It’s the 5th of November 1997, and one of Robert Mugabe’s flunkies is loitering near the fax machine at the office on the corner of Samora Michel and Sam Nujoma avenues.
His Minister for Agriculture, Kumbirai Kangai, is expecting an important letter from England; soon enough, the wonky old machine starts blinking and beeping and a page starts emerging from the tray. Kumbirai charges into the office: “Ahh,” he says, rubbing his hands together, “let’s see what the homosexual Tony Blair has to say for himself”.
But the anticipation quickly turns to anger when Kumbirai begins the third paragraph of the letter from Clare Short, Secretary of State for International Development: “I should make it clear that we do not accept that Britain has a special responsibility to meet the costs of land purchase in Zimbabwe”. His anger deepens when he reads the third line of the same paragraph: “My own origins are Irish, and as you know we were colonised, not colonisers.” Swearing, he turns to the flunky: “this woman…,” he says, “…she thinks now would be an appropriate time to try to blackface herself via facsimile”.
Obviously, I made that last bit up, but I was told of events when news reached State House where Mugabe was kicking back. He lost his temper 19 or 20 times and started smashing the framed photographs of his posh white public-school friends at their gentlemen’s clubs in St. James. His wife Grace then appeared and upon hearing the news, she lost her temper too – and ordered a fax machine to be thrown out of the window. She didn’t know it wasn’t the same one that had delivered the hare-brained note. But it still went.
Impossible situation
There didn’t appear to be a remotely reasonable exit from this impossible situation. In one corner, Mugabe, a psychotic megalomaniac riddled with the clap, whose late Ghanaian wife’s brothers had stolen all the cash from him that he had originally stolen from the state – and kept it in Accra. On another, a group of sneering, over-educated, right-on New Labour guys were determined to cast Britain to the world as “progressive”. Then you had the white farmers – unceremoniously dumped by successive UK administrations and now fair game for people like Hitler Hunzvi, leader of the war veterans and an annoying cramp in Mugabe’s backside.
Finally, you had Mugabe’s demented new wife. When the inevitable travel ban was instituted, who the hell had the balls to explain to her that she could no longer commandeer Air Zimbabwe flights, boot the other passengers off, then set the pilot on a course towards London: specifically Harrods?
ZANU-PF was suffering a crisis of political legitimacy. Back in 2002 Andrew Kenny remarked in The Spectator that “faced with the prospect of electoral defeat, the ANC would behave exactly as ZANU-PF has done”. Kenny acknowledged the desperation of these bad ideas. For decades Robert Mugabe delighted in the achievements of his farmers, particularly the quality of tobacco they produced, and only when Hitler started getting jumpy was he panicked into pressing the button.
Likewise, the ANC too is being pushed, but not by things that matter. In the year Mugabe went the full Mugabe (1999), the SAPS recorded 221,072 sexual offences against persons aged under 17 years. Little has changed – most sensible South Africans would gladly have swapped 2010’s FIFA World Cup for a relentless, well-funded campaign that dramatically reduced sexual crimes.
Two responses
But here we are. In Britain the news of South African expropriation without compensation (EWC) has been met with two responses. On the right it is the first glimpse of the destination on the journey to affirmative action; on the left – which dwarfs the right – the act is just and sound (it’s helpful to remember that the language employed in the original drafting of “empowerment” legislation was distinctly unAfrican, rather English academic-Marxist). But both views miss something important – and possibly everything. Timing. Why now?
It happened that in the same week another view of the world was projected by two men. In Washington, Donald Trump laid waste to EWC’s sister ideas such as “the green new deal” and committed the US to drilling for oil and gas as national imperatives. Then, in arguably one of the most important speeches of the decade, Argentina’s Javier Milei wrecked the Spectre Winter AGM at Davos for the second consecutive year, condemning Western governments for censorship and illustrating the real-time beauty and effect of chainsaw economics.
The problem for the ANC and governments like it (including the UK) is that the path to liberty and prosperity is too hard, and requires too much sacrifice – notably, in the size of government itself. The visions of Milei and Trump dramatically reduce the number of spaces available at the trough. They seek to expose the crony and predatory capitalists and terminate the schemes cooked up by regulators and revenue agencies and their proxies.
But creating items of national interest requires constant vigilance, and this doesn’t suit the ANC, which has successfully crafted an international image for itself as a wounded peasant who only wants to look after his family, so give now.
Unlikely spectacle
Whatever happens with EWC, it’s unlikely we’ll get the kind of spectacle we got around the early 2000s – which is arguably a small mercy, because these moments beggared belief just as much as they enraged. Remember Jonathan Moyo, Mugabe’s Minister of Information?
Right, so after having allegedly ripped off the legacy of a cereal pioneer (Mr. Kellogg’s foundation), this dude rocks up in Kempton Park at the end of 2002 – whilst his countrymen are starving – with a Mitsubishi Pajero and a Venter trailer. He goes to a cash ’n carry, loads the trailer with yellow block cheese and polony tubes, he then gets in a fight with his wife at the Formula 1 hotel, allegedly batters her to the alarm of his neighbours who call the police. But he tells the cops to piss off and leaves the following day – basically pulling a zap sign in his rear view all the way to Beitbridge.
Moyo’s behaviour wasn’t just tolerated by then Minister of Foreign Affairs Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma. The following year she eased into the habit of scolding reporters who dared to ask whether her department was measuring the consequences of “land reform”. The only ANC/adjacent individual who appeared to be concerned was Thabo Mbeki’s younger brother. He promised a cheque or a bottle of scotch to the person who made a citizen’s arrest of Moyo.
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR.
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Image: Grok