All right, everybody, welcome back to Anti-War Radio on Chaos 92.7 FM in Austin, Texas.
I'm Scott Horton, and our first guest today is Dr. Aaron S. McKinnon.
He is a professor of history at the University of West Georgia and is an expert in South Africa and in Southern Africa, I think I can safely assume.
And he's here today to teach us a little bit about the situation in Zimbabwe.
Welcome to the show.
Hi.
Thanks for having me on.
Oh, well, it's very good to have you here, and this is a subject that I don't think there's really too many experts who can fill in the humongous gaps in my knowledge.
So I'm glad to have you on here to discuss this.
Basically, just kind of broad strokes, Zimbabwe is a little country to the northeast of South Africa there at the southern end of the east coast of Africa.
It used to be Cecil Rhodesia back in the day, and then there was a revolution, I think, what, in the 70s, and this guy Robert Mugabe came to power, and they called it Zimbabwe, and he's been basically the dictator there ever since.
Am I even close?
Well, some broad brush strokes there, yeah, it sounds reasonably accurate.
I'm not sure that everybody would characterize him from the point of inception of his leadership as a dictator, but that's certainly the direction that he's moved in since his involvement in the liberation struggle, liberation war, as it was referred to in the later 1970s, culminating in the Lancaster House Agreement and transition to the independent state of Zimbabwe in 1980.
So former British colony, wow, and they didn't get their independence from the British until the very end of the 1970s, huh?
Well, in fact, they did, but under a different guise.
Back in the wave of the expansion of African nationalism that Harold MacMillan referred to as sweeping the African nations or the African continent, rather, through the 1950s, many independent black African states did emerge in that process, but in southern Africa there had been a very significant but powerful minority of white settlers, colonists who had sort of entrenched themselves in the areas, and by 1960, when the writing was on the wall apparently for these white colonists in what was then southern Rhodesia, they opted for a kind of radical strategy referred to as UDI or the Unilateral Declaration of Independence from Britain.
So rather than be guided by British trends towards decolonization, as it were referred to, or working with African nationalist leaders in order to establish independent states, they said, we're going to go it alone, and we're going to work along the lines of white minority rule, a sort of racist regime.
They felt that they had some link and support with South Africa, which had maintained its stalwart sort of apartheid system all the way through until 1994, and that was their position in 1960.
So it took from 1960 to 1980 for that process of independence to come to fruition in Rhodesia.
And how much plurality of power was there for the bulk of this time under Mugabe, say, you know, a 1980 to 2000 era?
Well, the development of the opposition in southern Rhodesia, as it was in Zimbabwe, we can skip to using that term probably more appropriately, was balanced among African leaders and African societies that were, broadly speaking, broken into two ethnic linguistic groups, the Shona, which were the largest group in the sort of northern and eastern sections of Zimbabwe, and then the Ndebele, or Sindabele-speaking peoples in the southern and western portions.
They had pulled together a coalition of forces, various guerrilla groups, grassroots, civic organizations, workers, union groups, church groups, in opposition to the white regime, and had been effective.
But their political plurality, as you might say, was divided between two major blocks, two major political parties, ZANU-PF, as it became Zimbabwe African National Union's Party, and ZAPU, which was loosely brought together under the leadership of Joshua Nkomo, who was then brought into Mugabe's government under the auspices of what became ZANU-PF, Mugabe's party.
So really, it's all about race, right?
Minority landowners versus the majority, and that kind of thing, and they have names for their political parties?
Is that basically it?
Well, I think this is one of the kind of misapprehensions or misunderstandings that often applies to the post-colonial circumstance in much of Africa, is a kind of concern about viewing things purely in racial terms.
I mean, certainly race plays a big part in the structures of colonial regimes and colonial oppression, and in the emergence of the new Zimbabwe, there were safeguards provided for minority whites in Zimbabwe, specifically to allow them to remain entrenched on the land.
And they also had some security within the parliamentary structure.
