 Range Rovers, four-wheel drives and men and women in traditional dress on horses passed me on both sides unconcerned that we were driving the wrong way through their funeral procession. Then they were gone. A glimpse of Africa. I met Robert Mugabe just once, at Lancaster House, at the independence talks presided over by Sir Christopher Soames. Mugabe called me to see him. I assumed because I was then General Secretary of War on Want, an NGO supplying his Zanu refugee camps in Mozambique, and he wanted to know about food aid. But not so. He knew I had been a European Commission official. He asked me about the Lome Convention and how Zimbabwe could benefit. His political secretary wrote it all down.
Mugabe led the talks at Lancaster House because Zanu had done what the British Foreign Office had least expected and had beaten the experienced old hand Joshu Nkomo’s Zapu as well as the Rev. Albert Sithole’s centrist party, and was going to lead Zimbabwe to independence.
Soon after Lancaster House, I visited the new Zimbabwe and I had a strange feeling that things were not quite right compared to South Africa or Namibia. I remember Mugabe was said to be on holiday when the North Korean trained 5th Battalion did a minor pogrom in Bulawayo. Why this aggressive push for a one-party state when Sam Njomo and Nelson Mandela came to represent multi-party democracies? Where did this instinct come from? The African authoritarianism of Mobuto Sese Seko and Gnassingbe Eyedema? Or European Stalinism with a dash of Kim Il Sung? What happened to this bright and promising young man I met so briefly at Lancaster House? Where did he go? What swallowed him up in the mist of African politics?
Land reform gone wrong.
He was bound to try and lead a radical land reform programme, but why did he leave it so late? And why so wrapped up with political patronage, land and jobs for supporters when it could have achieved so much? Even Smith had done better to help small farmers to beat sanctions.
In neighbouring Namibia, there was no sense in breaking up white commercial farms in areas of low black population, and the large black population was right up north. The farming map of Namibia had been determined by the limits of Afrikaaner and German hydrology 30 years before. The commercial farms were where available water technology had worked, and the deep artesian water in the north was still there, ready to be used one day for development. Namibian thinking reflected pragmatism and reconciliation as well as the realities of demographics and hydrology.
In Zimbabwe, by contrast, belated land reform took on the character of a latter day anti-colonial and class struggle, rewarding aging supposed freedom fighters, or political supporters, in defiance of the British colonial inheritance, to bring down the white farming class. The result was to dismantle what worked and made the country prosperous without substituting something viable. The theory of land reform from a radical European textbook without the practice of achieving real results in social and economic transformation or production. The degeneration of rural radicalism into an authoritarian patron client state.The end game.
The rest was accounted for by bureaucratic ossification; accumulation of subservient advisors and exclusion of good ones; the tendency that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely; the loyalty of the security forces until the last moment; the inevitable reflection of old loyalties from the bush; power politics; self-interest, and fear of change.
Now the end game is being played out. The old lion appears to be losing his last election battle. If it goes to the second round and he loses what will he do? Will he go quietly, or play his last card, the military card, and end his days protected by his men in uniform, a perverse tribute to the book by Ruth First that power comes out of the barrel of a gun?Perhaps his last instincts are from the heart of the old Africa that the old lion will never go except to his last resting place.
Hopefully a peaceful solution will be found. I say goodbye sadly to the bright young man who promised so much and cry for all those years we lost. Poor Zimbabwe. Whenever, at last, change does come, hope and pray for Zimbabwe to never again place such dependence and power upon the shoulders of one man.
Dr Terry Lacey is a development economist who writes about economic and social development and relations with the EU.