(Robert Mugabe)
Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe
Britain, Mugabe,
Zimbabwe, Africa
(originally written in July 2008 and updated as chapter 15 in Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe, Readings from Reading: Essays on African Politics, Genocide, Literature, 2011: 95-100)
(originally written in July 2008 and updated as chapter 15 in Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe, Readings from Reading: Essays on African Politics, Genocide, Literature, 2011: 95-100)
DESPITE THE unprecedented overdrive of its diplomatic pressure on African heads of regime
during the recent African Union assembly in Egypt, Britain failed abysmally to
persuade the summit to condemn Zimbabwe’s June 2008 rigged elections.[1]
For the Gordon Brown administration, this failure was a disappointing
anticlimax in a season of sustained publicity blitz across Britain in which the
state and media found a rare common purpose and a convergence of opinion on the
subject of the demonisation of Robert Mugabe. The typecasting was unmistakeably
swift and assured: Mugabe became the purveyor or indeed inventor of election
rigging in Africa, the grotesque human rights violator, the quintessential,
fiendishly-sutured African dictator. Even provincial newspaper editors and
commentators as well as their radio and television counterparts, usually
concerned with more mundane local issues, became instant experts on Mugabe and
Mugabeism – such was the frenzy of the times! Thanks to this bizarre British
offering of “African history” of the past 50 years, the plaque of shame that
lists the cabal of Africa’s notorious heads of regime and genocidist operatives
of the age appear casually erased for the occasion: Muhammed, Gowon, Danjuma,
al-Bashir, Idi Amin, Mengistu, Bokassa, Awolowo, Buhari, Compaoré, Aminu,
Eyadéma, Haruna, Mobutu, Toure, Enaharo, Abubakar, Akinrinade, Patassé,
Obasanjo, Are, Gbadamosi King, Habré, Adekunle, Ayida, Ali, Babangida, Taiwo …
The irony of the
awkward bind in which Britain currently finds itself in the Zimbabwe saga is
fascinating. Britain is absolutely right that Mugabe rigged those elections.
But everybody knows that. The African “leaders” at the Sharm el Sheikh summit
also know that. More importantly though, they also know that, like Mugabe, each
and everyone of them (total of 53 heads of regime), except, possibly, the
leaderships of Sénégal, Botswana, Ghana and South Africa, is presently head or
beneficiary of a rigged election/no-election regime. Not even Hosni Mubarak,
the host of the gathering, could distinguish between a rigged election and one
designated “free”/“fair”. It is therefore not surprising that, on the eve of
the conference, Mugabe dramatically capitalised on these well-known facts on
bogus elections-that-“elect”-bogus leaders in Africa and dared any of his
fellow summiteers to criticise his own signature of poll rigging!
“Elections” in Kenya, Nigeria, Zimbabwe
Hardly anyone of them took up that challenge. In the end, it was left to Britain, a supposedly non-member of the AU, to lobby delegates hard in hotel suites, conference hall, committee rooms and corridors to sign up to its “Mugabe illegitimate re-election” resolution quest but without success. For African “leaders” and quite a few other observers, Britain still had to explain the rationale for its policy to pick-and-choose from Africa’s rigged-election catalogue. Whilst it recognised and fraternises with the regimes that emerged from the rigged elections in Nigeria (April 2007) and Kenya (December 2007), it demonises and wants the rest of the world to ostracise the regime that took power after the rigged poll in Zimbabwe (June 2008).
Hardly anyone of them took up that challenge. In the end, it was left to Britain, a supposedly non-member of the AU, to lobby delegates hard in hotel suites, conference hall, committee rooms and corridors to sign up to its “Mugabe illegitimate re-election” resolution quest but without success. For African “leaders” and quite a few other observers, Britain still had to explain the rationale for its policy to pick-and-choose from Africa’s rigged-election catalogue. Whilst it recognised and fraternises with the regimes that emerged from the rigged elections in Nigeria (April 2007) and Kenya (December 2007), it demonises and wants the rest of the world to ostracise the regime that took power after the rigged poll in Zimbabwe (June 2008).
