutalized and detained.
There is a shipment of arms into the country said to be coming
from China for the government of Zimbabwe. The country is
a political, social and economic tinderbox. A few weeks ago,
the country’s high court ruled against the opposition’s
demand for the immediate release of the presidential election
result. ZANU-PF claimed that there were irregularities in
the election for which it prevailed on the electoral body
to do a recount in 23 constituencies. This was done about
two weeks ago and till now nothing has been heard of the outcome.
The issue is that Mugabe does not want to leave power. But
the problem is not so much that he is stoutly refusing to
step down as the fact that his continuing in power, no matter
by what means, will not only make that prediction happen,
but will also speed it up.
As it is, things are already very bad. Conditions of the
average Zimbabwean are abject. An estimated 25 percent of
the nationals have run out of the country, mostly to neighbouring
South Africa. Its economy is the worst in the world, blighted
by world’s highest inflation at 125,000 and still rising.
Average life expectancy is put at 35 years; hospitals are
death camps; shops are empty and to many Zimbabweans, Mugabe
is the only leader they have always known and under whose
leadership, since independence in 1980, the country, once
the food basket of the region, is now a sorry case.
Zimbabwe definitely needs more than the opposition and the
goodwill and hope of its nationals to pull her back from the
precipice.
The country needs the outside world; it needs the intervention
of the world community. The world itself understands this
and the worry is that it doesn’t seem to be doing much,
anything pointedly for Zimbabwe. Although there have been
some statements from world leaders urging the release of the
March 29 presidential election, such statements sound so distant,
muffled and ineffectual.
A few days ago, the 14-nation Southern African Economic Community
(SADC) called a summit in a bid to mediate in the crisis.
The summit, held in Zambia, only called for the election results
to be announced speedily. It did not urge Mugabe to step aside.
Even South Africa’s president, Thabo Mbeki, told the
world at the summit that there was no crisis in Zimbabwe.
He still believes in his “quiet diplomacy” in
solving the problem of Mugabe.
Perhaps the most embarrassing is the inertia of the African
Union (AU). Granted that, as a sovereign nation, Zimbabwe
enjoys its rights within that definition, there is a moral
obligation, which the outside world owes the people of the
country. Pressure can be brought to bear. Mugabe’s regime
can be helmed in by international sanction. The AU’s
silence, therefore, is an act in bad faith.
Mugabe has to be pushed out of power or persuaded to do so
now that the situation can be managed. As it is now, the potentials
are not good. Somalia, Congo, Kenya and Sudan are more than
enough trouble for a troubled continent. Adding Zimbabwe to
that list would be terrible. The world must also know that
if Mugabe goes away with this, nothing stops another power-hungry
despot from doing the same.
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