By Kofi Bentil
President Robert MugabeDecember 5, 2007: African Union leaders meeting their European Union counterparts in December are supposed to represent our future but when it comes to Robert Mugabe they are stuck in an ideological time-warp: Mugabe is a freedom-fighter and Zimbabwe is a victim of Western depredations, including threats to boycott the meeting. Even democratically-elected Ghanaian President John Kufuor, chairman of the African Union, recently observed equivocally: "When the leader of the opposition gets beaten up, for good or ill, naturally all concerned should be worried." At least Mugabe is honest: "Some are crying that they were beaten. Yes you will be thoroughly beaten. When the police say move, you move. If you don’t move, you invite the police to use force," he said about trade-union activists arrested in September last year.
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Many also shared Mugabe’s economically-ignorant call for self-sufficiency. But no developed country is self-sufficient in commodities (nor even most manufactured products) and we Africans cannot live on a diet of cocoa beans and tea: selling it is much more profitable. Manufacturing and adding value are great economic aims but they do not happen successfully by government decree - right now, Africans suffer heavy import tariffs for essential inputs (such as fertilizer) and medicines, state control of exports, lack of property rights, obstacles to private enterprise and a ubiquitous corrupt bureaucracy. Yet our leaders do not accept that the key to our future is allowing our people to create wealth: we cannot free ourselves from poverty without economic freedoms such as property rights, the rule of law and free markets.
But the Mugabe version remains attractive because we all like to believe that our failures are someone else’s fault. And Mugabe remains in power after 27 years, at the age of 83. It seems true that evil men live long but that is because every day an evil man lives is like eternity to the oppressed. Neither South Africa’s "quiet diplomacy" nor Western restrictions on money-laundering can influence a man who is cocooned in delusions and treated with deference by his neighbours. .....They should make Mugabe unwelcome at civilized meetings like the EU-AU summit in Lisbon and put legal pressure on him by consensus, as West African leaders did to force out Charles Taylor in Liberia. They should heed the call of Ghanaian former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan who said recently: "Africans must guard against a pernicious, self-destructive form of racism that unites citizens to rise up and expel tyrannical rulers who are white, but to excuse tyrannical rulers who are black" Before embarrassing themselves again, our leaders must come to their senses and join the huge majority of Africans who reject the barbaric Mugabe: by embracing economic freedoms to save their own countries, they would offer hope to Zimbabweans for the day after Mugabe.
Mr Bentil is a lecturer at Ashesi University
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