Mugabe: Ends and Means

I am continuing to read The No-Nonsense Guide to World Poverty. This book is truly enlightening to me. I am almost embarassed at how naive I have been, and how easily lulled into the party line on globalization, capitalism, and international development. How foolish I have been.

Now, I see some things in a whole new light. Take Mugabe and his confiscation of White-owned farms for redistribution to Blacks. At the time, i did have mixed feelings about it. How it was done was not appropriate, but why it was done, i believe is not only justified, but necessary. The people of Zimbabwe do not need big farms that export products to the West, they need land for their people to produce the food that they need to survive on a daily basis. The same can be said all over Africa. Coffee, tea and tobacco plantations of East Africa, catering to the vices of the Europeans and Americans, cocoa, vanilla, and sugar, too, not to mention the mineral trio of oil, diamonds and gold. Convert this land into food production for local consumption, and you will solve the famine crises that one African nation or another faces almost annually. One need not earn the money to buy it if they can grow it themselves. Of course, this may be exactly why inclusion into the global economy is considered so important to those in the north and west.

African leaders have such amazing tools for bargaining with the west, I am not sure why they do not use them to the advantage of the people of their respective countries. Oil, coffee, tea, chocolate-- the west craves these things. Perhaps African leaders should start demanding more in compensation for these items, like medicines to eradicate such diseases as AIDS, malaria, and TB; technology to not only produce more food, but to become agriculturally self sufficient (rather than dependent on specialized seed stock that can only be obtained from western corporate interests).

Getting back to Mugabe, I am now wondering what is going to become of the destruction of the ghettos of Harare. Will this be another land redistribution scheme that looks bad on first appearances but is actually for a greater national good? Only time will tell. Though, once again, he has clearly used the wrong means, we'll see how justified he is by the ends.

Peace