They were guaranteed a certain number of seats to represent their interests in an independent Zimbabwe for a period of time, and that lasted for about 10 years.
But it's more complicated than just race.
There are questions of ethnicity, heritage, the legitimacy that people have claimed as a function of their role in the liberation war, and their reworking of history to suit current ends.
And that's really where the difficulty sort of rests currently.
Well, and Mugabe, though, has tried to make it a black and white issue, hasn't he?
Well, he has sought to kind of reconstruct a nationalist identity, referred to as the kind of Sons of Soil, the Zimbabwean Sons of Soil identity, that is really synonymous with the ideology of this political party, ZANU-PF.
And much of the rhetoric that has come out of his political ideology is very much anti-Western, anti-white, anti-globalization, and anybody who is perceived to challenge the orthodoxy and the primacy of that ZANU-PF message is seen as an enemy.
And of course, this includes the majority of Zimbabweans who are African, who support opposition parties, such as the MDC.
And so we don't want to be sort of falling into a trap of reductionism, but certainly the rhetoric has focused on white farmers.
Now, understandably, you know, in African states where colonial regimes were set up and the bulk of land was controlled by whites who were privileged under those colonial regimes, this becomes a very obvious target and an understandable target, that the redress of the past is going to be constructed in racial terms.
Yeah, I mean, I'm all for individualism and property rights, but if you have people who inherited everything from a foreign empire, then, you know, protecting their property rights against everyone else in a sense is, you know, stealing from them, keeping things from them that they didn't rightly acquire.
Sure, and that's part of a broader kind of argument that is made by people on the left, by academics and by African politicians and, dare I say, people around the world, political analysts who said, look, you know, we have this imbalance from the past where, you know, 70% of the land was held in control in Zimbabwe by, you know, less than 10% of the population.
And certainly in South Africa, a very similar issue prevailed.
And, you know, one cannot say too much about the undermining of African independence because of those problems of the differential access to land.
I guess the difference in the current situation in Zimbabwe is that Mugabe and his party have not necessarily sought to follow what we would consider to be a free and fair redistribution of land for the good of the larger economy.
Has anyone ever really?
Pardon me?
Has anyone ever really?
I mean, obviously, governments act in the name of those kinds of things a lot.
But of course, if the government takes control of the land, it's only going to end up in the hands of the friends of the people who control the government.
That's all.
Well, that's that's a hazard.
That's an argument that is sometimes made.
I'm perhaps more familiar with the South African model, which was in the transition in the 1990s.
The Constitution provided for the redistribution of land based on market forces and what they called a willing seller, willing buyer situation.
And to be sure, the South African question of land redistribution is fraught with complications.
It's far from adequate.
There are many thousands, hundreds of thousands, perhaps, who feel that they have been shortchanged by the failure of redistribution of land in South Africa.
The situation is probably even more acute in Zimbabwe, in part because even until fairly recently, all through the 1990s, there was a privileged stake in the land by white farmers who were seen as economically productive, who were generating foreign exchange through tobacco and through other grains and products that brought in much needed foreign hard currency.
And of course, at that time, even in the postcolonial period, Zimbabwe was enormously productive, and it had achieved very enviable rates of economic stability and progress, and things have since changed.
Now, the redistribution obviously is problematic because Mugabe has used what's referred to as the fast-track land reform program there to basically wrest the land away from the small number of remaining white farmers on large estates and redistribute it, but it's being redistributed to party loyalists, to men who were veterans of the guerrilla war back in the 1980 period, and to those top elites within ZANU-PF.
And therein lies the problem.
It's not the question of how or where should redistribution occur, but how and who gets the land.
Right, yeah, these people who are cronies don't necessarily know a darn thing at all about grown tobacco or selling it or anything else.
Right, and that's part of the argument, but again, that's a question of sort of policy, perhaps.
There are those on the left who would argue that the long-term engagement of a country like Zimbabwe with a global economy by sort of subsuming its interest in foreign exchange and neoliberal economic policies is not really serving the good of the whole of the people.
