BARACK OBAMA, BOB MARLEY, ROBERT MUGABE AND ZIMBABWE

BARACK OBAMA, BOB MARLEY, ROBERT MUGABE AND ZIMBABWE

President Barack Obama of the United States is no doubt the man of the moment and the momentum has carried him all over the world and across continents since he was elected the 44th President of the United State’s and sworn into office in January 2009 in an epochal historical alchemy.

The President took the oath of office at a time America was at war on two fronts – Afghanistan and Iraq and at a perilous time economically as the world was gripped by a severe recession and economic meltdown not seen since the great depression of the 1930’s. America was loosing friends and influence across the globe mainly due to a needless war the new President has declared a war of choice that provoked strong differences in his country and around the world unlike the war of necessity in Afghanistan.

The young President has provoked enthusiasm every where he has traveled with his eloquence, seeming willingness to give a new direction to the supercilious foreign policies of Washington and to lead from the front. It helps that he has a graceful and intelligent wife and a young family most people can identify with. Infact after Eight years of the suffocating Bush Presidency, Barack Obama’s is an exhilarating breath of fresh air.

Barrack Obama is an accomplished lawyer, historian, teacher and orator well known for his beautiful speeches. His oratorical skills first came to the National consciousness at the 2004 National Democratic Party Convention in Boston, where Obama then a member of the Illinois State Senate delivered an acclaimed keynote speech which he titled the Audacity of Hope. He has since written a second book with the same title and the speeches and oratory have gotten even better. Since his election as President of the United States the speeches have been coming thick and fast everywhere he went leaving concrete debatable issues in his wake.

One of the latest of these speeches was delivered in Ghana to an African audience outlining America’s rules of engagement with Africa during the Obama presidency. Obama berthed in Ghana after a long trip he began in Russia for a summit between two great powers, a trip to Italy for a meeting of the world’s leading economies and an audience with Pope Benedict XVI at the Vatican. Some government officials and many others have questioned and made an issue of Obama’s decision to bye pass Nigeria ‘the Giant of Africa’ and Kenya, his ancestral home to visit the small West African country of Ghana. If these people were in denial, pretending they do not know why, Obama answered them comprehensively when he highlighted the progress Ghana has made since its return to the democratic fold. The monumental fraud that was the 2007 election and the atrophying corruption that still thrives here is enough to make Obama and any leader with serious democratic credentials cringe with revulsion. Whereas Ghana had a competitive and close election where the ruling party lost power and the heavens did not fall, the post election violence in Kenya last year did it no favours knocking it off the perch of Obama wannabe hosts.

Professor Wole Soyinka as usual wrote an incisive piece on why Obama should not and could not visit Nigeria but Obama himself in a veiled reference to Nigeria told us why he could not come here and I will copiously quote him “as I said in Cairo, each nation gives life to democracy in its own way, and in line with its own traditions. But history offers a clear verdict: Governments that respect the will of their own people, that govern by consent and not coercion, are more prosperous, they are more stable and more successful than governments that do not. This is about more than just holding elections. It’s also about what happens between elections. Repression can take many forms, and too many nations, even those that have elections, are plagued by problems that condemn their people to poverty. No country is going to produce wealth if its leaders exploit the economy to enrich themselves … or if police – if police can be bought off by drug traffickers. No business wants to invest in a place where government skims 20% off the top … or the head of the port authority is corrupt. No body wants to live in a society where the rule of law gives way to the rule of brutality and bribery. That is not democracy, that is tyranny, even if occasionally you sprinkle an election in there. And now is the time for that kind of governance to end. In the 21st Century, capable, reliable and transparent institutions are the key to success – strong parliaments; honest police forces; independent judges … an independent press; a vibrant private sector; a civil society. Those are the things that give life to democracy, because that is what matters in people’s everyday lives”

Will any of these jesters deny that this does accurately describe their perpetual sleeping ‘Giant of Africa’? Femi Falana also accurately captures the mood when he wrote “the reactionary governing class must have thought that Mr. Obama was joking when he cautioned in his inauguration speech that, ‘To those leaders who cling to power by corruption and deceit … you will soon find out you are on the wrong side of history’. If Mr. Obama is not prepared to associate with election riggers in Kenya, his fatherland, why should he collaborate with those who have threatened to continue to capture and impose themselves on the Nigerian people for 60 years? For goodness sake why should President Obama associate with a regime that lacks the political will to bring to book a few former government officials who have been indicted by foreign courts in the Siemens, Wilbros and Halliburton scandals?”

