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Monday 1 December 2008

Mugabe: Power, Plunder and the Struggle for Zimbabwe

How to ruin a country

Robert Salisbury

Getting rid of him will, for a start, not be easy. As an old Africa hand once said to me with some asperity, ‘Southern Africans don’t do military coups.’ In any case military coups, as Martin Rupaya points out in Moyo and Ashhurst, usually solve very little. There are some indications that many in ZANU-PF want Mugabe to go, but he has so far proved equal to internal dissidence. As for external pressure, Thabo Mbeki and his successors are clearly reluctant to push him out, except on his own terms. In any case, as Mark Ellis makes clear in an interview Moyo and Ashurst reprint, it is increasingly difficult to grant immunity to departing tyrants if they are sued under international law. Mugabe, sensibly from his point of view, would find immunity comforting.

The tragedy of Zimbabwe is not only what has happened, but that what has happened will make it difficult to build a country that can fulfil its potential. It possesses vast resources, mineral, agricultural and aesthetic. Above all, it has a courageous and able population, both black and white, who could make it the economic and political motor of Central Africa. Instead, the chances are that it will remain another African basket case, suggesting that Ian Smith was right about majority rule. What a triumph it would be if the people of Zimbabwe were to prove the late Ian Douglas wrong.

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