The Art of Lying

2^nd July 2002

Zimbabwe is being slaughtered by a parasitical ruling party that will do anything to ensure its dominion over the people-and by a people too apathetic to stand up to the ruthlessness of the ruling party.

True, few people foresaw the insanity of today when it all began two years ago. Fewer still could have prophesied the starvation of millions of ordinary people, while the ruling party, the architects of the starvation, live in pampered luxury and enjoy lavish meals at the people's expense.

That in two short years, Zimbabwe has degenerated into a fascist police state is undeniable-and that this was always the intention is certainly arguable. Threatened by the people, Robert Mugabe is hitting back at the people and inevitably the prisons will fill with those few brave men and women who believe in freedom.

Because freedom is certainly not what the ruling party is preaching to the country. Instead, it is preaching race hate, xenophobia and blatant lies. So far it has made honest journalism a criminal offence. Of more immediate and catastrophic consequence, it has made the nation's farmers criminals, second class citizens and declared that they're all racists and fascists.

If anything highlights Zanu PF's capacity for double speak, it is its attitude towards the farmers.

As a direct consequence of the brutal, murderous invasion of thousands of farms, six million Zimbabweans will starve this year. And while those people go hungry, the state's lying propaganda machine manages to blame the very farmers it has stopped from farming for the famine.

The sad truth is that too few of us have stood up to Mugabe's bloodthirsty regime-and that applies to the press too.

Meanwhile society's leaders have acquiesced to their own subjugation. In business, rather than fight for survival, leaders such as those in the Confederation of Zimbabwe Industries have remained silent, leaving it to individuals to take up the cudgels.

And in agriculture, farming leaders-in stark contrast to many farmers-have grovelled shamelessly at the feet of their oppressors.

Well, for agriculture the results are there for all to see. Millions starving, hundreds of thousands dispossessed and thousands out of business, and all because farming leaders were too frightened to fight back.

Still, it's not too late. Zimbabwe is a fine country populated mainly by fine people who do not want to be turned into hungry paupers by an avaricious ruling elite. They want courts they can trust rather than the mockery of justice they see all too often now. They want food in their bellies and they want jobs.

Zanu PF, on the other hand, wants an enfeebled nation to which it can dole out gifts and treats in the expectation that the people will be grateful. That is rubbish and must not be allowed to happen.

So, always we have to go back to the beginning. This entire problem began because Zanu PF knew it stood every chance of losing the June 2000 parliamentary poll to the opposition Movement for Democratic Change. In order to subvert democracy, Mugabe launched what he thought would be a crowd puller: a campaign filled with race hate that saw white Zimbabweans dispossessed of their homes and livelihoods.

It was an ill-considered plan that required constant and usually brutal reinforcement in the form of violent farm invasions and a constant barrage of racist rhetoric in the state-controlled press. But in a sense it failed, because while through violence and intimidation Mugabe won his elections, the farms were invaded by a comparative handful of Zimbabweans.

There are about 12 million people in Zimbabwe, which is where the ruling party's lie becomes apparent because, if all this land was so desperately wanted, those 12 million people would now be firmly settled on the farms.

They aren't-and they never will be. Indeed, now that that this pernicious regime has what it wants, it has started to systematically and cynically boot people off farms to make way for more important and already affluent supporters.

So what is the solution? Partly it lies in defiance, even quiet defiance of the sort Ghandi used so effectively against the British in India. It also lies in the recognition of the fact that true patriotism, as opposed to the sick version touted by Zanu PF, requires sacrifice and courage.

Most of all it requires the death of apathy, because apathy has been Zimbabwe's problem for over a decade. Right now six million of us face hunger, while almost 70% of us are unemployed. Unless something is done immediately, those figures are going to rise and rise fast. It would be a sad day for Zimbabwe, and a source of never ending shame, if the country sat back and watched it all happen, if we accepted the lies and relied on society's leaders to get us out of this stranglehold.

Zimbabwe Standard