By Bernard Bwoni
The Telegraph published London Mayor Boris Johnson’s
article entitled ‘Happy Birthday Mr Mugabe with special love from Labour’ on
the 22nd February 2015 and this got me thinking, what the heck has
this man been smoking seriously? The Conservative Party and the ruling party in
Zimbabwe have enjoyed cordial relations from way back then before the country’s
independence and the Lancaster House Conference and as such this confused and
confusing article would have made a lot sense coming from Tony Blair himself. I
bet Mrs. Margaret Thatcher would be turning in her grave at this unwarranted
and nauseating tirade against President Mugabe. Mayor
Boris Johnson started off by calling President Mugabe’s 21st
February Movement ‘an event of truly spectacular ugliness’ and he wonders ‘who
on earth would want to there?’ The simple answer to Johnson’s lazy question is,
the many Zimbabweans who voted the man into power would definitely want to be
there. I am convinced Mayor Boris Johnson wrote this article whilst under the
influence of something that is not legally available on the open market. For
starters how on earth did he come to the conclusion that Zimbabweans eat lion
meat? He calls those who were going to be attending President Mugabe’s birthday
celebrations a ‘meat-maddened mob’ and ‘brain-washed Zimbabweans’ who will sing
happy birthday ‘to the man who has impoverished their country’. From there onwards his article became a
mish-mash of contradictions and confusion.
The fact of the matter is that in the last general
election in Zimbabwe 61% of the electorate voted President Mugabe into power in
an election endorsed as free, fair and credible by the SADC and African Union
observers. These were the observers who were on the ground and that is the
democracy which Mayor Boris claims to champion. So for him to call those who
decided to celebrate President Mugabe’s birthday as ‘brainwashed’ is not only
condescending but an attempt at muzzling people’s democratic right and
downright dirty. President Mugabe is a hero for many Zimbabweans Mayor Boris
and the fact that he is not your hero does not make those Zimbabweans who see
him as a hero ‘brainwashed’.
Reading through Mayor Boris’ article one is left wondering
where on earth he got his facts from to come up with this fiction of an
article. He makes spurious claims that all teachers across Zimbabwe had been
forced to contribute $10 each for these celebrations. I initially gave Mayor
Boris the benefit of the doubt but decided to check with a few of my friends in
Zimbabwe who are teachers just to make sure and none of them was aware of such
a call. So where did Johnson get these distortions from? Or did he just make it
all up in this moment of madness?
Mayor Boris then goes on to make a revealing admission
that it was the Labour Government under Tony Blair who played a ‘shameful part
in the disaster’ and that is absolutely right. It is this ‘shameful part’ that
meant that the British Government reneged on funding the Land Reform process in
Zimbabwe as agreed at the Lancaster House Conference, Tony Blair and his bosom
buddy George Bush’s economic sanctions against Zimbabwe have indeed caused the
untold suffering of the ordinary people in Zimbabwe. Mayor Boris rightly points
out that the British Government agreed to fund the land reform at Lancaster and
he rightly places the blame on Tony Blair and Claire Short for going back on
the arrangement. Now the question to pose to Mayor Boris is why the uncalled
for attack on President Mugabe?
It is the British government betrayal of the Lancaster
House agreement that led to the Fast Track Land Reform in Zimbabwe and it is
because of the Fast Track Land Reform that the EU and the USA imposed economic
sanctions against Zimbabwe. It is the economic sanctions that have led to the
‘malnourishment of children’ and ‘the companies going to the wall’ that Mayor Boris
was going on about. He then goes on to the pluck figures out of thin air in his
drunken state I assume and makes yet more unsubstantiated claims that Zimbabwe
is now the ‘poorest nation on earth’ and talks about the ‘ravages of HIV’, the
‘emaciated figures listlessly on street corners’ as his evidence of Zimbabwe
being the poorest country on earth ‘beaten only by Congo’. I am left wondering
what indicators Boris used to come up with such ridiculous claims?
