The two anachronisms of Mugabe's Zimbabwe

By Gwynne Dyer

LONDON (JP): This week marks the 20th anniversary of the end of white minority rule in Zimbabwe, but all the celebrations and parades have been canceled.

President Robert Mugabe is not quite the "deranged despot" that opposition leader Morgan Tsangvirai recently called him, but he does not like large crowds gathering in the cities. He is nearing the end of his 20 years in power, and the game is getting very rough.

It got even rougher last weekend, when "squatters" on one of the 900 white-owned farms that have been occupied on orders from Mugabe's ruling ZANU-PF Party abducted the owner, David Stevens, and shot him dead.

On the same day Chenjerai "Hitler" Hunzvi, leader of the National Liberation War Veterans Association that is organizing the farm seizures, declared at ZANU-PF headquarters: "This is a day of war."

Zimbabwe had a decade of war in the 1970s, after the white minority (now down to around 70,000) illegally declared independence from Britain rather than surrender power to the black majority. Since the "settlers" lost in 1980, Mugabe has run Zimbabwe as a one-party state in all but name. But he hasn't run it very well, and the settlers didn't really lose.

Almost half of the country's good agricultural land is still in the hands of some 4,000 white "commercial" farmers (out of 12 million people). The farms are essentially a colonial anachronism, and after independence in 1980 Britain agreed to pay for buying the commercial farmers out and re-settling black small-holders on their land.

But London canceled the arrangement after it turned out that many of the farms, rather than being broken up, were being "redistributed" into the hands of senior ZANU-PF members. So for over a decade Mugabe let the issue slide, and then at the age of 76 suddenly he starts using illegal violence against the white farmers. Why?

Because Mugabe himself is an anachronism whose time is fast running out. He is the last leader of the African independence generation still in power, and like most of that generation neither his democratic instincts nor his administrative talents matched his skills as a revolutionary leader.

The Zimbabwean dollar is worth one-30th of what it was when he took power; unemployment is 50 percent; even literacy has fallen under his rule. So people's patience is running out, and Mugabe is getting desperate.

To be fair, Mugabe's difficulties are not entirely due to his personal shortcomings. Almost every African leader faces the same problem: that the traditional view of political power expects leaders to reward their followers and supporters out of their own resources -- or, in a modern state, out of the public purse.

The demands on a leader like Mugabe are so intense -- for government jobs, import licenses, "redistributed" farms, and so on -- that most of the state's resources are parceled out as patronage, leaving very little for development.

Since there is very little development, resources dwindle even as the demand for patronage rises. Eventually, the gap gets so wide that there is a crisis, and that is where Mugabe is now.

This explains his desperate lurches of policy in the last couple of years, like sending 11,000 Zimbabwean troops to intervene in the civil war in the Congo on the side of President Laurent Kabila.

He sent them not because Kabila is in the right, but because it is an opportunity to make large amounts of money out of illegal diamond and gold concessions. His all-out attack on the white farmers has similar motives: land to parcel out to his loyalists, and a racist/nationalist cause that might win back the support of black voters.

It started in February with a referendum on constitutional changes that would have further enhanced Mugabe's powers -- and given him the legal right to seize white-owned property without compensation.

To his evident astonishment, the voters rejected that proposal: they simply don't believe the old rhetoric any more, and they are totally fed up.

So then Mugabe raised the ante by unleashing the "war veterans" linked to ZANU-PF (many of whom are not genuine vets) to occupy white-owned farms. When the Zimbabwean High Court ruled the occupations illegal, he ordered the police not to intervene. He did not order the murder of David Stevens, but it was implicit in his strategy.

The name of the game is to distract Zimbabweans from their real grievances with a black-white mini-war over colonial land issues that should have been settled peacefully long ago. Since Mugabe and the commercial farmers are political dinosaurs of equally ancient lineage, he may well succeed in the short run.

In the longer run, he is wrecking Zimbabwe. What is new and worrisome is the fact that this time Mugabe's ploy to win another 12 or 18 months in power involves triggering a lethal fight over race and land. This is not good news for South Africa.

Zimbabwe and its neighbor South Africa are different countries. South Africa is far more developed, better educated, more urbanized, and four times as big.

Its white population are not a few tens of thousands of Johnny-come-lately settlers, but millions of people in every walk of life whose ancestors have been in the country for centuries.

South Africa has handled the transition to black majority rule with infinitely more sense and grace than Zimbabwe. The last thing it needs is some idiot up north setting up a violent racial confrontation over land that will re-awaken all the vicious old stereotypes, hatreds and fears in the minds of South African idiots both black and white. But that, it would appear, is what it is going to get.