Posted on 04/22/2003 1:15:07 AM PDT by Cincinatus' Wife
HARARE (AFP) - Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe is prepared to meet opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai if the latter accepts Mugabe won presidential elections last year, the 79-year old leader said.
In a wide-ranging interview broadcast on state television, Mugabe also hit out at the United States for wanting him to hand over power to a transitional government, saying Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs Walter Kansteiner could "go hang".
The Zimbabwean leader was speaking in a special interview to mark Zimbabwe's 23 years of independence. But the celebrations have been marred for many by worsening economic hardships and widening political divisions.
The country's main labour body has set Wednesday as the start of protest mass action over a massive fuel price hike announced last week. Inflation meanwhile has reached 228 percent and 7.8 million people have faced food shortages.
Mugabe however claimed that most Zimbabweans are content.
"The majority of people are a happy lot despite the hardships we're going through," he said.
And he blamed food shortages and other economic problems on the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), Tsvangirai's party.
"What's the cause of the shortages? Isn't it the opposition that is calling on the international community for sanctions?" he asked.
But he said he was ready to meet the opposition leader if Tsvangirai accepted the outcome of last year's presidential election, which Mugabe won.
The MDC has rejected the result and is due to challenge it in court.
"You have to accept the reality that Mugabe is the president. If he (Tsvangirai) accepts that, there is no problem, none at all," he said.
Tsvangirai is facing treason charges for allegedly plotting to assassinate Mugabe, charges he denies.
During the interview Mugabe reacted angrily to recent criticism of his government by Britain and the United States. Both have been critics of alleged human rights abuses in Zimbabwe and the controversial land reform programme.
The US's Kansteiner is said to be soon going on a mission to Botswana and South Africa -- two of Zimbabwe's neighbours -- to build up pressure against the Mugabe government.
"He (Kansteiner) can go hang. I was elected," Mugabe charged.
"Who is Kansteiner to pronounce the validity (of the election)?"
Zimbabwe's economic decline has coincided with a three-year old programme to take land from white farmers to give to new black farmers. Mugabe hailed the success of the programme, saying Zimbabwe was not "totally independent until the land issue was under control."
He warned that black empowerment was "going to visit" other sectors dominated by foreigners, including manufacturing and mining.
Well, that is the problem.
Instead, most Zimbabweans were "drowning in abject poverty", were still "suffering social and political violence" and were being harassed by officials who "have placed themselves above the law". It expressed outrage over the regime's practice of demanding that people in famine relief queues "produce a party card before receiving food".***
Zimbabwe's Mugabe says prepared to meet opposition leader........and then have him killed.
US wants "Comrade Bob" out, transitional government in Zimbabwe: senior official***WASHINGTON (AFP) - The United States is urging Zimbabwe's neighbors to step up pressure on President Robert Mugabe to hand power to a transitional government to pave the way for new elections, a senior State Department official said. "What we're telling them is there has to be a transitional government in Zimbabwe that leads to a free and fair, internationally supervised election," the official said. "That is the goal, he stole the last one, we can't let that happen again," the official said, referring to a widely condemned election last March in which Mugabe won re-election. "It has to be internationally supervised, open, transparent with an electoral commission that works," the official told reporters on condition of anonymity.
The official would not say whether Washington had gotten positive reactions to its call from any specific country in the region, but said generally the "neighborhood" was increasingly aware of the problems posed by Mugabe's rule. "The neighborhood -- meaning southern Africa -- is realizing that this is not going well, this is breaking bad," the official said. "The food situation is going to get nothing but worse, the economic scene is disastrous."***
Mugabe: Freedom fighter turned autocrat***While growing up, Robert Mugabe witnessed at first hand the unequal distribution of land in the then Rhodesia. He professes to be a staunch Catholic, and worshippers at Harare's Catholic Cathedral are occasionally swamped by security guards as he turns up for Sunday Mass. However, Mugabe's beliefs did not prevent him from having two children by his young secretary, Grace, while his popular Ghanaian first wife, Sally, was dying from cancer. His marriage to Grace in 1996 was a public relations disaster. Since then, the economy has steadily declined, along with Mugabe's popularity.***
Leaving Grace Alone Would Be Unpatriotic The Daily News (Harare) EDITORIAL - March 5, 2003 [Full Text] BACK in the days when President Mugabe was not so frightened of the local independent Press, he held the occasional news conference, either at State House or Munhumutapa Building. At one such conference, he railed against journalists probing his extra-marital affair with Grace Marufu which, as we now know, culminated in their marriage. "Have I ever asked you about your girlfriends?" he asked, with a withering look at the journalists who thought they were on to a Big Story.
I remember the journalists looking at each other, in some wonderment: why would the President, with his busy schedule, be interested in their little love affairs, assuming any of them had the time to engage in such dalliance? These days, Mugabe rarely holds news conferences for the local media, except for the government mouthpieces, whose boot-licking has scaled nauseating levels lately. Once in a while, when there is a visiting dignitary, he may talk to the local Press in solidarity with the VIP. But even then the independent Press may not be around as they are rarely invited to such conferences, except when the government wants to announce some boring, mundane happening.
Today, if Mugabe was asked about what some critics have called Grace's outrageous behaviour as the First Lady, it is a matter of speculation how he would react. Would he retort with: "Have I ever asked you about your wife's obsession with shopping?" Or: "If your wife can't go shopping in Paris, and can only do it in Gaborone and Louis Trichardt or even Dubai, don't blame me."
