'Terrified' Mugabe tightens his grip

WHEN THE soldiers rolled past Lot Dube's land and set up camp, they told him and other farmers that all non-maize crops would be destroyed.

Their entire harvest would have to be sold to the Zimbabwean government's Grain Marketing Board so it could be used to purchase foreign currency.

It is the Mugabe regime's latest ploy to buy its way out of an economic crisis so severe that inflation is running at more than 1,000%, a record for an African nation supposedly not at war.

Dube, 63, who has farmed in the southern Insiza district since 1982, had to watch while the troops ploughed his market vegetables - onions, tomatoes and sweet potatoes that bring in money to pay for his children's school fees - into the ground.

There was little point complaining to the Grain Board; Robert Mugabe has recently put a military commander in charge of its operation.

With pressure now building both internally and externally on the 82-year-old president to save his country by removing himself from power, Mugabe is strengthening his grip over the country's rural masses.

This week, the UN representative to Zimbabwe is being recalled to New York to brief the Secretary General Kofi Annan on a situation rapidly spiralling out of control. Annan intends to visit the troubled African state later this year. Although the UN is making no official statements, it is believed Mugabe will be offered financial aid in return for giving up power.

UN Under-Secretary Ibrahim Gambari, who heads the political affairs department, said he is working with Zimbabwe's foreign minister "on how best to prepare for a positive visit by the Secretary-General which would help advance this process of helping the people of Zimbabwe".

What all sides appear to want most is to prevent a descent into bloody civil war. The conditions are certainly ripe. Last month, annual inflation hit 1,042%, the worst of any country outside a war zone.

Once the breadbasket of southern Africa, Zimbabwe's economy has been shrinking for the past six years and has been dependent on food aid since 2002. At least 75% of Zimbabweans probably have no jobs, and food and fuel are scarcer than ever. Last month, the UN distributed emergency food aid to about one fourth of the 12.5 million population and said many people were surviving on one meal or less a day.

Now Mugabe, who has been in power since the country's independence in 1980, has ordered his military to fan out across several rural areas to ensure the government's grain silos are full. He is also appointing military commanders to top positions in civilian institutions, presumably to stave off instability anticipated over rising prices.

As well as the Grain Board, senior officers, both on active duty and retired, are now in control of the Reserve Bank, the Electoral Commission, Zimbabwe Railroads, the Ministry of Energy, the Public Service Commission, the National Parks and other key institutions.

Jonathan Moyo, a former Secretary for Information and currently Zimbabwe's only independent Member of Parliament, said: "This is an admission that things have fallen apart and national governance can no longer continue in a civilian mode. It's a crisis and we are in an undeclared state of emergency."

The result could be "massive spontaneous demonstrations sliding into anarchy", Moyo added. "Zimbabwe is a case of worrying potential because should it erupt it will be out of control."

The presence of the military predominantly in the southern part of the country, and not in the north where Mugabe's draws his support, is no coincidence. "The army has targeted areas that are potential opposition strongholds, those farmers that have voted for the opposition," said Gordon Moyo, leader of the Bulawayo Dialogue advocacy group. "It's an act of intimidation and a violation of human right of those people."

David Coltart, a white Member of Parliament with the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), said: "The militarisation of the state of government is viewed by Mugabe as a passport to a post-State House security. He hopes that after he leaves State House he will not be pursued by the law and not dragged to Senegal or the Netherlands for crimes against humanity."

Earlier this month, the pro-government Herald newspaper announced a likely constitutional amendment for Mugabe to remain in power until 2010, two years past the next scheduled presidential election.

None of this is helping the economy, critics say. "The economy will only turn around when you get competent and experienced people running it, not the military," says Coltart. "The appointment of military people to run things like the railroads will only speed up the demise of the regime."

Many officials in prominent positions are accused of pillaging from the institutions they oversee and profiting from corruption rackets.

John Robertson, an economist in the capital, Harare, said: "It is robber baron stuff of the highest order. It's a pirate ship with Robert Mugabe as the captain. It's an exciting, profitable ride while it lasts, but inflation is the consequence."

In eerily quiet tourist destinations, such as Victoria Falls, a cup of tea that as recently as last year cost 12,000 Zimbabwean dollars now costs 250,000. Supermarket shelves are stocked full of goods too expensive to purchase.

The economic squeeze is affecting all sectors of society. Last December, graffiti appeared in the bathrooms of army barracks, calling for Mugabe to be ousted. Shortly after the government announced a 300% pay increase for soldiers and teachers.

But the increased printing of money is only likely to spur even greater inflation. "It is a way of buying off the soldiers," said Gordon Moyo. "Mugabe is a terrified man."

Not much hope can be pinned on the official opposition. After years of repression, the MDC is utterly split. MDC leader Morgan Tsvangirai is threatening to take his opposition to the streets, but may struggle to muster enough supporters to avoid being brutally crushed by the country's powerful security forces.

Back in the southern fields, their tactics are plain to all. Soldiers are accused of beating local residents - women as well as men - who have not obeyed the orders to uproot their vegetable gardens and fruit trees. They can be seen guarding roads and footpaths throughout the irrigation schemes and driving tractors, which is as close as they come to farming.

"They say they want to end hunger in Zimbabwe," Dube said. "But I think they want to take the fields for their own use."

Neighbour Gabrial Nkala, 55, who has been farming on the same plot since 1980, added: "

We need agriculture exports, not soldiers, but it seems they are here for a very long time."