Yet no independent
assessments of the three “polls” have shown that the charade in Zimbabwe was
any worse than either the one in Nigeria or in Kenya. This is the case if one
evaluates the comparative data available on the three countries, focusing
particularly on such key indices: (a) competitive environment for all
contestants and their affiliate organisations (b) genuine and free access to
vital campaign resources including the ability to form independent political
parties (c) raise finance (d) access to publicly-owned media outlets for party
broadcasts and advertising (e) access to private media institutions (f)
unhindered campaigns in time and space (g) intimidation (h) pre-“poll” levels
of violence (i) “poll” day/post-“poll” day levels of violence (j) number of
persons murdered (k) number of persons injured (l) homes/other properties
damaged or destroyed (m) displacement of persons, and (n) overall state of
“stability and security” within the country in the aftermath of the “poll”. On
the very crucial subject of fatality in these “polls”, for instance, more
Africans were murdered in Kenya than in Zimbabwe; more Africans were murdered in
Nigeria than in Zimbabwe. Finally, it should be stressed that for the regime in
Nigeria, unlike its counterparts in Kenya and indeed Zimbabwe, its April 2007
“election” was nothing short of a military campaign – aptly, albeit ominously
code-named “operation do-or-die” by regime head Olusegun Obasanjo, a genocidist
general in the Nigeria army during the 1966-1970 Igbo genocide. This was
Obasanjo’s third election rigging in eight years.
Gukurahundi
EXCEPT Britain is perhaps much more
concerned with the destiny of Africans in election-rigging Zimbabwe than
those in the rest of other equally election-rigging African countries which
include Nigeria and Kenya, the June 2008 rigged presidential poll in Zimbabwe
does not, in itself, sufficiently explain the basis of the present British
hostility to Robert Mugabe. One of the myths peddled along the stream of mutual
propaganda by both sides in this crisis is to exaggerate the timeframe of the
“confrontation”. Contrary to current popular perception, Mugabe has generally
had a close and warm relationship with successive British governments during
most of his 28 years of absolutist power. Few African “leaders” of comparable
disposition have had such ties with Britain in recent history.
We mustn’t
forget that the overwhelming majority of victims of Mugabe’s ruthless rule,
right from the outset, have been Africans. In 1982-83, two years after he came
to power following the “restoration” of Zimbabwean independence, Mugabe ordered
the notorious Gukurahundi or the 5th brigade of his military forces to
embark on a devastating, murderous campaign against the Ndebele people in the
south of the country.[2]
A total of 20000 Ndebele were slaughtered during the pogrom.[3]
Mugabe essentially assumed supreme political power across Zimbabwe after these
murders. The Ndebele were the core electoral constituency for the ZAPU
liberation movement, which, in alliance with Mugabe’s ZANU, had won the
pre-“restoration” of independence election organised and supervised by
Britain.
At the time
of the Ndebele massacre, the British still exercised some administrative
“oversight” on Zimbabwean security and land resources, an important feature of
the “restoration” of independence settlement worked out in London in 1979/early
1980. Britain was therefore fully aware of the Ndebele atrocity. The Gukurahundi
campaign was comprehensively and extensively covered across the world’s media
then. In 1984, barely one year after the Gukurahundi outrage, the
prestigious Edinburgh University awarded Mugabe an honorary doctorate degree for
“services to education in Africa”.[4]
Ten years later, the Zimbabwean “leader” made an official visit to London. The
British state used the grand occasion to crown its special relationship with
Mugabe by appointing him the prestigious honorary Knight Grand Cross of the
Order of the Bath (Following the June 2008 revocation of this honour, there was
consternation and disappointment among some in African-centred intellectual
circles in Britain who were unaware that Mugabe had all along, until very recently,
been a proud recipient of British knighthood!).[5]
THIS COSY relationship began souring in the
late 1990s. The Blair government that took office in 1997 reneged on making the
annual British financial payment to the Mugabe regime (that had been paid since
1980 – part of the London pre-“restoration” of independence settlement) to
enable it engage in the perverse venture of “buying back” African lands
expropriated by the British invasion of Zimbabwe during the course of the
previous century. Mugabe responded by implementing a “land recovery programme”,
which should have been part of the strategic goal of the liberation project
back in 1980. The Mugabe “version” being executed 20 years later was clearly
opportunistic, a hardly disguised stratagem for the personal survival of a
dictator! The compelling lesson of the belated Mugabe-British discord couldn’t
be clearer: Mugabe could murder and murder as many Africans in Zimbabwe and
trample on their other human rights as he deemed fit but there was a “red line”
he mustn’t cross – harm Europeans in Zimbabwe. For Britain, Mugabe’s “land
recovery” exercise was just “land robbery” that harmed Europeans in Zimbabwe.
