By Tawanda Majoni
“Blair, keep your England, and let me keep my Zimbabwe!” Those were the dramatic words by President Robert Mugabe 14 years ago. They earned him a plump point as a champion of the African Renaissance.
His point was, the Labour Party in Britain was trying to bring back colonialism by the back door for the land reform programme that Mugabe wanted the world to believe was meant to empower millions of landless Zimbabweans.
In a very good measure, he succeeded. For example, sometime in 2003, Radio Islam phoned me. They asked to interview me, as a green editor who had just written on the land reform programme, analysing the (im)prudence of the same. I agreed to the interview. But there was a big catch to it. Just before we went live on air, the host played a jingle: “Blair, keep your England, and let me keep my Zimbabwe!”
I sighed and giggled awkwardly. The host was giving me a hint about how to approach the subject. And the attitude was, Mugabe is a big man; he has told off Britain and he has a super point. Mugabe’s propaganda rant against Britain was part of his and the Zanu PF anti-western message that got traction in quite a good number of nations in the Developing South.
From 2000, President Mugabe and his party have used several types of well-defined and systematically sustained propaganda pitches to massage the local electorate and influence the perceptions of African, developing nations’ and even western citizens. All with substantial success.
Anti-west rhetoric was one of those. More precisely, they managed to sway party supporters and external admirers, particularly those with a leftist inclination, with the regime change mantra. Here, they accused western powers, especially Britain, the US and a number of EU members, of deploying subtle but also overt methods to weaken the Mugabe establishment and eventually get rid of it.
Party strategists did a good job around the restrictive measures imposed by the EU, through Article 96 of the Cotonou Agreement in 2002 and the US’s Zimbabwe Democracy and Economic Recovery Act (ZIDERA) of 2001. The two were meant to force the government and its proxies to acknowledge human rights, democratic principles and the rule of law, essentially.
The Zanu PF outfit called them sanctions and insisted that they were designed to cause a lot of suffering among Zimbabweans, whip their anger and compel them to rise up against the sitting regime. The propagandists were re not outright liars of course, especially as regards the impact of the sanctions, aka restrictive measures.
I was there in May 2012 when visiting UN Commissioner for Human Rights, Navi Pillay, told us that her organisation’s position was that the “targeted” sanctions must be discontinued because they had brought a lot of misery on ordinary people.
That was a big score for the Zanu PF side of the inclusive government, especially as the other two parties making up the coalition, MDC-T and MDC-N, concurred. The regime agenda propaganda found a soft nest in the opposition, particularly Morgan Tsvangirai’s MDC, that Zanu PF repeatedly insisted was coming in as a western proxy of neo-imperialism. The west made mistakes that Mugabe and his party mined.
In the early years, a number of western governments did not hide their preference for Tsvangirai, nor their contempt towards Mugabe. This tendency provided ample support to the regime change theory, and many ended up feeling that Mugabe was a martyr.
Besides the anti-west talk that Mugabe used quite cleverly at his rallies and on international podiums, Zanu PF sustained itself on the empowerment ballyhoo. This even preceded the regime change hype, when in 2000 the regime embarked on an unplanned fast track land redistribution programme that booted out a whole county of commercial white farmers. The argument was, this was necessary to empower thousands of land hungry Zimbabweans.
The trick worked well during the 2000, 2005, 2008 and 2013 elections, together with some by-elections in between. Many people ended up thinking that Mugabe loved them so much he had finally decided to gift them with free land. Interestingly, even those from the west overall never argued with the need to give people land, just the way it was done.
Then this empowerment words art took a new nuance, assuming the tag of indigenisation several years later. Blacks had taken the land, but now needed the factories, so went the propaganda. Many poor and unemployed youths were tickled. They were even prepared to maim, rape and kill during the 2008 presidential run-off because the party was dangling the indigenisation carrot before their hungry eyes.
Critical polls are coming, probably by July 2018. President Mugabe, 92 now, will be older, more tired and facing his sternest electoral test then. He will certainly not have rigged the economy by the time we arrive at the general elections.
His lieutenants want him to hand over the baton and Zanu PF is acutely divided. Yet he wants to run as president again and Zanu PF is used to ruling, so it must win. That’s an uphill task for Mugabe. Worse still, the propaganda bag is sieving and it is difficult to imagine what popular pitch he and his party will weave this time around.
In Britain, there is no more Tony Blair to talk about. That guy lied about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and got the boot as a thank you. BBC, CNN and other western media cheered him along as he chanted anti-Saddam Hussein slogans. Only as far as the soldiers hadn’t started getting back home in body bags.
Then there was John Major, and Mugabe was getting less interested, a bit exhausted. Still, he pulled the sanctions mantra to much applause. Now there is (what’s his name?) David Cameron. This guy is too worked up that Britons don’t want his plan for the UK to remain in the European Union folder, so they will Brexit. He can’t stand the heat, so he will be leaving office in the next three or so months.
Still, Mugabe is telling the West to go hang, for an imagined grand regime change agenda. As if the west ever wanted to commit suicide. But no-one is giving him an ear anymore. The record is too broken he may just as well start dancing as he hums.
The likes of Saviour Kasukuwere and Kembo Mohadi might still be rattling on with regime change. Recently, they accused citizen activists who protested in Beitbridge of hewing the wood for political parties working for Zanu P’s ouster.
That will not stick, of course, because people are not fools anymore. Everyone knows that the ultimate goal of any sane political opposition party is regime change, with maybe the exception of Acie Lumumba’s Viva Zimbabwe that seems to think, weirdly, that one must launch a party to confess to past corruption. It is these very people the ruling party would want to lure back who are angry that their goods are being confiscated at the border, so they will not be in a rush to believe any regime change goo.
Besides, the EU has learnt fast. It is no longer openly opposing President Mugabe’s government. In fact, the western bloc resumed direct economic interaction with Harare in November 2014, after more than 14 years of working through chosen agencies such as UNDP. That will make any rant about EU regime change a song for crèche freshers.
No-one, not even the propagandists themselves, will care to listen. Almost all the other suspects have been removed from the “appropriate measures” adopted under Article 96. ZIDERA might still be there on paper, but the US is less interested now and even Mugabe has grown too hoarse to continue on it.
Similarly, for several years now, the IMF has been engaging Zimbabwe quite seriously through the Staff Monitored Programme (SMP). Africa Confidential recently told us that, come September, the fund, together with its sibling, the World Bank, and the African Development Bank (AfDB), could restore direct financial aid to Zimbabwe.
For a good measure, Mugabe will not be able to rave against African “sell-outs” anymore because they let him come, yap and then nod off at both the African Union and SADC where they made him believe he was the chair and was therefore making things happen.
The land reform programme is a dead horse now. People don’t want to be told they have been empowered on wasteland, especially as they have to contend with all sorts of El Ninos and La Ninos that savage their fields year in and year out.
It will be difficult for President Mugabe and his party factions to try and hawk away the MDC and Joice Mujuru’s ZimPF as proxies of the west. Tsvangirai is no longer receiving any aid from the west. That is why people are now going to his rallies on the backs of asses.
Mujuru might be representing a new source of political hope for those that might want regime change, but Zanu PF would have to dig very dip to prove that it’s the west seeking to topple him through her. She was one of his for a long time, and many would find it hard to believe that she can be used as a pawn by the west.
That leaves the ruling party and its leader in a big rut. They might just as well start thinking of how to make us believe that the billions from Marange were stolen by the villagers now resettled at Arda Transau. Well, that’s a hard sell in itself, of course.
