Shame on Mugabe’s stooges

Rian Malan

16 May 2007

Rian Malan is appalled that Zimbabwe has been put in charge of Sustainable Development by the UN — and says it is symptomatic of the way in which Mugabe is indulged by foolish go-gooders from New York to South Africa

It went down badly. Owen said he’d been reading my scribblings in this very paper, and hadn’t liked them at all. ‘I thought you were just playing up to the Brits for the money,’ he said, ‘but you actually believe this stuff!’ Then he explained to the gathering that ANC policy toward Mugabe was entirely rational and designed to prevent Zimbabwe imploding. I said, ‘Oh, come on! Zimbabwe imploded years ago.’ Jonathan Shapiro, aka the eminent leftish political cartoonist Zapiro, intervened at this point. He was willing to allow that the ANC was guilty of double standards when it came to human rights in Zimbabwe, but I wasn’t having any of that. ‘Screw double standards,’ I said. ‘Mugabe’s country is ruined and his people are starving, but he smashed the white farmers, so blacks — our government included — support him regardless. These people hate us,’ I concluded. ‘This is war.’ Whereupon Owen lost it entirely. ‘You’re pathetic,’ he shouted. ‘Pathetic!’

It seems to me that last week’s events in New York render a terrible verdict on well-intentioned do-gooders and the climate of impunity they create for African dictators. These thugs and kleptocrats know there is no downside; blacks — some blacks — don’t care what horrors they inflict on black people, so long as they can make anti-imperialist noises. As for whites, they will take any insults you dish out and come to feed your people anyway, thereby sparing you from the consequences of your incompetence and criminality. There can be little doubt that this was an essential part of Mugabe’s calculations. I mean, the man has something like eight university degrees. It cannot possibly have escaped his notice that elimination of white commercial farmers would precipitate a food crisis. But why worry? He knew that the UN and allied charities would step in to feed the starving. Indeed, he was so confident of their generosity that he did not scruple to use donated food as a political weapon, rewarding loyalists with free grub and punishing rebellious villages by withholding same while loudly proclaiming that food shortages and spiralling prices were caused by drought, rather than deranged government policy.