One only hope this puts to rest the question of Obama’s visit to Nigeria. When we put our house in order, I am sure he will gladly pay a week long working visit to Nigeria.

Obama’s oratorical powers are unquestioned and his speeches are indeed beautiful pieces of art and will make a wonderful collection for anyone interested enough and you can hardly fault most of his reasoning and conclusions. Infact if beautiful speeches alone solve problems, the multifarious troubles bedeviling our world today would long have been history but unfortunately they do not. The speech in Ghana was one of such good and beautiful speeches but the President was wrong on one score. While his speech proceeded on the premise that Africa’s future is up to Africans he could not have been right to sweepingly exculpate and absolve the west of any culpability in the debacle that is Zimbabwe today by insisting that “the West is not responsible for the destruction of the Zimbabwean economy over the last decade”.

To be sure Robert Mugabe has his own issues and no doubt carries the lion’s share of the blame for the destruction of Zimbabwe, the role and equally devastating that the west through Britain played cannot be ignored or glossed over. The troubles in Zimbabwe did not start a decade ago and Obama well knows this. The seed for the destruction of Zimbabwe was sowed by Britain in the years leading to Zimbabwe’s independence in 1980 and thereafter when its last bastions of empire were crumbling across the globe and the sun was setting on her majesty’s imperial realm. With the failure of Ian Smith’s Unilateral Declaration of Independence over the then Southern Rhodesia, Zimbabwe’s independence was hurriedly negotiated and while the elections that followed were won by Robert Mugabe after a campaign filled with intimidation, violence and threats to continue the Bush war by Mugabe’s ZANU should he lose the election, Britain which had earlier considered disqualifying ZANU for flagrant violation of the Lancaster House Agreement and violent intimidation of the militants he now controlled went on to hand over power to Mugabe at independence in 1980 over the other more popular Nationalists such as Bishop Abel Muzorewa, Ndabaningi Sithole and Joshua Nkomo amongst others who were angling for power at the time because in their flawed thinking and as they and other colonial powers have done all over Africa since Ghana’s independence in 1957, they had to install puppet regimes that will forever look unto them as patrons so they can merely substitute colonialism for neo colonialism.

At the London Conferences at Lancaster House to negotiate Zimbabwe’s independence, Robert Mugabe was pressured to sign the agreement and land was the major stumbling block, aid in excess of # 630 million pounds was pledged for resettlement/land redistribution and sundry British support in exchange for the constitutional arrangement that Zimbabwe cannot seize European owned lands for 10 years and the willing buyer, willing seller clause to be funded by Britain. Britain did not deliver much on this promise and in 1997 after over # 40 million pounds has been spent, the Labour Government of Tony Blair unilaterally declared that the British government did not accept that it had a special responsibility to meet the costs of land purchase in Zimbabwe notwithstanding the Lancaster House Agreement. The majority of the arable farm lands are in the hands of white owners. Zimbabwean whites although making up less than 5% of the population owned more than 70% of the arable land, including most of the best. The lands were thus reserved for white landlords growing cash crops for export, a sector of the economy favoured by the west with little or no regards to the sensibilities of the majority of the landless poor peasants. Every time Robert Mugabe tries to hold Britain to this agreement or find alternative ways of bringing about land redistribution, he was threatened and blackmailed. The rational thing was to find common ground but instead Britain went the divisive route of propping up the opposition to wrest power from Mugabe and the ruling party and has openly called for the overthrow of the old man. This is a very delicate issue though because it is obvious that democracy is being subverted in Zimbabwe. The old man has being in power for 29 years now and he is not showing any signs of letting go. But the truth should equally be obvious to anyone who cares to look that the old man is hanging on to power out of fear even though there may really be nothing to offer Zimbabwe anymore. He needs assurances that out of power, whatever is left of his legacy will be preserved; he does not want to relinquish power on British terms and to ‘British stooges’. So Zimbabwe’s problems are the legacy of imperialism aggravated by western economic meddling as much as the troubles of a Robert Mugabe that has stayed in power for too long. As Matthew Swift wrote in the Independent, it was Cecil Rhodes who originated the racist ‘land grabs’ to which Zimbabwe’s current miseries can ultimately be traced. These are not opinions to be debated; these are facts to be dealt with as Obama said of 9/11 and al Qaeda in his Cairo speech.