Already posted, but still:

http://www.tcsdaily.com/article.aspx?id=050906A

From Refugees to Tycoons

By Val MacQueen : BIO| 09 May 2006

Immediately after he pulled off his '72 coup against President Oboto in Uganda, strongman Idi Amin -- full title:

His Excellency President for Life, Field Marshal Al Hadji Doctor Idi Amin, VC, DSO, MC, Lord of All the Beasts of the Earth and Fishes of the Sea, and Conqueror of the British Empire in Africa in General and Uganda in Particular (and also, curiously, King of Scotland)

--decreed Africa should be for Africans. One of his first decisions as lord of beasts and fishes was to eject all the Asians -- some 40,000 or so, who were third generation descendants of Indians who had come to work for the British colonial administration during the days of Empire and who, when the British Empire was dissolved, created commercial enterprises.

Not for nothing had Amin been mentioned in a dispatch, when he was on the British side during the Mau-Mau uprising, as "virtually bone from the neck up, and needs things explained in words of one letter."

Having decided to eject the country's wealth-creators, he further ruled that these people, uprooted from their country of birth, could take with them only what they could carry. They had 90 days to get out.

The crisis this provoked in Britain at the time has been softened with the passing of the years, but because they were Commonwealth citizens with British passports, the government, in the face of almost universal opposition at home, did the right thing and decided to give them refuge. So 40,000 ethnic Asians arrived in an alien, monocultural group of islands in the clothes they stood up in and the one suitcase holding the meager possessions they had managed to carry with them. Their confusion and distress at having had to leave their country of birth and all their possessions to come to a cold, damp, hostile island must have been almost unendurable.

Back home Idi Amin distributed the property they'd been forced to leave behind among his friends and presided noisily over the decline of Uganda. The Asians, meanwhile, were billeted in drab refugee centers until they found their feet, and they displayed a resilience that still astounds.

What a difference two generations can make.

The British high-circulation Asian newspaper Eastern Eye, in conjunction with The Daily Telegraph of London, has just published its annual list of Britain's richest Asians. In all, six from East African refugee families made it into the top 10.

Number one is Mike Jatani, one of four brothers who started the Lornamead Group (beauty products) in 1978, eight years after the Amin explusion. Today, their company, started from scratch, is worth £650 million ($1.2 billion).

According to The Daily Telegraph, the pharmacy sector is the biggest, with the Mehta brothers (8th) and husband and wife team Navin and Varsha Engineer (12th) between them accounting for £300 million -- over half a billion dollars.

In the fashion segment, one of Britain's best loved women's clothing chains, offering outstanding fashion value for money, is New Look, owned by one Tom Singh, whose Indian parents brought him to England when he was one year old and set themselves the task of peddling goods from door to door. Tom Singh and his wife opened their first store in 1968. By the mid-1990s they had 200 stores. In 1998, they sold the chain to a venture capitalist for £156 million and Singh took a role as non-executive director. In 2004, New Look returned to the private sector and Singh rejoined as managing director. Sikh Tom Singh's in the No 6 slot. Also in fashion, Shami Ahmed, who created Bloggs jeans, comes in at No. 13.

Another Sikh, Jasminder Singh, born in Dar-es-Salaam, with his Radisson Edwardian Hotel chain, comes in at No 5.

The only new entry to the top 20 this year is an entrepreneurial travel boss at no. 18 with £95 million, displacing the fetchingly described "curry magnate", Sir Gulam Noon. Last year, Noon was 16th on the Asian rich list with £100 million, but now with just £85 million doesn't merit a place at the Asian top table. (The displaced Noon has been otherwise engaged in the traditional British rich man's sport of trying to buy a peerage under the table -- the second such Asian businessman caught in Tony Blair's latest wheeze to raise money for the Labour Party -- an encouraging demonstration of just how integrated Britain's Indians have become.)

Steel parts tycoon and cricket-enthusiast Lord Swraj Paul (he rather sweetly lists his membership of the MCC -- the world famous Marylebone Cricket Club -- on his resumé and contributes time and money to helping disadvantaged boys take up the game), is No 3 and worth £450 million. He and his wife recently managed to get Non-Resident Indian status from the Indian government, which means they will have the right to settle in India one day. Who comes around goes around.

Those expelled from East Africa were third generation immigrants to Africa, and had created assets and wealth. Which is why Idi Amin was so interested in them. Now, those families are again third generation immigrants, this time to Britain, and again they are rolling in wealth. How was this extraordinary feat accomplished twice?

How does one account for a group of people who came from the Third World to the First World with nothing but a suitcase, within three generations, overtook around 99.5 percent of the natives in terms of wealth?

Like the Chinese, ethnic south Asians have a reputation for possessing shrewd commercial instincts and a willingness to sacrifice short term advantage (i.e. going to work for someone else in return for a regular salary) in the service of a long-term goal. The entire family stays focused.

Those families in the 1970s were indeed strangers in a strange land. They didn't waste time on regrets. They hunkered down and got to work. The parents of Tom Singh traipsed around neighbourhoods peddling goods from door to door for years. As did others. They were thrifty. They worked long hours. They saved their money and reinvested it in themselves. Indians keep it all in the family and the mates of their children marry into the business also. Tom Singh's parents amassed some money from their door-to-door peddling, but it was their son Tom and his wife who opened the family's first store, and subsequently 200 more.

Another key to ethnic Indians' success is, they do not look to banks for money. If money is needed, they look within the family or extended family, offering a part of the business by way of repayment.

The three richest British Asians were excluded from the Eastern Eye/Daily Telegraph list because their business interests lie primarily outside the United Kingdom. Numbers two and three would be the notorious Hinduja brothers, whose fortune is estimated at around $8 billion.

Finally, not only the richest British Indian, but Britain's richest-ever individual come together in the person of international steel panjandrum 54-year old Lakshmi Mittal, born in Rajastan and whose £14.8 billion fortune puts him third in the world after Bill Gates and Warren Buffet.

Queen Elizabeth of Great Britain is worth $818 million.

Val MacQueen is a TCS contributing writer.

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