Let us get things right about Zimbabwe and Congo which
Mayor Boris again decided to conveniently omit. These two countries are
extraordinarily rich in natural resources and they are not playing ball with Western
capital and hence Mayor Boris’ frustration. He goes on to patronize Zimbabwe
and the liberation war by stating ‘readers will remember the 1979 Lancaster
House Agreement, by which Margaret Thatcher granted independence to Rhodesia’.
This man is mad! The Zimbabwe independence did not come on a silver platter Mayor
Boris, but it was the protracted liberation struggle that brought the
Rhodesians to the negotiating table at Lancaster. The liberation of Zimbabwe
was not handed over to the people of Zimbabwe, arms were taken up against the
unrelenting Rhodesian government, and blood was shed until that priceless day
on 18th April 1980 when Zimbabwe attained its independence.
Mayor Boris
puts that blame on Tony Blair for reneging on the arrangements agreed at
Lancaster as the reason for the cause of the Fast Track Land Reform in Zimbabwe
but then contradicts himself by claiming that ‘Mugabe’s long reign has been
characterised by one overwhelming objective: to exterminate the last vestiges
of white power’. This is totally unfounded because President Mugabe is the
first African leader to coin the concept of National Reconciliation long before
Mandela was credited as the icon of reconciliation. After independence the
whites in Zimbabwe were left untouched and they continued to live freely. Ian
Smith lived freely in Zimbabwe until his death and he is buried in Zimbabwe.
President Mugabe embraced his erstwhile nemesis of the liberation struggle and
even had whites in his cabinet. Mayor Boris then goes on to contradict himself again
by stating that it was this betrayal of the Lancaster House Agreement that gave
‘Mugabe his pretext to launch his pogroms against the whites’. No Mayor Boris, this was not an attack on
whites but rather a case of addressing some historical inequalities and these
had been tabled at Lancaster. The 6000 whites Mayor Boris mentioned owned over
70% of the arable land in Zimbabwe whilst the over 10 million indigenous black people
of Zimbabwe were relegated to the most unproductive lands of the country and
the margins of all economic activity.
The London
Mayor goes on to say that the Labour government allowed Mugabe to ‘launch a
racist tyranny’ and that it was Labour’s betrayal of Lancaster that gave Mugabe
the ‘pretext for the despotic confiscations’. Let it be made clear that the
liberation war in Zimbabwe was about the land and hence the agreement that the
British Government would fund the process of redistributing the land to its
original owners. The land reform in Zimbabwe, whichever form it took, was
inevitable and necessary to redress the ruthless land tenure laws drafted by
the crafty Rhodesian colonial system. The Fast Track Land Reform in Zimbabwe
was a case of correcting a skewed land ownership pattern where a few whites
owned the majority of the fertile land at the expense of the many black
Zimbabweans who had been forced into the rock terrains of the country.
President Mugabe did not make up the provisions of the Lancaster House but
these were agreed by all principals.
Mayor Boris is
right about one thing throughout his article that Tony Blair and his colleagues
were responsible for the breakdown of the cordial relations between Zimbabwe
and the British Government. He nailed it when he places the blame on the Labour
Government but then lost it when he went into this tirade against President
Mugabe. It was the inexperience and hastiness of Tony Blair that the provisions
of the Lancaster House Agreement were scrapped and President Mugabe had no choice
but to redistribute land to the hungry and angry landless indigenous
Zimbabweans.
Zimbabweans
have celebrated President Mugabe’s 21st February Movement for years
now and will continue to do so. Those who decide to go, it is their right and
not for Boris to decide or ridicule. Those who go are not ‘a meat-maddened mob’
or ‘brainwashed’ but willing Zimbabweans. There are children, educated adults
and elders who attend and no one puts a gun to their heads to attend this
over-subscribed yearly event. Zimbabweans do not eat lion meat Mayor Boris so
get your facts right before going to print. Mr David Cameron just like all the
other Conservative leaders have always accorded President Mugabe a modicum of
respect and that is the bedrock of the Zimbabwe-British relations. Mayor Boris got
it terribly wrong when he launched this attack on President Mugabe. Whatever he
is smoking these days has to be banned.
bernardbwoni.blogspot.com
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