Mugabe's Win is Zimbabwe's Loss

by Cliopatria

If it is not official it is pretty close. Robert Mugabe's ZANU-PF has bullied and stolen its way to a two-thirds majority. This means that Mugabe is effectively president for life, that he will be able to hand-pick his successor, and that he (and his party, as if there is a worthwhile difference at this point) will be able to change the Zimbabwean Constitution at will.

I thought it would happen, I was more than willing to be proved wrong. From Machiavellian standpoint, Mugabe makes for a heck of a case study, but poor Zimbabweans are the victims who would almost assuredly prefer the case study to be purely theoretical.

I cannot help but wonder if Thabo Mbeki and the rest of the ANC hierarchy in South Africa are not at least a little concerned about what might ensue in the next few years across the Limpopo. Let the be no doubt that whatever it is will have profound effects on the Rainbow Nation, and not for the good.

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Derek Charles Catsam - 4/4/2005

Chris --
Rather than get into another fruitless debate over the nation state, let me make just a fewe comments --
In Africa, I actually agree with you -- the nation state has been an abysmal failure. But the thing is that upon independence, it was the independence leaders themselves who would not be denied the nation state. In other words, the irony is that colonialism almost inevitably made the nation states that followed almost impossibly unmanageable. But those very same leaders when given other options refused to entertain them. When there was a chance for some sort of Pan-Africanism, Nkrumeh and Kenyatta and, yes, Mugabe, flatky refused anything other than the prevailing notions.
So one of our main disagreements is one of practicality versus, say, philosophy. Although philosophically we differ also, my main argument about the nation state is that it is real, and we have to live within that reality.
The problem with Mugabe is, to my mind, not a failure of the nation state, but rather it is a failure of will among Africans who have becaome so knee-jerk about this "Pan Africanist" concept that they actually fail the masses of Africans because their conception is so leader-focused. In other words -- they manage to make Mugabe out to be a victim here as well rather than accept that as an African Leader he bears aan enormous responsibility for the wrongs he has done to his people. There was no reason why Zimbabwe as a nation state had to fgail. There are all sorts of reasons why it could have succeeded. But once Mugabe went around the bend, failure was almost guaranteed. This is especially so given timing -- hby the time South Africa was in a position to do anything (even if they had been right, no one would have taken a white South African regime seriously) South Africa was in no position to act, and by the time they were, Thabo Mbeki was blinded by a false and dangerous sense of fealty to what Mugabe once was rather than what he had become.

Those are my tentative thoughts, anyway.

I'll be back in Odessa tomorrow and hopefully will be ready to post regularly again.

dc

chris l pettit - 4/3/2005

What do you do when you find out that the maize that you have provided to the Zim government has been used to manipulate the population? THis is the situation that South Africa finds itself in now. How do you rememdy things? Because of archaic and useless nation-state "respect" (instead of dealing with the rights of the individuals and community as a whole...i know this statement can be misinterpreted as supporting US, Russian and Israeli atrocities) South Africa felt diplomatically compelled to deliver foodstuffs to the government of the starving people in order to try and bring them aid...and it resulted in political manipulation while people still starve. How does one overcome this? The simple answer is send in civil groups to provide the aid on the ground...but claims regarding sovereignty and the "legality" of the situation are brought up...in addition to governments not liking that sort of thing because it deprives them of the ability to manipulate (I saw the same thing in Sri Lanka, where the government manipulates the distribution of metal sheeting for homes). THis is why letting governments handle aid (or much of anything in international human rights law discourse) is just a total failure. It is high time we start talking about solutions...

CP