Mugabe is the Mobutu of our time
Marian L. Tupy wishes that Zimbabwe would follow the lead of Botswana, a market democracy. For now, it swelters under the oppressive rule of a tyrant who is wrecking his country.
As the economic situation in Zaire deteriorated, unhappiness with Mobutu’s rule increased. To remain in power, Mobutu devised a vast system of patronage that incorporated an expanding number of his critics in the government. The size of government exploded. Between 1965 and 1990, Zaire saw 51 prime ministers and their governments come and go — each averaging 40 ministers and deputy ministers. Each government member, of course, was expected to use his time in office to provide for himself, his family and a few generations of his descendants. By the 1990s Zaire had more than 600,000 civil servants ‘notionally responsible for tasks the World Bank estimated could be carried out by a mere 50,000’.
As the government’s financial resources dwindled, the looting became more desperate. Gécamines, the gigantic state-owned mining company responsible for most of Zaire’s foreign currency earnings from the extraction and sale of copper, cobalt, uranium and zinc, was looted so thoroughly that its copper production fell from over 440,848 tons in 1989 to 27,507 tons in 2001. In the final act of desperation, Mobutu ordered the Bank of Zaire to print money. By 1994, inflation hit 23,773 per cent.
By 6 May 1997, when Mobutu took off in a Russian cargo plane that flew him to exile in Rabat, Morocco, he was so universally despised by his fellow countrymen that some members of his own presidential guard opened fire with ‘bullets ripping into… [the plane’s] bodywork’.
It was 1980 and Zimbabwe had just gained independence from Britain. White rule had ended and so did a civil war that cost some 30,000 lives. The first-ever multiracial election gave Mugabe’s Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU) a parliamentary majority, but Zimbabwe had an independent judicial system and a constitution that protected minority rights. Moreover, Zimbabwe had one of the largest and most sophisticated economies on the continent. The country seemed destined to become an African success story.
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March 21st, 2008 8:24amTo give people an earthy grounding to Britain's complicity in the handing over of S.Rhodesia into the jaws of Marxist Leninist saboteurs. Read: "Bitter Harvest: The Great Betrayal and the Dreadful Aftermath", by Ian Smith. So great was Britain's wish to be rid of this jewel of Africa. So great was the anger of the then PM toward Ian Smith's unilateral declaration of independents. So great was the British torque for appeasement towards black Africa's advancing communists... They gave it away!! There were safeguards but they turned a blind eye. They just couldn't be bothered. The devil in their eyes was the white minority government ... who wanted more time before handing over to majority rule. Who ... we should ask, is the devil now?