Grace Mugabe's shopping sprees have become world news. If Mugabe is not concerned about the effect of this scandalous public display of profligacy by his wife, then he should not expect all of us to feel the same way. As many people face starvation in her own country, Grace is pictured as she goes out shopping in Paris while her husband attends a pretty useless conference in the French capital. The picture shows a bodyguard trying to shield her from the camera's view in vain, it turns out; it shows her face looking defiant and determined.
The Daily Mail of London, in a centrespread article entitled Grasping Grace, has a picture of her dressed in an expensive costume, handbag in hand, going out on yet another expensive shopping spree. The newspaper calls her "The First Lady of Shopping". Predictably, most of her supporters will say this hatchet job on her, coming from a British newspaper, is not surprising. The British have had little that is complimentary to say about her and her husband since 2000. But that is not true at all. There has been no survey yet, but a majority of Zimbabweans are as outraged by Grace's antics as are the British or any other nation which expects its First Lady to conduct herself with the decorum befitting a respectable, public-spirited citizen.
In some quarters, Grace Mugabe has been called the Imelda Marcos of Africa. In others, the prediction has been made that her husband will end up the way Ferdinand Marcos did in exile, a sick, old man who had looted the national coffers of his poor country. Back in the days when their controversial marriage took place, Lupi Mushayakara, then the editor of an acerbic women's magazine, conducted a survey among Zimbabwean women on the subject.
There was overwhelming disgust at the whole sordid business. As far as I know, Lupi is still studying in the United States. The Daily Mail story has this passage on Grace: "The Via Veneto in Rome and the upmarket stores of Barcelona's Diagonal centre have missed Grace and her credit cards, too. "In the past, she regularly turfed passengers off Air Zimbabwe Boeing 767s to accommodate herself and her parcels on her trips home, and she would have the plane land at a military air base to avoid customs and duty.
"The shopping malls of the Far East captivated her for a while she and her entourage of 20 recently ensconced themselves in the first-class cabin of a South African Airways flight to Singapore. They were later seen piling 15 packing cases full of luxury goods into the cabin." Even if the money squandered on such extravagant trinkets is not the taxpayers' but Mugabe's own income it is still obscene that the wife of a president from a poor country facing its worst economic crisis ever should be publicly seen to be so unconcerned about its plight. Some have argued that Grace had a tough childhood. She is simply doing it to compensate for that, with a royal lifestyle. Cinderella didn't do that, did she?
Others say she is taking after her husband, whose own list of outrageous political antics would qualify for him to be boiled in oil in the old days. Rumours of a rift between the two seem exaggerated: certainly, there has been no indication whatsoever that Mugabe has rebuked Grace for her public display of greed and ostentation. Mugabe is so confident he has the people eating out of the palm of his hand he doesn't believe there would ever be a public outcry against him as a result of Grace's pathological shopmania.
Like all dictators, including the aforementioned Ferdinand Marcos, Mugabe must believe that their honeymoon will never end. But he ought to have consulted both Kenneth Kaunda and Frederick Chiluba during his recent visit to Lusaka. Both men, but particularly the latter, ran their countries like their own little personal sheikhdoms and when the fall came, they were totally unprepared for it, going into a psychiatric spin of some sort as the truth hit them in the solar plexus.
The same fate seems to await Bakili Muluzi, whose obsession with a third term of office has transformed him from that young swashbuckling if rotund hero, into a clone of the Ngwazi. He seems headed for an explosive exit after which, like Chiluba, he is likely to be arrested and hauled into court to explain the apparent disappearance of millions of kwacha.
I am still fascinated by a story carried by The Chronicle, an independent Malawian newspaper, in which Muluzi's wife had to be flown to South Africa for emergency medical treatment. The publisher, whom I met last month in Colombo, Sri Lanka, provided more juicy details of this Dynasty-proportion episode. Unfortunately, this is such heavy, heady stuff publishing it here could land many people in a veritable legal stew we have quite enough of that without taking on Muluzi. But I can just hear the Malawian president rebuking all journalists: "Have I ever asked you about what goes on in your bedroom between you and your wife?"
As with Mugabe, the man would probably ignore the fact that as the president of a country even one as poor as Malawi his private and public lives are inexorably intertwined. For that reason, it would be a display of the most crass lack of patriotism for us not to put the spotlight on Grace Mugabe's recent inglorious behaviour. Imelda Marcos made world headlines with her shoes, but the people of the Philippines were furious with her for giving their country the stigma of such extravagance and ostentation. They, like some of us, believe that the country has to be bigger than any two-bit First Lady of Shopping or any president who is the spouse of such a lady. Both could always end up the way the Marcos dynasty did in total ignominy. [End]
A family of the VaDema tribe rub sticks to light a fire at the emergency food distribution center in Chitsungo, Zimbabwe, Wednesday, April 16, 2003. A small community, nearly 3,000 families living in hamlets of brick and mud houses, gather each month for emergency food handouts to help them survive. The U.N. agency is drastically scaling down its food deliveries from about 60,000 tons a month to 30,000 tons to Zimbabwe as the first of the current year's local harvests begin to trickle in. (AP Photo/str)
She is the most hated woman in Zimbabwe.
Pretty much applicable to the whole Mugrabby regime.
Mugabe has said in the past that he would consider stepping down when his government had completed the land reform programme that has seen white-owned land redistributed among new black farmers. "We are getting to a stage where we shall say 'ah fine, we have settled this matter and people can retire,'" Mugabe said, when asked if he felt he had achieved what he had set out to.
Mugabe often uses the plural 'we' when talking about himself. In January this year it was rumoured that army chief Vitalis Zvinavashe and speaker of parliament Emmerson Mnangagwa had contacted opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai over a plan to retire Mugabe and form a unity government. The ruling party dismissed the report. Mugabe has been in power in the southern African country since independence in 1980. [End]
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