President has proved critics at home and abroad wrong with a brand of political independence now yielding economic freedom
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| Robert Mugabe shows his finger after casting his vote during presidential elections in Harare, Zimbabwe, on Wednesday. Photograph: Meng Chenguang/Rex Features |
Robert Mugabe shows
his finger after casting his vote during presidential elections in
Harare, Zimbabwe, on Wednesday. Photograph: Meng Chenguang/Rex Features
Robert Mugabe belongs to a dying breed of politicians on the African continent. Molded in the crucible of politics of nationalism, he emerges as the surviving face
of African nationalism radicalised through armed resistance to settler
colonialism. It is this dimension of his generational politics, this
trait of his character, which Britain and the western world has not been
able to comprehend.
Mugabe is more than just a politician, he
leads a cause, or as his militant supporters would say, he has become
the cause itself. And the cause has something to do with giving back the
African his dignity well beyond symbols of nominal independence. A few
days ago he told his supporters political independence was inadequate if
it did not yield economic freedom. While it is fashionable to charge
Mugabe with destroying Zimbabwe
in its prime, little regard is given to the fact that the average
African country has been granted nominal political independence amid
economic subservience. And as the convulsions in northern Africa and even Brazil show, the flag does not always fly away.
What
continues to confound Mugabe's western opponents – and there are many
in the west who want to see the back of him – is that his brand of
post-colonial politics is steeped in the economic self-empowerment of
the Zimbabweans, which resonates with the continent. More than many
other African leaders, Mugabe draws cheers across the continent.
In
western lore he has been a terrorist, a Marxist ideologue, now a
bloodthirsty tyrant, stereotypes that he alone on the continent has been
able to mock and laugh off. "If standing for my people's aspirations
makes me a Hitler," he once said, "let me be a Hitler a thousand times."
With
seven earned degrees spanning disciplines, he is not your archetypal
tin pot dictator. "The trouble with Mugabe," the former British foreign
secretary Douglas Hurd once said, is that "he thinks like us". And knows
us, one could have added.
From Margaret Thatcher's grudging acknowledgement to Tony Blair's
open hostility, the British establishment has had to contend with an
assertive Mugabe, ironically himself an epitome of British success.
Educated by the Jesuits in the British settler colony of Rhodesia, he is
what the late Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe would have called an
educated "British-protected person". And like Caliban in The Tempest,
his profit from this British education is that he knows the British
language well enough and uses it to curse them. "It is those demons at
No 10 Downing Street that need exorcising," Mugabe once castigated
Blair, yet still escaping the fate that visited Patrice Lumumba, the elected leader of the DRC assassinated in a US-sponsored plot, for a milder chastisement of the Belgian king in 1960.
The
land issue, a question which only history is still to settle. Despoiled
of its land through a series of racial colonial measures, Zimbabwe at
independence inherited a gross skew in land ownership. A small,
reclusive white settler population of 4,000 owned nearly half of arable
Zimbabwe – the best half at that – with the other half, packing over 10
million black Zimbabweans. History had fated Zimbabwe to a racial
conflict, preordained a racially polarising fight for Mugabe. And to
make matters worse, land was the causa belli of the 15-year
bush war which Mugabe led, and had dominated decolonisation talks at
Lancaster House on the last quarter of 1979. That gave this issue a
surfeit of emotion, in equal measure across the racial divide.
Mugabe decided to tackle this matter conclusively, and defiantly after the Blair government reneged on promises to fund land redistribution made under the Lancaster House agreement.
What followed was more than a decade of a damaging standoff with the
former colonial master, Britain. More damaging to Zimbabwe, the
underdog. And here history gets split in its verdict: was Mugabe
reckless and selfish, or did he lead his people through yet another
revolution? The western world thinks he did it to spite competent white
farmers who owned the land by a colonial right that persisted into
independence; that he led a wholesale expropriation of "white-owned"
land to win votes against the Movement for Democratic Change, MDC, a
new, labour-led party which posed a real threat to his rule. And the
consequences have been there for all to see: an economic meltdown; a
descend from breadbasket to a basket case; a rollback in civil
liberties. The list of charges against him is endless.
I have seen
Mugabe fight for his political life before, in the controversial and
contested 2008 elections. Then his back was against the wall.
The
economy had spun out of control, threatening to sweep him under
politically. Sanctions which the western world had unleashed on
Zimbabwe, ostensibly for imperiling human rights, many say as punishment
for taking back the land, were biting his people as never before. The
adversities were overwhelming. Yet he hung on, just. It is this ability
to ride the storm, which attracted me to make the film Mugabe: Villain or Hero? Where I spent three years in Zimbabwe gaining rare access to the Zimbabwean leader.
Today
Mugabe is back in the election trenches in a radically different
political environment. Blair, Gordon Brown and George W Bush, his
foremost opponents are gone.
More dramatically, the MDC, Mugabe's supposed bete noire, is on course to a crushing defeat in the latest election. Morgan Tsvangirai's claims of vote rigging
will fall on deaf ears, even if David Cameron and Barack Obama stick
their noses in. The official observers passed the election off as free,
fair and credible. The Zimbabwean people will inevitably accept the
winner.
Will Cameron and Obama have the appetite for a further fight with Mugabe, when they know that Tsvangirai is a flawed candidate?
Mugabe and his Zanu-PF are on a surge,
seemingly unstoppable towards a second coming. And tellingly, the
election is being fought on the theme of "indigenisation and economic
empowerment" by which Mugabe, following up on his land reforms, now
seeks a 51% stake in the economy for his people. That this is another
racially polarising policy is without doubt. But the amazing thing is
that it is a policy which seems to give Mugabe and his Zanu-PF party a
marked edge over the MDC with its neo-liberal agenda of
foreign-investment-led job-creation.
Even more surprising is that
the youth – history's motive force in north Africa and around the world –
are finding favour with Mugabe's fiery rhetoric, already founded in the
land reform programme whose benefits are beginning to show. Mugabe, the
man reviled in the west, may very well have infected a successor
generation in ways African politics and politicians – present and future
– may find hard to ignore, let alone cure. At 89, the infirmities of
time may very well make this election his last stand against the west.
The issue may boil down to what after him. But for now, all indications
point to his bagging the latest poll.
Roy Agyemang is the director/producer of award-winning documentary Mugabe: Villain or Hero?
Twitter @RoyAgy
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