ARROGANCE PERSONIFIED

I have published this week a picture of me sitting on a pile of stones. This intriguing yet symbolic photograph was taken in Sweden at a place called Kungsgraven (King’s Grave) sometime in 1995. The epitaph “Sitting on Zimbabwe Ruins” is poignant in the sense that it portrays the state of my beloved country at this very moment in time. To say that we are sitting on the ruins of a once admired and beautiful country is an understatement. We are well and truly “fucked,” to excuse the hard language, because there is no fairer description.

President Mugabe has just returned from a much-publicized begging jaunt in China, them being just about the only friends we have left in the whole wide world. The Libyans lost patience with us a long time ago and the oil pumps dried up immediately afterwards. We are not privy to the information on the thousands of acres of land the North Africans were plied with in return for barrels of motion lotion. The rumour is that Mugabe, also known as uKhulu (which is a polite alternative to ‘geriatric.’) to some of us, has promised the Chinese all our platinum and copper reserves. I said it was a rumour.

Cuba has little else to offer other than half-baked doctors. African states, poor as they are, can do little except cheer from the sidelines…as long as the pariah of the world does not set foot in their countries and smear them with whatever is keeping western donors as far away as possible from our doorstep. Besides these two, who else is friendly? South Africa? Not on your life! Mbeki is stocking the fire because he is gaining immensely from our demise. They call it “Cash Cow” diplomacy.

The words of the South African president at the national land summit in Johannesburg at the weekend and quoted in the local press gave very little comfort to us Zimbabweans. It displays the bankruptcy of African leadership. How can he stand up and defend the indefensible, Zimbabweans ask? We thought that was the job of clueless Zimbabwean government ministers and our stuttering state propaganda machinery.

I quote, “ The debt problem in Zimbabwe is the result of the demand to meet the urgent needs of the people after liberation, the Government of Zimbabwe spent more money than it had.” He was implying that it was not because of political and economic mismanagement. One would be forgiven for thinking that Mbeki received the speech straight from our own spin-doctors. If we were to give him the benefit of doubt, we could say perhaps he was misquoted.

Let’s get back to Ukhulu (Grandpa) who came from China with a basket full of…nothing. Zimbabwe, as you know by now, was the breadbasket of the region. Sadly, we are now a basket case. The painful part is that our dear leaders are in a state of denial. They are not responsible, the say, for the morass we find ourselves in. If you have studied management, I am sure that you have come across somewhere where it says that the hallmark of good leadership is acknowledging when you are wrong.