Sometimes, as a person or a country, you draw the short straw. You could be living in an up-and-coming country like Brazil, for example, with hopes for a great future and some prosperity, only to have a right-wing narcissist like Jair Bolsonaro be elected president — and all your hopes of a bright future are dashed. A great country, poor leadership. The only question there is whether the country can survive a bad leader.
Or you could be SA, where the economy has been destroyed by theft and looting under former president Jacob Zuma. Then you have a pretty decent guy like Cyril Ramaphosa being elected. Only, the man is shackled by his party, its recent history, his own comrades and his own diffidence. Nice guy, very bad political detritus.
Then you have Zimbabwe. It’s neither this nor that. It’s a double whammy. The place has experienced 40 full years of poor leadership, 40 full years of bad policies and 40 full years of nonstop looting.
Right now, it does not at all seem as if it’s about to emerge from its nightmare. While many of us in the rest of the world are hopeful we can change a bad system, or that we can get rid of a poor leader, Zimbabwe is a country that seems to have neither the ability nor the will nor the hope of escaping its shackles. Let’s not beat about the bush here. The country to the north of us is a failed state at every level you can imagine. And we, from Thabo Mbeki to Zuma and now Ramaphosa, have helped its looters along very nicely for the past 20 years. Indeed, the ANC has been applauding as that country’s elite has looted and plundered.
I hate to say I told you so, but when strongman Robert Mugabe was toppled in 2017 I warned: "It is so tempting to jump up with joy and ululate with the oppressed people of Zimbabwe … it would be foolish to do so. Zimbabwe has been a country of false dawns and dashed hopes since Mugabe took power in 1980."
Zimbabwe is a textbook example of how to turn a country of great potential into a basket case
It still is. Zimbabwe’s economy has completely collapsed. Its leaders are looting the country and setting themselves up offshore. The country is a dictatorship where opposition activists and leaders have been arrested, detained, tortured and menaced over the past 20 years, and particularly now that the coronavirus has brought suffering on the country’s people.
The last election was a sham. The one before that was a sham. Those who have been able to do so, have fled and are all over Southern Africa.
Last week the military shut down the stock exchange and suspended mobile money transactions. Al Jazeera reports that unemployment has reached an estimated 90%. There is no fuel or food. Bloomberg reports that inflation is at 800%.
"Civil servants earn a 10th of what they took home two years ago," Bloomberg writes. "Most Zimbabweans haven’t experienced such pain since Mugabe led his liberation army to independence from white minority rule in 1980."
Meanwhile, opposition activists and civil society figures are now routinely arrested, tortured and charged with crimes as ridiculous as "undermining the president’s authority".
A few weeks ago security forces seized the opposition’s headquarters. Who does that except a dictatorship?
Zimbabwe is a textbook example of how not to do things and how to turn a country of great potential into a basket case. It is everything we should avoid: thinking that leaders are gods, not standing up for ourselves and our citizenry, deifying leaders.
Most important, it is the death of voice. Zimbabwe got to the horrible state it is in because our spineless leaders — from Mbeki to Ramaphosa — used their voices not to help forge democracy in that country but to empower a murderous regime. They played politics and enabled a tyrant. The result is there for all to see.
Oh, I know. There will be a lot of bleating from a certain tired brigade of people who love to ennoble dictators such as Mugabe. The answer to their inane arguments is to point them north and ask them: would you live in Zimbabwe yourself? Not one of them would say yes.
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