With the Commonwealth having come to Guyana this week, it is perhaps a good time to reflect on the situation in Zimbabwe, which withdrew from the Commonwealth in December 2003. This was due to what President Robert Mugabe regarded as unwarranted and unwelcome Commonwealth pressure to effect national reconciliation and to resolve the political and economic crisis crippling the country.
Four years later, Zimbabwe steadfastly remains outside the Commonwealth and is closer than ever to complete collapse. Human rights continue to deteriorate alarmingly. Annual inflation ranges between the government’s figure of an incomprehensible 7,600 percent and independent estimates of an even more unimaginable 13,000 percent. 80 percent of the population live in extreme poverty and some 25 percent of its 12 million people have become political and economic refugees, mostly in neighbouring countries. Once Southern Africa’s bread basket, Zimbabwe is undeniably a basket case of a country, and the blame lies squarely at the 83 year-old Mr Mugabe’s feet.
Since Mr Mugabe began confiscating white-owned farms in 2000, Zimbabwe has gone from being an agricultural exporter to a country where half the population faces starvation and malnutrition. Mr Mugabe himself blames “Western sabotage” for the situation, rather than his own actions.
Mr Mugabe’s land “reform” was supposed to redress the wrongs of white colonialism and the imperfections of the independence deal made with Margaret Thatcher’s government. It was supposed to give the land back to indigenous Zimbabweans and make the country self-sufficient. Ironically, the land grab has made half the population dependent on the outside world for food and the constantly maligned British government is now the biggest single donor paying for emergency food aid to Zimbabwe.
Whether one believes that Mr Mugabe is justified or not in his policy and actions, the sad fact remains that he is starving his country to death under a brutally repressive regime and, to the world outside Africa at least, has sullied irrevocably his credentials as a hero of the southern African independence struggle.
Herein lies the problem.
To date, all efforts to engage Mr Mugabe and his ruling Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF) government to promote national reconciliation and facilitate the country’s return to the Commonwealth fold have foundered, not least because Mr Mugabe’s immediate neighbours and colleagues appear reluctant to push an African hero into a corner. Pressure from the EU, the UK and the US has also helped to bolster Mr Mugabe’s anti-imperialist credentials, as he has been able to argue that he is the victim of a neo-colonialist conspiracy.
To most non-Africans, Mr Mugabe is clearly off his rocker. But for Africans, he is an African problem that must be dealt with by Africans in an African way.
In March this year, following a crackdown on the opposition Movement for Democratic Change, the Southern African Development Community (SADC) asked South African President Thabo Mbeki to mediate between Mr Mugabe’s government and the MDC. But there has been little progress.
Now, as elections approach in March 2008, with Mr Mugabe seeking re-election and the country slipping further and further into starvation and hopelessness, the need for a solution is more pressing than ever.
Last month, the International Crisis Group (ICG), an independent, non-profit NGO, based in Brussels, comprising several eminent international personalities working to prevent and resolve conflict across the world, published a report on Zimbabwe, with recommendations for a regional solution to resolve the crisis in that country.
Most notably, the ICG recommended that international support be given to the Mbeki-led mediation and to a carrot-and-stick approach by SADC to “use its leverage” to meet Zimbabwe’s request for an economic rescue package, in exchange for “full