And so the problem with the current situation in Zimbabwe is pretty complex because it's not just about a bad leadership which is engaging in kleptocracy, the snatch and grab of land and resources and redistributing it to the cronies.
I mean, that's a key problem.
But there are these arguments that are made by ZANU-PF that really what they're doing is redressing the wrongs of the past.
And at the risk of sort of privileging my own profession, I would say this is where historians need to come in and say, hey, there's a big difference between redressing the wrongs of the past under the guise of the needs of African nationalism and a reworked post-colonial circumstance on the one hand with the problems of a pretty rapacious fascistic dictator like Robert Mugabe on the other hand.
Right.
And one of the ways that he's stealing the wealth, or well, not just he, but the government of Zimbabwe has been stealing the wealth of the people is through inflation and through the absolute destruction of their currency.
I've seen stories about $10 million bills and things going around like this was post-World War I Germany.
Absolutely.
I think the highest figure I've seen over the past week has been something in the neighborhood of 164,000 percent inflation.
And yeah, it's almost unimaginable.
If you see press reports on the newspaper, if you speak with people about, you know, shopping, for example, in Harare or in Bulawayo in Zimbabwe, you're talking about empty stores in which you might find, you know, an ancient loaf of bread and you might have to pay, you know, $50 million in dollars for it.
And of course, you know, the economy is completely dysfunctional, you know, 80 percent rates of unemployment.
And this is where, you know, the combination of his sort of very oppressive political regime has combined with the complete undermining of the economy to create a social as well as political crisis for Zimbabweans.
And that's really the tragedy to go in, say, you know, 15 odd years from one of the most stable and productive Southern African states into this basket case economically and politically is great, great tragedy.
And I would suggest it also is problematic because it really does undermine broader African nationalist initiatives.
Well, let me nail you down on your language there.
I want to make sure I understand what you meant when you talked about the destruction of the economy to create social crisis.
Do you believe that that was a deliberate measure by Mugabe in order to provoke crisis and perpetuate his power?
Or he's just creating all this money simply, you know, to spend on yachts and cocaine and fun for his friends and let the rest of the economy be damned as a side effect?
Yeah, I'm not sure one would characterize Mugabe as that sort of level of self-indulgent.
I was just assuming, you know.
But yeah, I mean, it is a good question.
I don't think he is making a calculated effort to destroy the country economically in a kind of, you know, Romanesque, debauched, self-indulgent way.
I think he realizes that, you know, the problem of political leadership in that country is a tough question to resolve and that in any state, you have to choose a balance between opening up political space to opposition parties and working out your differences for the good of the whole or clamping down and sort of holding on to power.
And I think he's very much concerned with holding on to power.
I mean, the recent elections there have shown very clearly that his party will brook no consideration of a transfer of power.
And I think that's quite ominous.
We could come back to that later, perhaps.
But debauchery aside and what exactly he's spending the money on aside, you don't think it's deliberate because I don't think that's out of the question.
I mean, the use of inflation to destroy savings, to destroy property, owning classes and so forth is a time-honored technique.
Sure.
But I think clearly in the case of Zimbabwe, the inflationary spiral is rather a byproduct of mismanagement of the economy on the one hand and his very concerted efforts to undermine opposition on the other.
And this is where we do see that, yes, he certainly is serving the interests of his elite group of cronies through accumulation.
And principally, they're interested in accumulating wealth through the control of land.
Now, whether or not they can actually put that into into effective practice in the long term is highly questionable because we've seen that, you know, they don't have the capacity to come in to take over a large estate farm and run it effectively.
And in fact, the likelihood is that you would create a kind of retrograde sort of aristocracy of landholding elites, which would then in turn lease out the land to a very humble and impoverished peasantry.
And so in the long term, yeah, they are sort of becoming parasitic.
They're feeding on their own selves in that regard.
But the inflationary spiral is not necessarily a tactic used to undermine the opposition.
They've had far more effective means, for example, Operation Muramba Batswana, which was an effort in the period 2000-2002 to eradicate opposition groups in the urban areas of Zimbabwe by basically clearing out informal shack settlements in the town.
