Zimbabwe - A Basket Case

16^th June 2003

The World Economic Forum (WEF) has ranked Zimbabwe among the worst performers in Africa on good governance, democracy, the rule of law, human rights and anti-corruption efforts. Not that this is surprising at all.

But that Zimbabwe could be ranked 16th from the bottom on the list of the most corrupt and worst abusers of human rights on a continent where in many countries justice is not what the courts say but what some deranged dictator decrees, surely shows how low we have sunk as a nation.

According to statistics released by the WEF at its summit held last week in South Africa’s port city of Durban, the Zimbabwe government, which two weeks ago ruthlessly crushed protests by the country’s opposition and has, as we write, the main opposition leader in prison, scored the lowest for independence of the judiciary and second lowest for the neutrality of government public decisions.

Neighbouring Botswana, which was ranked the best performer, scored the high marks for upholding a stable and transparent democratic system, with even a special anti-corruption directorate to help fight white-collar crime.

Of course it is rather expecting too much to ask the government of Zimbabwe to establish a truly independent anti-corruption commission, just as it would be asking for the impossible to ask President Robert Mugabe and his ruling ZANU PF party to allow the creation of a truly independent and impartial electoral commission in this country.

As if to rebuke her Zimbabwean neighbours for their intolerance of divergent political views, the governor of the Bank of Botswana, Linah Mohohlo, told the summit her country’s political system allowed for a vibrant opposition and media and, more profoundly, that no member of the opposition or Press had ever been arrested in that country.

Needless to say, Mohohlo’s thinly veiled comments expose the government’s claim that all in Southern Africa support its retrogressive policies for the shameless lie that it is.

And instead of the government hastening to borrow a leaf from its prosperous neighbour and ditching the ruinous policies that have reduced Zimbabwe to a pauper and pariah state, it predictably reacted with its usual arrogance.

Finance and Economic Development Minister Herbert Murerwa, who led the country’s delegation to the Durban summit, recited to the world the same tired lie that Zimbabwe had done no wrong but was an merely and innocent victim of unfair and negative publicity in the international Press.

Murerwa, usually a sensible man, even childishly protested that the WEF should have found another country, not sovereign Zimbabwe, to use as an example of a delinquent state.

He asked the Press in South Africa: “Why don’t they (WEF) use the Democratic Republic of the Congo or Burundi to show what’s wrong?”

Back home the government mouthpiece Sunday Mail newspaper further ventilated government’s thinking and reaction to the WEF summit and its rating of Zimbabwe, celebrating the whole event as some strange victory because, according to the State-controlled paper, organisers of the summit had refused alleged attempts by Britain to have Zimbabwe put on the agenda of the meeting.

Yet even the government should know by now that these diversionary tactics will fool no one.

That all Zimbabweans and the rest of the progressive international community know that the chief reason why Zimbabwe has crumbled into this economic and political mess is because of the reckless and mad policies of a dictatorship that wants to cling to power at all and whatever costs.

By choosing to believe its own propaganda and persistently refusing to see reality, the government is only hastening its own demise.

Daily News - Zimbabwe