Zimbabwe, until recently Africa’s most open and attractive society, has signaled clearly that it is prepared to tolerate no limits on its power, whatever the cost to its image at home and abroad.
The independent legal system – one of the last functioning institutions of the State – suffered a major blow this week when authorities threatened striking magistrates and judges over appallingly low salaries.
Elsewhere, threats of force have proved far from hollow. At least three opposition activists have been murdered in the past one month, in incidents involving State security forces. Many others have been critically injured. As is now usual when the government’s opponents fall victim to violence, no arrests have been made and no leads are being followed.
The media has also come under attack, with abductions and torture of journalists on the rise, as well as security service hit lists targeting political writers leaked from official sources. When diplomats made a formal protest, Mugabe responded in characteristic fashion: all the first secretaries who had demanded security guarantees for the named journalists have been summoned to the Foreign Ministry and accused of abusing their diplomatic status by interfering with the workings of Zimbabwean justice.
The Zimbabwean heard that Mugabe’s Foreign chief, Simbarashe Mumbengegwi has called a meeting with foreign diplomats to denounce them and the international media for having distorted the political environment leading to polls as having been characterized by violence.
Zimbabwe … will never in future brook the phenomenon of dirty, interfering hands in its domestic affairs, he said, according diplomats.
Analysts in Harare suggest that the government’s ultra-hardline stance stems in part from Mugabe’s own bruised vanity, in part from political and economic desperation, and in part from shrewd calculation.
For the past seven years, the former guerrilla leader has been the victim of a downward economic spiral caused largely by his own policies.
In particular, Zimbabwe has struggled to cope with his disastrous price war edict that has resulted in empty supermarket shelves. Combined with worsening corruption and mismanagement, unemployment, interest rates and food prices have soared. Faced with open hostility on the streets of Harare, Mugabe has sought to bolster his support, by pursuing populist indigenization policies that have, however, drastically hurt investor confidence.
Mugabe’s deliberate effort to radicalise and racialise the State he created appears to have shored up his own power in the short term, but at a high economic and diplomatic price.
Internationally, Mugabe’s frequent racial outbursts and his clear sponsorship of attacks on foreigners, opponents, the media and the judiciary have made him a pariah.
A proud freedom fighter who spent years in white Rhodesian prisons, who was feted as a leader of the non-aligned movement and an apartheid era champion of African rights, is now commonly mentioned in the same breath as tin-pot dictators. Politically and economically, the government continues to wallow in deep trouble.
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Post published in: News