Oh, yeah, I remember that.
And it was pretty horrific.
And and of course, the Mugabe argument was, here we have evidence of, you know, problematic underclass in the urban centers.
And the way we're going to deal with it is to force them out into the rural areas.
We're going to clean or cleanse.
And that's really what the term meant was to cleanse these areas of these shack settlements.
And what he didn't acknowledge at the time was that those shack settlements were a product of the collapse of the rural economy.
And so, you know, the paradox was lost on him, I think, in terms of his his efforts there, that, you know, poverty had become so pervasive that people were driven from the rural areas to find a desperate foothold in the urban areas.
And his reaction was, we can't have that because these people may become politically active in opposition to my party.
So how do we deal with that?
We purge them.
Right.
And then I guess that explains what is said here in the AP.
Well, assuming that this is true, that the life expectancy in Zimbabwe has fallen from 60 years to 35 years.
Yeah.
Is that really accurate to 35 years is the life expectancy there now?
Well, one has to be a little bit careful with with statistics that talk about life expectancy.
And the question is, you know, are we dealing with life expectancy once you survive infancy, where the largest rates of death occur?
We might even hazard that there are even greater threats or that life expectancy could be considered to be even further reduced because of rates of infant mortality.
And I think in many ways, those statistics may just be part of a deeper rooted problem that is simmering in in the urban areas and likely to spread to the countryside.
They were dealing with a region that has potential to be malarial.
Tuberculosis and HIV, AIDS are certainly rampant in in all of southern Africa because of transport linkages.
And, yeah, I mean, it is a profound statistic, and I think it does suggest a fairly accurate picture that the average person is not going to not going to see life into their 60s.
And this is fertile land, right?
This is a land full of minerals and soil and could be a wealthy society.
There's no legitimate reason.
It's not like a giant plague came through or something and or a giant drought came through and destroyed everything.
It's it's government destruction of the economy is what's done this to these people.
Well, that that certainly is the conventional wisdom.
And I agree with it largely.
But and this is not intended as a defense of Mr.
Mugabe.
But if we listen to his rhetoric and we look at it in the broader global context, one of the arguments they're making is or a series of arguments the making is is roughly encapsulated.
Thus, there is a recent history of devastating environmental problems of excuse me, of drought, followed by some flooding with environmental upheavals.
In addition to that, they argue that and this is the paradox of kind of what we call the gender development thesis in in sort of world history.
And that is to suggest that on the one hand, there's a condemnation of the colonial regime for setting up this privileged white elite, which generated a lot of wealth for themselves.
At the same time, then we condemn them.
And Mugabe's rhetoric is that the these sorts of patterns are responsible for the economic collapse.
Now, interestingly enough, I took the trouble yesterday to telephone the Zimbabwe embassy in Washington, and I was fortunate enough to get a chance to speak with the consul Wilbert there.
And he was very clear in his ZANU-PF sort of loyalist message that their argument is that the economic plight of the Zimbabwe currently is not because of what seems obvious.
Mugabe is mismanagement.
He says, no, no, no, that's not the case.
Really, it is the Western and white dominated political economy of the globe, which has undermined everything we try to do.
Now, some of that does go back to the historical period of what are called the structural adjustment programs that were applied to Africa.
And I'm not sure if you've got IMF and the World Bank where they come in and they call it the free market when they loot all your state owned assets and take the money and run.
Yeah, pretty gunpoint.
Yeah.
And of course, a lot of Southern African countries were kind of pressured into buying into those.
That's what caused the that's what caused the great Ethiopian crisis of the 1980s, hands across America and all that.
That was the World Bank that did that.
I mean, there's there's an argument that says that that certainly World Bank policies undermine the ability of local producers in the state to contend with the incredible forces of the global economy as they kind of, you know, took advantage of these weak players.
Now, all I'm saying is that that's part of the rhetoric that comes out of Mugabe and the Zainab Piaf message.