This is where the United State’s and the west come in if the multifarious problems bedeviling Africa will ever be solved. But all we heard in Ghana was how Africans must salvage Africa. Obama did not tell us in concrete terms what America will do to help Africa. In Moscow, he told Russians what America will do and will not do. In Cairo he assured the Islamic world and Palestine that the only resolution to the Middle East conflict is for the aspirations of both sides to be met through two state’s and that he will personally pursue this outcome with all the patience and dedication that the task required. To Pakistanis he said his Government was planning to invest $ 1.5 billion each year over the next five years to build roads, schools etc. To Afghans he said his Government was providing over $ 2.8 billion to help Afghans develop their economy and deliver services that people depend on. To concerned Iraqi’s he pledged to honor America’s commitment to remove all troops from Iraq by 2012 and undertook that his government will help train its security forces and develop its economy. In his Ghana speech Africa was merely an adjunct in a $ 3.5 billion food security initiative and a $ 63 billion investment into a global health plan.

We Africans have been told fair and square though that we are on our own. Those who thought the election of a President with an African heritage will put African issues on the front burner of America’s foreign policy have been left to lick their wounds. Barack Obama is President of the United State’s and the focus, objectives and central theme of America’s foreign policy does not necessarily change with the election of Presidents; only strategy and style may differ. There is no way Africa can suddenly become more important than the Middle East in the conceptualization and implementation of America’s foreign policy. The earlier we accept this indubitable fact of America’s engagement with Africa and move on with our lives, the better for us all.

Africa should have heeded the wise counsel of that iconoclast, Robert Nesta Marley (Bob Marley) on the eve of Zimbabwe’s independence in 1980. In 1980 at Zimbabwe’s independence, Africa and the rest of the world had high hopes for that country. In the midst of the euphoria however, Bob Marley sang what became one of the most popular and ever appealing revolutionary anthems in world history. In the piece titled “Zimbabwe” and drawing from the United Nations “Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Territories and Peoples” (otherwise referred to as The Right of Self Determination Resolution) of 1960 Bob Marley counseled that everyman had a right to decide his own destiny and that in that judgment there is no partiality and that together in arms we will fight the struggle and that we will come together to overcome our little troubles.

He further expressed the satisfaction that African’s are the ones who fittingly and rightly liberated Zimbabwe and he admonished Zimbabwe’s leaders against internal power struggle and the divide and rule strategy which history has shown to have no practical utility as it will only tear Africans apart and alienate the leaders from the people. Finally he expressed the hope that in no time the real leaders (revolutionaries) whose only motivation for seeking power is the good of all Africans will be identified and the mercenaries amongst them found out.

How ironic things have played out. Not only was the hope of Zimbabwe never realized, none of the good things Bob Marley spoke about was replicated on Zimbabwean soil. Zimbabwe’s leaders are at each others throat, internal power struggle and rivalry is the lot of its leaders, divide and rule is the order of the day and the destruction of the economy has had the country teetering at the edge of the precipice with no immediate solution in sight. The situation is so dire and complicated now that you do not know who and what to believe any more. All the parties – Mugabe, the Opposition, Britain and the West - seem to have genuine claims to the peoples trust in Zimbabwe.

But the rot in Zimbabwe can still be halted if all involved approach the negotiations with open hearts, throwing out the window old prejudices, the continued mediation of South Africa with high level support from the United States and Nigeria may remain the surest way to resolve the Zimbabwean debacle. Britain should acknowledge its destabilizing and irresponsible posture towards a former colony and henceforth stop its fixation with the overthrow of the Mugabe government. It should instead support a framework that ensures that Mugabe’s ZANU PF genuinely shares power with the opposition led by Morgan Tsvangirai in a meaningful way. A framework that recognizes Zimbabwe’s shared past, the present differences/difficulties and the complexities of the future ensuring that at least the opposition has a continued chance of winning power in free and fair polls.

STEPHEN O. OBAJAJA is a Partner at the Lagos Law Firm of Fountain Court Partners.