Daily Times

It seems that the Grand Old Man of Africa and Gucci Grace may have come to the end of the Zimbabwean road. President Robert Mugabe is the continent’s longest serving ruler; having been at the helm for close to 40 years. Indeed, he is the only leader his country has known since its independence from Britain back in 1980.

The West has had a long love-hate relationship with Mugabe. The latter, of course, swept to power on a wave of anti-colonial sentiment. He was once a bona fide freedom fighter; a man who stood defiantly against imperialism and those who accumulated immense wealth as they looted and plundered other peoples’ lands. But it is all too easy for the political idealist, once in power, to become intoxicated and lose sight of the peoples’ mandate. This is what happened to Libya’s Col Gaddafi. Indeed, some cheeky wag might even dare suggest that Britain’s Tony Blair was not immune to such charms. Though, of course, he had no qualms about stepping down even as the citizenry had wanted him to stay; for true to megalomaniac tradition, he always had his eye on the bigger prize. Namely his post-Downing Street career.

And so it was that much of the western world began to lambast Mugabe as a greedy despot who lived the life of Riley while his people starved. And Gucci Grace was far worse, with tales of her passion for diamonds and designer trinkets. It is being said that the army has stepped in to bar her from succeeding her husband to the top. Such fears were being taken seriously after Mugabe’s recent sacking of his number two and given that his wife had been positioning herself as a credible political candidate. Today, she is believed to have fled to Namibia.

And it is true that ordinary Zimbabweans have had it tough. As Britain’s Daily Mail is keen to point out: after almost four decades in power, the average male life expectancy is said to have fallen from 59 to 58. Mr Mugabe is 93 years-old. Someone somewhere should do the maths. It also notes that back in 2015, the UN World Food Programme estimated that a quarter of the country’s children under five were stunted due to malnutrition; while just over half suffered from amnesia.

Just as Zimbabwe was readying to break free of colonial shackles, came the world oil crisis. Thus almost overnight the cost of repaying loans skyrocketed. Forcing the world’s poorest nations to take out new loans — from the World Bank and IMF — simply to stay afloat. And not only that, these latest debts were to be serviced using hard currency only

While there is no denying the rampant abject poverty in Zimbabwe — what is missing from this narrative is any notion of western collective responsibility. The buck must first stop with Britain for its role as colonial master. And then it must go on until it comes to those twin institutions of the new global economic order: the World Bank and IMF. For the latter have done more than their fare share to ensure that Africa remains the world’s poorest continent.

And they did so by way of the infamous Structural Adjustment Polices (SAPs) that featured as part of the economic reform package for the developing world throughout the 1980s and 1990s. Just as Zimbabwe was readying to break free of colonial shackles, came the world oil crisis; as prices of crude increased. Thus almost overnight the cost of repaying loans skyrocketed. Forcing the world’s poorest nations to take out new ones — ostensibly from our old friends, the World Bank and IMF — simply to stay afloat. And as various research papers dealing with the SAPs era have observed, this prompted a starting admission by Francois Mitterrand. The former French President, back in 1994, went on record to concede that despite the huge sums of aid pouring into Africa from the West — capital flows from the former to the latter were far greater.

Significantly, this aid was ‘binded’; meaning it was tied to accepting SAPs. And then came the double-whammy: it was mandatory for those repaying loans to do so in hard currency. Yet for the likes of the Daily Mail, it is suffice to make superbly non-witty quips about how Zimbabwean hyper-inflation made that of Weimar Germany appear to be nothing more than a minor glitch by comparison. Never mind that the hard currency servicing of debts leads to ‘exporting at all costs’. Just as when it comes to repaying IMF interest on loans — poor nations turn towards export-led growth and the courting of multinationals and the veritable ‘race to the bottom’ in terms of lowering the costs of social protection.

Thus when British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson chooses to offer this tuppence-worth on the state of Zimbabwe’s affairs, remarking that Britain will be doing all it can to ensure that the military takeover provides a genuine opportunity to the people of that country to decide their future — this smacks, at best, of insincerity. At worst, of colonial whitewashing. And here, this doesn’t just refer to the period of direct British rule over Zimbabwe. It also includes the West’s role in establishing the World Bank and IMF; with a view towards having these two institutions, founded on the ashes of the Second World War, determining the global economic order; whereby the rich get richer and the poor starve to death. And all this at a time before anti-colonial movements were fruitful. In other words, newly independent states found themselves tied to a system that they had no hand in designing.

So, perhaps, BoJo the Foreign Secretary would consider thinking before he speaks. Or better yet just keep schtum. And do everyone a favour.

The writer is the Deputy Managing Editor, Daily Times. She can be reached at mirandahusain@me.com and tweets @humeiwei

Published in Daily Times, November 18^th 2017.