They're saying, look, this opposition group, the MDC, Morgan Svendray and his buddies are in cahoots with these white farmers and the World Bank and the US and the UK.
And all they want to do is engage in a kind of neo imperialism.
They're going to take our our land, our Zimbabwean land, and they're going to turn it right back over to white farmers and we'll be cut out once again.
Now, part of the argument is, well, maybe maybe this is good because then you'll restabilize the economy.
But nobody is suggesting that addressing the political crisis in Zimbabwe is going to lead to that kind of outcome.
I mean, I think people are talking about, obviously, the rule of law, liberal democracy, a stable economy, controlling inflation.
But when you look at it in the broader context of African history and the African nationalist movements, you can see how somebody like Mugabe would have great resonance for people there and say, look, this guy, he's one of us.
He's he's a freedom fighter.
He was there fighting against the white oppressors and he is still fighting for us.
And he really is.
He really does have neo imperialism to point his finger at.
I mean, it's the Americans aren't quite, you know, red coat soldiers marching around down there.
But when they send in their guys with their briefcases to say, listen, this is how we're going to work your economic readjustment, it's very much backed up with government force and or at least overwhelming force in the world market and so forth.
It's no different than the socialists being elected in South America.
They have a neo imperialism to point at and say, look, people look at what they're trying to force us to do.
You ought to vote left.
And the people do.
So here we're giving Zimbabwe, this Cretan, a legitimate excuse to say that he's defending the people from outside interference.
Absolutely.
You've hit the nail right on the head.
And this is this is the crisis for the left writ large or academics who are sort of of a left leaning approach like myself to say, look, on the one hand, we certainly recognize the need for redressing the wrongs of the past.
The question is, are we prepared to support that at the expense of an opening up of the economy where everybody gets equal access?
And so this is where Mugabe has been very, very crafty, is is a very powerful public record, a rhetoric rather that resonates with these nationalist or reworked nationalist ideas from the past to privilege his elite group.
And, you know, if you look at the Zimbabwe political economy in the past 10 years, he's been very good at providing for the guys that he needs to support him.
So the guerrilla veterans who are the ones who have been invading the white farms there and sort of trying to liberate them as it were sort of taking taking them ransom, he makes sure they get access to money, to privileged political positions and to to farmland members in the army, members of the police.
He's ensured that they, too, have access to, you know, these these privileged areas.
So we have, you know, a very shrewd political tactician here, you know, undermining those two elements of African nationalist liberation movements, the one which is a sort of organic indigenous response to the global economy, both in the past and currently, and the question of how to deal with the current economic struggles.
All right.
Now, a half hour into this interview, I guess I ought to ask you about the news.
About nine or 10 days ago, they had parliamentary and presidential elections there.
And for weeks beforehand, people were saying, oh, Mugabe is already getting ready to steal this thing.
And the results have been in dispute since then.
Can you give us an update?
Is it clear at least that the opposition has taken the parliament now and it's only the presidency that's still in dispute?
Well, certainly that's true of what is being reported that, you know, parliament has been swept or is in control now by the MDC.
And of course, the larger question is, is the presidency?
Because over time, Mugabe has managed to create an office of presidency, which has considerably enhanced powers for a period of time.
You know, if we had this discussion Thursday or Friday of last week, I would have said that the indications, the early indications were that Mugabe was perhaps preparing an exit strategy.
They were talking about that last week a little bit.
Yeah.
And in fact, you know, I was kind of curious.
I was thinking about it.
I'm not sure if you're aware, but Boston University has this kind of interesting ex-African president's program where they've had Kenneth Kawunda there.
And basically what they've done is they've offered positions as sort of a scholar in residence or an experienced political in residence at Boston University as a segue out of political life for these longstanding African nationalist leaders and kind of excusing any questions that might come up for their record.
And I sort of wondered, well, gee, I want, you know, is that going to come for for Mugabe?
Others have said that safe havens have been provided or possibilities of safe havens have been mooted for Malaysia.
