No wonder Africa is called the dark continent. No wonder Africa keeps falling behind the rest of the world. No wonder there is starvation and poverty in Africa. No wonder Africans invest a large proportion of their investments offshore. No wonder so many Africans are leaving Africa. Africa has inflicted demise on itself and it still won’t learn any lessons.
It seems that if you take logic, put it in a bucket and turn it upside down, you will get close to the logic of how Africa’s leadership thinks and behaves.
Take this week’s emergency SADC meeting in Tanzania. They met to discuss the shocking situation in Zimbabwe. This country was once the breadbasket of Southern Africa. It fed many of its neighbours whose earlier independence and lack of good governance ensured food insecurity. In many cases, its leaders looted their countries’ treasuries.
It didn’t take long for Zimbabwe to fall in line. Mugabe’s rapaciously corrupt regime applied this same “african logic” to ruling Zimbabwe but this time, their intention was to destroy anything and everything that they could not control. In a matter of just 7 years, as a result of losing an election, Mugabe’s zanupf has destroyed productivity in just about every segment of industry, agriculture and mining. One thing is clear, Mugabe’s regime only knows how to destroy. It has added not one iota of value to Zimbabwe since coming to power. It has effectively hijacked Zimbabwe by rigging elections since 2000. As long as zanuPF remain in power, Zimbabwe will continue to go down the plug hole.
Their blueprint for power is rather simplistic, but highly effective. Establish a small loyal elite, destroy the middle class and keep the rest of the population dependent by creating conditions for a large peasant poverty-stricken population. In political terms, their reverse logic keeps them in power – forever. Their overiding priority is power and that is why politics dictates economics in Africa. The reverse is the case in the free world.
This week, we saw Zimbabwe’s vital statistics breaking more barriers. The inflation rate went to 3000% and the currency went through the floor. For the ordinary citizen, there is no hope and that is why so many are risking the crocodile infested waters of the Limpopo to escape the horror.
The President of Tanzania called together an urgent meeting of SADC to discuss the Zimbabwe situation. 14 Presidents flew into Tanzania and deliberated. As expected, they shot the messenger. They blamed everyone else except the culprit. Mugabe came away from this meeting stronger than ever. He gloated on his way out saying that these 14 Presidents gave him their full support and that the beating that opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai received from the police was because “he deserved it”.
These 14 Presidents believed Mugabe when he told them that Zimbabwe’s economic melt-down was caused by western sanctions. How on earth can travel sanctions on known zanupf human rights violators cause economic melt-down? But that’s the logic and these Presidents believe obviously believe it or surely they wouldn’t have called for their removal.
These 14 Presidents, it seems, also believed that the cause of the breakdown in law and order is caused by the “violent” Movement for Democratic Change (MDC). Is their intelligence so bad as that they don’t know about the 200 odd MDC members who have been kidnapped by Mugabe’s militia and severely beaten in the last two weeks? One has to wonder. The current whereabouts of many of these people remains unknown. In all likelihood, the could be dead as a result of Mugabe’s “Degrees in Violence”, as Mugabe himself has so aptly put it.
Robert Mugabe is a violent dictator with the blood of thousands of Zimbabweans on his hands.
It seems that his kind of uncivilised behaviour must be okay in Africa because over this last week, he was supported by 14 Presidents.
