Mugabe; socialism at it’s best

Photo from CNN/AFP/Getty

Saturday Robert Mugabe, socialist President of Zimbabwe (formerly Rhodesia) stands for reelection again. The Associated Press illustrates the economic situation there;

The word is out: The Spar supermarket has bread at only $7 million a loaf. People rush to the shelf duly marked $7 million, but by the time they reach the till with their hyper-inflated Zimbabwean dollars, the price is up to $25 million.

That equals just 62 American cents, more than a teacher makes in a week. “How can we afford to eat that?” a woman exclaims. Customers leave their loaves at the counter and walk out with their brick-sized bundles of bank notes, angry and disconsolate.

Yet they continue to vote for Mugabe. A rational person might admit failure, but no one has ever accused Mugabe of being a rational person. A Reuters story in the New York Times demonstrates his vote-buying;

President Robert Mugabe gave out 450 cars to senior and midlevel doctors at government hospitals in what opponents say is a vote-buying campaign ahead of Saturday’s presidential election. […] He also promised the doctors houses within two years.

Funny how that happens a few days before the election. A CNN article briefly describes the economic conditions Zimbabweans face;

 Zimbabweans are the poorest they have ever been since the nation became a democracy. Unemployment is estimated at around 80 percent, inflation is more than 100,000 percent, and hundreds of thousands are fleeing the country to earn more elsewhere than they would back home.

Mugabe has been in office since the country, then called Rhodesia, gained independence from Britain in 1980.

He was once respected as a liberation hero, but observers now criticize him for repressive tactics and corruption, and blame him for the country’s dire economic state.

Yesterday, the Zimbabwe courts sentenced a white farmer to five years in prison (suspended under the condition he comply with the law) for refusing to vacate his property for more of Mugabe’s land reform – seizing white-owned farms and turning them into failing collectives. (Wall Street Journal link)

 A Harare magistrate gave Deon Theron, a vice president of the white-dominated Commercial Farmers Union, one month to leave his farm and a six-month prison sentence, suspended for five years on condition he does not violate the Land Act. Mr. Theron’s lawyer said he would appeal the conviction and sentence.

The 53-year-old dairy farmer was convicted Tuesday of unlawfully remaining on his farm after it was declared state land. The prosecutor had called for his imprisonment. The prosecutor, who refused to give his name to reporters but was addressed by the magistrate as Mr. Zvakare, urged a quick sentencing and said it was “a serious criminal case.”

But his target hasn’t always been the white residents of Zimbabwe writes the Wall Street Journal editorial board;

His first target, and greatest victims, were his fellow blacks. In the mid-1980s, he unleashed a campaign of torture and murder against political opponents in Matabeleland that claimed 20,000 lives. Later, he razed shantytowns in the big cities inhabited by poor supporters of the opposition Movement for Democratic Change. Trade unions, journalists, independent courts and other institutions, and political opponents received the African “big man” treatment. Only in 2000 did Mr. Mugabe, out of desperation, target the country’s few remaining whites. The subsequent dispossession of white-owned farms destroyed Zimbabwe’s agricultural economy and brought the country’s troubles fully to the world’s attention.

So why starvation? Well, all great communist revolutions used famine as a weapon to control people. Lenin, as far back as 1891, thought of famine as a tool for communists to gain control when he refused to help in own home town. “Famine,” he explained, “in destroying the outdated peasant system, would usher in socialism.” He later presided over a two year famine (1921-1922) after the revolution that cost an estimated 5 million Russian souls – Stalin also forced a famine on the country and it’s satellites that killed another 5 million people. The toll from Mao’s “Great Leap Forward” will probably never be counted reliably.

So Mugabe is only following in the steps of great communists and keeping the dream alive.

Category: Economy, Foreign Policy