Last week, Tanzania hosted two conferences, both in Dar es salaam.
The two conferences offered Zimbabwe’s President Robert Mugabe and his Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai another opportunity to display their costly divergent views, approaches and their differing priorities for the nation.
It is thirty years after independence and Mugabe, of course, was going to Tanzania to attend, what else but a useless meeting to discuss ways of combating “Western neo-colonialism”.
Nostalgia is addictive!
While Mugabe was listening and haranguing some washed up revolutionaries whose aims have long been overtaken by time and with not even outdated wars to fight, Tsvangirai was, on the other hand, going to the same town to drum up, invite and seek investment at the World Economic Forum, Africa’s biggest business meeting. He was joining and mingling with 10 African heads of state and government for the three-day conference that was specifically dedicated to the continent’s economic future.
But what was more pathetic was the manner in which Tsvangirai and Mugabe undertook their journeys.
Apart from the cost to the nation and the extravagance of the two of them attending these sublime conferences together when there is so much to be done at home, Mugabe and Tsvangirai left for the same town in the same country on two separate national flights from the same town on the same day.
The conferences themselves also held two contradictory issues for the two men who are supposedly partners in a government of national unity.
Mugabe was attending the other conference to denounce “western neo-colonialsm” while at the other meeting, Tsvangirai was looking for ways to invite those same neo-colonialists to come and invest in Zimbabwe.
Inviting investors into Zimbabwe does not seem to be Mugabe’s priority yet, for the MDC, the revival of the economy is a top priority as the people believe that it is only the MDC that can assist in turning around the fortunes of the country that Mugabe destroyed.
It must be very difficult for Tsvangirai to always try to swim to the safe banks of the shore while upstream Mugabe is opening the flood gates wider and wider.
The MDC has always been trying to woo foreign investments, trying to re-establish investor friendly policies while, at the same time, Mugabe always continued with his destructive economic policies that are very unfriendly to investors.
While Tsvangirai and his lieutenants will not miss the opportunity to head a foreign investor into Zimbabwe, Mugabe has been sending extremely contradictory messages to the same investors.
He continues to take over farms while manhandling the farm owners and confiscating their properties with no compensation; state sponsored violence is always a danger and there is no rule of law.
A few weeks ago, Mugabe tried to force an indigenisation law on Zimbabwe that would pave the way for the takeover of foreign-owned firms in the country after decreeing that all foreign-owned companies must cede 51 percent shares to indigenous (read ‘black’) Zimbabweans.
The question, however, is that why should land imbalances be corrected violently when the farms can be acquired without the killing of a single person?
Why should indigenisation be done in a manner that strips an investor of their investment, property rights and human rights when it can be done legally and without killing anyone?
Why do all of these in a chaotic way that will take decades to correct, just as we still have not recovered from the farm invasions of ten years ago?
But, learning from Mugabe’s chaotic land reform programme, when people who could not tell the difference between land and the sky, ended up with large tracts of fertile land which they never could put to use because they were not farmers.
The farms ended up in the hands of Mugabe’s relatives, friends and cronies, with Mugabe and his wife grabbing at least six farms.
Now Mugabe and his violent desperadoes are moving on to companies and the ZANU-PF bloodsuckers who keep all the money they have in their cars’ ashtrays are already salivating at the prospect of owning shares in Barclays Bank, Standard Chartered Bank and to be majority shareholders in companies whose expertise they don’t have.
These contradictory signals, in addition to the fact that what Mugabe wants Mugabe takes, to hell with the courts, do not offer any amount of confidence to prospective investors.
“The departure of Mugabe and Tsvangirai on two flights bound for the same destination seems to confirm suggestions that, despite public shows of unity, the two leaders remain divided within the fragile coalition government,” said the (Zimbabwe) Daily News.
Meanwhile in Dar, Mugabe could not resist gate-crushing the World Economic Forum where Tsvangirai was cooped up. Mugabe ended up at the podium, peeing into the drinking well, as he usually does when he sees a crowd.
He told shell-shocked delegates and heads of state that Zimbabwe’s controversial indigenisation law, “which requires foreign companies to cede at least 51 percent of their equity to locals in a lopsided dollarized economy” was not contradictory or dangerously pretentious as reported by the Western media.
“The proposed law will not deter investors,” Mugabe said. “We want to empower our people economically, to have a stake in the economy. Our people remain poor. While people have said the legislation will drive away investors. We say no.”
It was like taking Lucifer into church for the sermon. The contradiction was just too clear to be ignored.
Lance Mambondiani, of Coronation Financial Services, said that the problem with the indigenization law soon after a controversial land grab which resulted in chaotic violations of property rights and multiple farm ownership by the elite, was that the outcome was unlikely to be different.
“An independent indigenization commission constituted by industry experts should be set up to manage implementation and monitor compliance,” he said. “The threshold for companies that fall within the bill could also be raised to avoid bureaucratic bungling and the concentration of power into the central government.”
He continued: “Fewer would be convinced that an almost bankrupt country, recently on the verge of an economic implosion and barely admitted into the international community for failure to pay its obligations would need to prioritise an equalization law under the guise of indigenous empowerment.”
But Mugabe was buoyant.
“We want to see our people share in the ownership of resources,” he said.
Mugabe has never understood that the economic laws and policies that apply to countries the world over also apply to Zimbabwe.
Much like the land reform program, said Mambondiani, not many would argue against the importance of the indigenization bill. The devil, however, could be in its implementation, he said.
Priorities, priorities!
From Dar, Tsvangirai, who has now developed the travelling bug, will fly to the United states, where former US Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, is to give him an award for “tireless efforts to restore democracy, human rights and the rule of law to Zimbabwe.”
Albright does not even know the battle is far from being won.