Dr. Mahathir Mohamad, the former prime minister of Malaysia, indicated in a report that maybe maybe Malaysia should provide him some space.
Mahathir's political record is not perhaps as dubious as Mugabe's, but somewhat dubious.
And so you can take from that what you will.
South Africa may also be prepared.
And in fact, I saw a report in which Mugabe was claimed by Zanupiaf loyalists that Mugabe had said, I'm prepared to go if you give me a blanket amnesty.
Now, since the weekend, I think the writing is on the wall very clearly, the failure of the Supreme Court to force the election results to be promulgated, the posturing of the police, the reworked reinvasions.
We've got veterans from the guerrilla war who are now reoccupying white farms across the countryside.
I think every indication is that Mugabe has decided, no, I'm I'm not not going to go that quietly and that easily.
And they're going to force a runoff for the president.
And I suspect that the reason why we haven't seen the results so far is that the results do not support a Mugabe win and that he will be using pretty much whatever tactics and strategies he has available, including intimidation, political repression, bans on the media to ensure that his message gets out and that he wins the next election.
Yeah, well, it would be absolutely incredible to think that somebody who's presided over this kind of economic destruction could be reelected when people absolutely cannot save.
I mean, they're basically forbidden from saving anything.
They must trade all their currencies away as fast as they possibly can.
Well, and I think that's really where this current crisis has has led to some glimmer of hope.
He has won previous elections in a downward spiraling economy.
And again, I think it's because he's had this very compelling message that, you know, I'm here as your leader defending your interests against the horrors of the past as represented to us in the horrors of this neo-imperial future.
Right.
And, you know, I think it's interesting.
I mean, some of the material I've been reading is curious because it says, hey, you know, why is the guy still so popular?
He has this kind of avuncular dictatorial sort of approach to life.
He's got that big man kind of presence and he has been crafty at redistributing.
And in the past election, he went out and he took farm tractors out to the countryside and said, here, here are farm tractors for my people.
So, you know, he has been able to whip up some support.
But I think you're absolutely right.
When when people have to take a wheelbarrow full of currency to buy a loaf of bread and then only to discover that the loaf of bread isn't even there, they're going to be voting in a different direction if possible.
But the problem is, no matter what the polls actually record, I think that ZanuPF will make sure that a Mugabe win is presented within the next sort of two, three months of the outside.
In fact, this fellow I spoke with at the embassy yesterday said that the MDC may not be able to claim power even if it wins an election.
Yeah.
Now tell me about this guy.
Well, I can't say his name, Sven Gurai.
Sven Gurai, yeah.
And boy, oh boy, I'll tell you from The Guardian a day or two ago, I forget.
Major powers here, such as South Africa, the US and Britain, must act to remove the white knuckle grip of Mugabe's suicidal reign and oblige him and his minions to retire, he wrote in The Guardian.
How can global leaders espouse the values of democracy, yet when they are being challenged, fail to open their mouths?
So apparently Mugabe's opponent is calling for American and British regime change to install him in power.
Tell me that that is not even in the cards in a million years, please.
Well, it's very unlikely that, you know, US or UK people would be on the ground doing anything.
What's much more likely, I think, at this point is he has made overtures to the South African government.
Kabu Mbeki is a bit of a slippery character on this question.
He has been, that's the current president of South Africa.
He's been vacillating as to whether or not the appropriate amount of pressure should be brought to bear on Mugabe to step down and therefore create an atmosphere of free and fair elections.
I mean, this is, you know, it's a two stage process.
One is, you know, can we create an atmosphere where free and fair elections can really take place in Zimbabwe?
And two, even if we can do that, does that mean that Mugabe and ZANU-PF will accede to it?
I think ultimately the South Africans will be in a position to bring the greatest authority to this question.
But the leadership from Mbeki is not clear.
Now, I know that Jacob Zuma, who is the heir apparent to the leadership in South Africa, has been recently elected as the chair of the ANC and is likely to be the candidate for the next presidential election and therefore likely to be the next president of South Africa.