He had crossed that “red line” and must be punished!
First steps
IT IS NOT inconceivable that Britain
decided to focus on the rigged Zimbabwe poll, rather than address all the
others in Africa, as the start to challenging pervasive election-robbery in
Africa. After all, one must start somewhere! Maybe Prime Minister Brown wants
to re-launch a new “ethical foreign policy” that focuses on Africa after the
disastrous collapse of the one initiated by his predecessor (Blair) in the late
1990s/early 2000s. Under the aegis of the former, paradoxically, Britain, in
the August-September 2001 conference on racism in South Africa, vehemently
opposed African peoples’ calls for reparations from Britain for its central
role in the pan-European execution of the African holocaust and the phenomenal
wealth it accrued in the process.[6] In
the same period, Britain emerged as the leading arms exporter to Africa, now
earning at least US$2 billion per annum. At the height of the dreadful wars in
the Africa Great Lakes region in 2000, Britain sold weapons to both sides of
the conflict. Charles Onyango-Obbo, the respected Ugandan journalist, recalls:
Britain is supporting both sides – it just robs them of any moral authority and a lot of people rightly do despise the British government in this affair.[7]
IT IS never too late to establish this
moral position, even after 500 long years ... If indeed Brown’s intention on
his Zimbabwe “confrontation” is to embark on a British policy of amends in
Africa, the following steps would be profoundly rewarding:
1. Britain
has to expand its current “illegitimate”-branding of the Mugabe regime to
encompass the two other rigged elections that occurred in Africa since April
2007 – namely, Nigeria and Kenya. Brown will soon be hosting Umaru Yar’Adua, a
key participant and chief beneficiary of the April 2007 rigged election in
Nigeria, in a London summit.[8]
Should Brown be hosting Yar’Adua while ostracising Mugabe? If so, Brown must
clarify his position to an understandably highly sceptical world.
2. Britain would need to stop its present
“convenient” reading of African recent history on the question of election
rigging. Britain inaugurated election rigging in Africa during the closing days
of its formal occupation of the continent. This was its policy of perpetuating
its control of politics and economics in Africa even after “withdrawal”. James
Robertson, the British occupation governor, rigged the 1959 pre-“restoration”
of independence legislative and executive poll in Nigeria to ensure that power
went to pro-British clients in the north region who strenuously opposed the
liberation of the country led by Igbo people. There has been no free or fair
election in Nigeria since then. Three years earlier, Robertson, then occupation
governor in the Sudan, had rigged the poll there in favour of the Arab minority
population who are still entrenched in power till this day
3. Britain was central, along with the Nigeria
state, in planning and executing the Igbo genocide of 1966-1970. A total of 3.1
million Igbo, a quarter of the nation’s population then, were murdered. It was
the foundational genocide of post-(European)conquest Africa. It was Britain’s
“punishment” of the Igbo for daring to lead the struggle for the freeing of
Nigeria that began in the 1940s. Twice, during that struggle, the British
occupation had casually watched two organised pogroms against the Igbo in north
Nigeria (1945, 1953) which were dress rehearsals for the subsequent genocide.
