JORAM NYATHI: The power of mind over matter

25 Jan, 2015 - 00:01 0 Views

The Sunday Mail

President Mugabe could assume the Chairmanship of the African Union which meets for its 24th Summit at its birthplace in the Ethiopian capital, Addis Ababa, this week.

President Mugabe takes over the chair of the AU at a time the continent is facing enormous challenges from Ebola in parts of West Africa to flooding in Mozambique and Malawi and political instability in countries as diverse as Nigeria, Lesotho, South Sudan, Kenya, Uganda, DRC and Central African Republic.

He is already chair of Sadc, a grouping of 15 nations facing myriad problems of their own, including a recent attempted coup in Lesotho and disputed electoral outcomes in Zambia and Mozambique.

On the home front Mugabe has the challenge of forging a consensus among Zimbabweans for the “accelerated implementation of Zim-Asset”, the Government’s economic recovery blueprint which was launched in October 2013 following the ruling Zanu-PF’s resounding victory in the harmonised elections on July 31 the same year.

Attempts to remove him from the Presidency of his party through an internal revolt suffered a stillbirth ahead of Congress in December, leaving those with ambitions to replace him licking their wounded egos.

All combined, President Mugabe has enough of a cocktail on his hands to cause a migraine.

That is if we were talking about a less wily political player, not one prone to be misunderstood by analysts who judge legacies in terms of borrowed yardsticks about tenure of office and one’s age.

Bourgeois yardsticks which President Mugabe has defied and debunked over the years but keep being resurrected by those who now feel only time will remove a hated enemy whose strategy for survival they can’t fathom, and now pray that nature might soon intervene.

So, as usual, evaluation of President Mugabe’s performance as chair of the African Union by local analysts has focused on his age, his physical health and the “revolt” by people who have been fired from Government.

It is as if the Chair of the AU or Sadc were expected to command troops from one battlefront to the next like a military commander, where physical strength competes for supremacy with mental agility.

That need not be the case.

On the local political scene, the issue of President Mugabe’s age and ill-health has been deployed as an electoral albatross by the opposition with shocking results.

Even as late as 2013, it was argued that Mugabe would not be able to campaign due to old age. In any case, why would people vote for an 89-year-old man, it was asked cynically, with scant attention to policies which resonated with the grassroots?

He only did 10 stars rallies, but the electoral results were devastating against young opposition leaders.

The nation and the gullible West were told Mugabe had lost control of his party or was now hostage to the military.

By the time of the party’s 6th National People’s Congress he was virtually the only man standing!

But the attackers would not relent over his age.

So it was that his delayed return from holiday in the Far East this month became grist for frenzied speculation about Mugabe finally succumbing to ill-health.

His appearance at the Harare International Airport last Thursday came as a disappointing anticlimax.

There was no doubting that he is very fit for his age, that he has a huge following on the political front, and that the security establishment is firmly behind him.

What is urgently needed is to marshal resources for the implementation of Zim-Asset. This is not likely to be easy and there is no magic about it, least of all youth without brains. It is not about indigenisation policies. It has nothing to do with Mugabe’s age.

In part it is about a private sector which has remained wedded to Stone Age industrial processes and is too obsessed with political outcomes to think about innovation.

As Finance and Economic Development Minister Patrick Chinamasa asked last week: what have local managers done to either save companies threatened with closure or to revive or take over those which have shut down or have been sabotaged by their Rhodesian owners?

Most of these managers are happy to reel out figures of firms closing down every week and the high number of redundancies, as if they expect to be knighted for diligent intelligence gathering.

But there are also exogenous factors which will impact on economic recovery.

IMF managing director Christine Lagarde has forecast low growth of the global economy and falling commodity prices for countries which export primary goods such as Zimbabwe.

That can only mean a widening trade deficit, tighter credit crunch and a keener liquidity situation. Erratic rains portend ill for the cropping season, all factors which are beyond the control of the most physically energetic leader.

If age were the real deciding factor in a nation’s political and economic wellbeing, President Mugabe would enjoy the easiest ride as Chair of both Sadc and the AU.

According to bourgeoisie Western reckoning, most of the countries are led by youthful leaders after seamless change of leadership with every election. Talk of Kenya, Mozambique, Nigeria, Lesotho. They should be havens of political stability and economic prosperity.

But most are wrecked by intractable internal problems.

Those who have insisted on elections and age yardsticks as guarantors of political stability and democracy have used these as avenues to influence the inexperienced new leader for their own benefit. And President Mugabe has become a stumbling block and Western persona non grata.

To conceptualise President Mugabe’s Chairmanship of the AU and Sadc in terms of his chronological age is to miss the point completely because those much younger than him are facing greater problems in their countries than we do in Zimbabwe.

More than that, those leaders younger than him have generally proved to be most susceptible to Western manipulation and betrayal of the Pan-African ideals.

A number of them already play host to America’s Africom, a provocatively intrusive military-cum-intelligence gathering agency whose primary goal is to destabilise the continent.

In due course this is the agency the US will use to remove those African leaders who challenge its global hegemony and plunder of African resources.

It is in this context that President Mugabe’s chairmanship is vantage. It is more to revive and bequeath the Pan-African agenda to the often easily swayed, manipulated and venal younger generation of leaders than it is to run around dousing political and military conflicts across the continent.

His leadership should serve to reignite the ideals of revolutionary leaders like Kwame Nkrumah, Patrice Lumumba, Thomas Sankara, Samora Machel and Julius Nyerere, most of whose lives were cut short by imperialist agents for trying to open their people’s eyes, to assert control over their natural resources or for rejecting pacts like France’s evil Continuation of Colonialism agreements under which this slave master continues to exercise sovereign control over the economic resources and political affairs of 14 of its former West African colonies.

President Mugabe has his agenda cut out for him.

In Sadc he made it clear when he took over last year that focus should be on industrialisation led by South Africa. Product beneficiation and value addition should improve the value of mineral exports and help in creating job.

Beneficiated mineral exports should improve earnings from exports than exporting raw materials.

Regional integration was also set as a key agenda item during his tenure.

More broadly, President Mugabe decried Africa’s dependency on foreign funding for all its projects, which deprived it of both ownership and priority status. Africa must be able to finance its military operations, thus be able to take the initiative in providing African solutions to African problems. If these messages can be grasped and internalised by the new generation of leaders, Mugabe would have cemented his legacy as an African liberator.

It is not about physical youth. It is about the power of mind over matter.

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