He has indicated that he believes Mugabe needs to go.
But making that claim and actually enforcing it are two different things for two important reasons.
One, ZANU-PF is so well entrenched, it might take serious physical action to oust him.
And two, African leaders, especially of this generation who themselves have been long standing warriors in the liberation struggle, are very loathe to press out of power somebody who has Mugabe's kinds of credentials for having supported the liberation struggle himself.
So we're not going to be able to hire a neighboring state to invade like we did in hiring Ethiopia to invade Somalia back in December of six and ever since then.
One would certainly hope not.
I mean, I think South Africa has the security forces to help stabilize the situation.
Should it come to that?
Whether they have the will to do it, I don't know.
If they stabilized it, then the question is what what could come?
Would there be a declaration of a new electoral process, which I'm pretty sure would by that point lead to an MDC victory?
I think that's likely to be the most we could hope for.
To be honest with you, I don't think the U.S. really has much of a specific interest in this case at all.
One way or the other, Zimbabwe is a landlocked country.
It doesn't figure very large on the horizon of American interests.
It doesn't bear oil.
And therefore, it's not a strategic value the way that some other West African states would be.
That's of course, has a long established relationship, and it has basically said they will pony up one billion pounds sterling to basically anybody but Mugabe who wins an election.
And that may be incentive enough for people to say, you know what, we're done with this and we're prepared to take to the streets.
But then again, they would be inviting the potential for the kind of brutal repression that Mugabe has been known for.
In fact, when he consolidated power back in the early 1980s, there are claims that he was responsible for atrocities which resulted in the deaths of 20,000 people who were political opponents to him.
So he's certainly not beyond using that kind of repressive brutality to cling to power.
Wait, now, who is it that's offering the sterling?
The British government.
The British government.
Yes, because see, that just sets up anybody who does oppose him as agents of the foreign power, just like Castro does to anybody who opposes him in Cuba.
Absolutely.
I mean, it becomes a catch 22 situation.
On the one hand, you say, look here to the people, we can provide you with the, you know, foreign backed economic stability to rebuild our country.
And Mugabe can say, you see, this is exactly what I told you to fear.
They're opening the door to, you know, white neo-imperialism.
I think, though, you know, from what I've seen of interviews with people on the streets and what I've heard through NPR and other people, it suggests that most Zimbabweans are sick to death of the circumstances and they want some sort of change.
What's interesting is that the independent presidential candidate, Simba Makoni, who's a former finance minister in Mugabe's government, has not actually gotten more support.
He's running at about six percent, I think, or eight percent of the popular vote.
And you see him as the superior candidate to this other guy who's calling for regime change?
Well, I don't think he's a superior candidate, but he does bring one critical element to the mix, and that is that he has not been associated with, you know, external neo-imperialist forces the way that the NDC and Morgan Sangrai has been.
Sangrai is seen as being an ally to white farmers.
And, you know, even though I don't believe that's the case, that is the argument that's made, whereas Simba Makoni is, well, look, he's a former ZANU-PF stalwart.
He represents a middle course.
But interestingly enough, people are divided between the two polar opposites there.
Yeah, well, that's the way it always is in politics, isn't it?
Like James Bovard says, drunks in a bar, they swing and they miss.
Well, a good point.
All right.
Well, listen, this has really been fascinating.
I really appreciate your time.
I'm really glad that none of this has to do with a war that America caused or is or not directly anyway.
I guess we did cover the whole World Bank thing there.
But apparently a conflict that's mostly none of America's business and is not slated to be.
That's great news, at least.
And and I really appreciate all the knowledge that you've shared with us today about the background and the current situation going on there in Zimbabwe.
Great.
It was a great pleasure.
Thanks for the opportunity.
I appreciate the discussion.
All right, everybody.
That's Dr. Aaron S. McKinnon.
He's a professor of history at the University of West Georgia.
This is Antiwar Radio on Chaos 92.7 FM in Austin, Texas.
And we'll be right back.