As I argue in my Biafra Revisited, Britain must apologise to the Igbo
for its involvement in this crime against humanity. It should pay reparations
to the survivors and lastly, but surely not the least, support current efforts
to bring individuals and institutions in Nigeria, Britain and elsewhere
involved in this genocide to justice. A number of prominent Nigerians involved
in the genocide are still alive and must be indicted unfailingly in
international criminal courts: Danjuma, Gowon, Buhari, Babangida, Haruna, Are,
Enaharo, Aminu, Gbadamosi King, Abubakar, Obasanjo, Akinrinade, Adekunle,
Ayida, Ali, Taiwo …
4. A fortnight ago, Hakeem Baba-Ahmed, a permanent secretary of the regime in Abuja, made an astonishing declaration to a meeting of the country’s senate committee on transport. Baba-Ahmed said that the strategic Onicha bridge, linking east and west Igboland, is “collapsing”.[9] He added, quite lackadaisically, that “there wasn’t anything” his regime could do about this unfolding grave emergency.[10] Millions of Igbo and others use this bridge annually. Successive Nigerian regimes have always regarded Britain as their “most reliable” foreign ally.[11] It is therefore incumbent on the British to advise their Nigerian friends at Abuja, the occupying power in Igboland since 1970, of their international responsibilities on this bridge. The current Yar’Adua regime in Abuja and the previous one should have no doubts whatsoever that they will individually and collectively be held responsible in the international criminal courts for any consequences brought about by the collapse of the Onicha bridge on Igbo life, Igbo property, Igbo income, Igbo opportunities, environmental degradation, etc., etc.
5. Britain
is the premier arms exporter to Africa. This is what keeps Africa’s genocide
state, the bane of African social existence, very much alive. In turn, this
state organises mass slaughters of peoples and nations, asphyxiates
opportunities for its citizens, fuels the rigging of elections ... Britain
can singularly begin to change this dreadful dynamic by imposing a
comprehensive arms embargo on all countries throughout Africa. Brown is not
required to go to parliament to seek approval for this historic move. The
measure can be taken in the next Tuesday, weekly cabinet meeting: 15 July 2008.
Twitter@HerbertEkweEkwe
(Charles Mingus Sextet – with Eric Dolphy, Cornell University 1964, “Meditations” [personnel: Mingus, bass; Johnny Coles, trumpet; Dolphy, flute, bass clarinet; Clifford Jordan, tenor saxophone; Jaki Byard, piano; Dannie Richmond, drums; recorded: live, Cornell University, 18 March 1964])
[1]“Brown makes Zimbabwe cash
promise”, BBC News, 29 June 2008, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/7480117.stm
(accessed 3 July 2010). For the conference communiqué, see “African Union Summit
Resolution on Zimbabwe: Adopted at the 11th Ordinary Session of the African Union
Assembly, 1 July 2008, Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt”,
http://www.newzimbabwe.com/pages/gukgenocide11.12299.html
(accessed 30 October 2010).
[3]Ibid.
[4]http://www.newzimbabwe.com/pages/uz19.16507.html
(accessed 30 October 2010)
[5]http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/article1340277.ece
(accessed 30 October
2010).
[6]Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe, African
Literature in Defence of History: An essay on Chinua Achebe (Dakar and Reading: African Renaissance, 2001), pp. 71-72.
[7]Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe, Biafra
Revisited (Dakar and Reading: African Renaissance, 2006), p. 128.
[8]“Prime Minister Brown meets
with Nigerian President YarAdua”, Joint press
conference, 10 Downing Street, London, 16 July
2008,
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vK_bFZ4gdaw
(accessed 14 February
2010).
[9]http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Naija-news/message/5270
(accessed 13 June 2010).
[10]Ibid.
[11]Cf. Yar’Adua comments during
that July 2008 London joint press conference with
Brown, “Prime Minister Brown meets with
Nigerian President YarAdua”.
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