Southern Write - Contrarian commentary on issues African and global.

A joke doing the rounds in Zimbabwe goes like this:

Question: “What did we have before candles?”

Answer: “Electricity.”

It’s only slightly funny because it’s true and across the country there are countless similar examples: The tractor is making way for the ox-drawn plough, witchdoctors are filling the medical void left by the doctors who have fled abroad, tarred roads are turning to dirt, the rule of law has succumbed to the whim of a tyrant, and the ‘national wealth’ has become a misnomer – the country’s riches are entirely for the benefit of a tiny ruling elite. Apart from the fact that the style of dress has changed and the assegai has been swapped for the AK 47, Zimbabwe today is not unlike the territory that was settled by Rhodes’ pioneers back at the turn of the last century.

The men on Mars would have witnessed the transition of a primitive society from one of subsistence, forage and plunder to one of escalating wealth creation through the introduction of a legal framework. Thus innovative and enterprising interlopers turned soil and stone into commercial endeavours and created a self sustaining economy of enormous diversity that was capable of surviving war, sanction and international opprobrium. On the back of this; schools, hospitals, roads, railways, phone-systems, police stations, power stations and court-houses were built taking the country into a league along with the developed nations of the world.

 This was the polity over which control was vested in Robert Mugabe in 1980 and to which his mentor Julius Nyerere referred as “the jewel of Africa”. Along with worldly goodwill came hundred of millions in aid and the stage seemed certainly set for an African success story but those hopes were always illusory. It was soon clear the new leadership was out of its depth and the underlying reason was that they had no idea how the wealth had been created and therefore had no idea how to sustain it. Money in their view simply appeared and they were unable to make the connection to world of commercial endeavour through thoughtful planning, risk and hard work.

 This fact was again made shockingly clear with the advent of the land invasions where extremely well educated blacks; lawyers, accountants and bankers sincerely believed that mere ownership of a white man’s farm would yield the same rewards as it had the former owner. In some cases a hundred years of toil and diligent endeavour was reduced to dust in mere months! One farmer on returning to his land to survey the damage was dismayed to find his dam wall broken.  The new ‘owner’ informed him he had breached it so the fish could be more easily harvested.

The rest is history. Nothing that has been touched by the ruling elite and its acolytes has not been destroyed.  

Presently, Mugabe and his cronies hurl invective at the Western world while looking for new sources of bounty but, they are distressed because the pickings are disturbingly slim and so the mood reverts to type and that is forage, slash and burn agriculture, killing of animals and enslaving the minions to dig for diamonds .

A displaced Darwendale farmer thought he had lost his senses when he surveyed his small farm from afar recently. Once 2,000 acres of intensively cultivated land it has become home to an estimated 3,000 gold-diggers. Bereft of trees he was astonished to discover the property was also missing nothing less than a hill. He knew the hill had been there because he had looked at it very day for over forty years. Further investigation showed his eyes were not being deceptive, the hill has been dug away and no longer exists.

Now with US dollars in short supply at the Reserve Bank the ruling elite need to get back to the gold standard and they are doing so with alacrity. Just as it was before, the country is being broken up into small kingdoms ruled over by an unholy alliance of chiefs, politicos and militia-men and all the natural wealth within that purview will henceforth accrue to them on pain of death to whosoever dares interfere with this primitive but, wholly African, dispensation.

For the men looking on from Mars the cycle is almost complete. Zimbabwe is well on its way back to the stone age.

• Posted on Wednesday, February 3rd, 2010
• 2 comments