With the death, last Friday, of former Zimbabwean strongman, Robert Mugabe, all but one of Africa’s independence leaders have passed away. There is a feeling by many contemporary African thinkers that either due to inexperience, naivety or inordinate desire to inherit the powers and privileges of the departing colonial officers, they failed to advance the independence they won beyond mere “flag” independence. In many African countries, socio-economic conditions actually deteriorated after independence.
No one single leader embodies this disappointment more than Bob Mugabe. Being a latecomer to the game of independence, Mugabe was expected to have learnt from the many mistakes of African leaders, who either due to struggle for power or bad governance, have ran their countries aground.
Indeed, he started quite well. He led the country through a golden period of economic growth, infrastructure and educational development that was the envy of the rest of the continent. He prioritised the building of schools and hospitals turning Zimbabwe into one of the countries with the highest literacy rate in Africa.
Zimbabwean agriculture was booming. With some of the richest farmland in Africa, it was known as the breadbasket of Africa and is a net exporter of maize, cotton, beef, tobacco, roses, and sugarcane. Knowing that the productive base of the country was still firmly in white hands, he even became very reconciliatory at independence, preaching reconciliation and unity of all races, assuring white farmers many of whom moved to Zimbabwe after 1980.
But his handling of the land in question was to be his greatest undoing.
In the 1979, Lancaster House agreement that ended white rule and granted Zimbabwe independence, Mugabe and his group of freedom fighters were prevailed upon to wait ten years (1980 – 1990) before redistributing land to black majority forced out of their land (the land question was central to the bush war and demand for independence).
Mugabe who once promised “none of the white exploiters will be allowed to keep an acre”, gave in after Britain and the US promised to provide $1 billion and $750 million respectively to fund the land reforms programme. But it was only a verbal promise as the only thing on paper was that Zimbabwe’s first democratically elected government would not force white farmers off their land.
Regardless, riding on the wave of electoral victory and independence, Mugabe promised to resettle 160,000 black families on white-owned farms within three years – a promise he had no means of keeping even on a willing-seller willing-buyer basis.
Yet after 20 years, not much has changed. Only about 10 percent of the arable land moved legally from the white to black hands and about 6,000 white farmers still occupied over half of Zimbabwe’s of arable land and over 850,000 black farmers were crammed into the rest. Also, his base of war veterans was getting impatient.
The year 1990 came and passed, the promised money for land reforms didn’t come. There’s been a change of guard at 10 Downing Street and the labour government of Tony Blair was not willing to fulfil the promise made by Margaret Thatcher’s conservative government. Clare Short, Blair’s minister for International Development, in 1997, informed the Zimbabwean government that the election of a Labour government “without links to former colonial interests” meant the UK no longer had “special responsibility to meet the cost of land purchases”.
The African Union and others managed to stay Mugabe’s hand until 2000 when the economically ruinous “fast-track land reforms” began.
But real economic decline started in 1997 when the Mugabe was pressured into making huge payments as pension to war veterans of the Bush war that won the country independence. Inflation went up by almost 50 percent.
But after losing a constitutional referendum, in 2000, seeking to grant him more powers, he abandoned any gradualist approach to land reforms and set the war veterans on white farmers.
“If white settlers just took the land from us without paying for it…we can, in a similar way, just take it from them without paying for it,” Mugabe declared.
In return, the Blair government-engineered Western sanctions against the regime and began a policy of demonization against Mugabe and his regime –a policy that persisted until Mugabe was deposed in 2017.
The results were ruinous. The economy quickly unravelled. Hyperinflation ran riot, supermarket shelves were empty and the Mugabe’s famed school and health systems began to crumble. The country that was once a net importer of agricultural products now began exporting its professionals when unemployment became rife –some estimates have it that nine out of ten of the active population were out of work while in 2017, unemployment was estimated to be around 85 percent.
So bad was the situation that by 2009 inflation had reached 500 billion percent and the government was forced to dump the Zimbabwean dollar for the US dollar and South African rand.
No doubt, the principle of land reforms was a good one, but it was badly managed and meant to reward party loyalists rather than genuine farmers. Party officials and war veterans, who neither had the expertise nor interest in farming were the real beneficiaries of the seized land and it was no wonder agriculture collapsed after the seizure.
Mugabe failed to learn from the failure of African leaders before him and prioritised consolidation and retention of power over the economic emancipation of his people. Even as the economic crisis deepened, Mugabe resisted calls to stand down, telling whoever cared to listen that he was going to rule until his last day on earth. According to him, he had two goals in life: to reach 100 years and to govern until he dies. He therefore resorted to repression, massacred his own people, rigged elections and destroyed the economy just to achieve those goals.
Sadly, the economic emancipation of his people was not one of his goals. That is the story of most African independence leaders.
CHRISTOPHER AKOR
