Smash hit

The imposing Bulawayo Club, once the hangout of rail and mining magnates, is now only half-lit at night. The members’ bar, formerly the favoured watering hole of the city’s business elite, now rarely attracts more than one or two visitors a day. “We have more barmen than clients these days,” quipped a porter.

Fuel shortages mean public transport has pretty much ceased to function, and if the rickety old buses do finally arrive the cost is beyond most Zimbabweans’ budget. People look tired and broken. They shuffle dispiritedly through the streets, but once safely in the passenger seat they speak openly of their plight.

“We’re suffering. Things are very tight here. It used to be good, but he has chased you (whites) all away,” said Charles, a painter who has not worked for almost two years. He had waited more than two hours for a lift. “Sometimes you can wait all day, but so what? We have nothing else to do these days.”

Visiting Mr Mugabe’s Zimbabwe is like entering a time warp — a throwback to the days of Eastern Europe before the collapse of communism. It is a country of nervous whispers, anxious backward glances and hollow declarations praising visionary leadership. Meanwhile, most of the country’s 11 million people struggle to feed their families.

State-run newspapers are full of “news” about friendship agreements with countries such as Iran, and articles on the dark intentions of Britain, the United States and their puppets in the Zimbabwean opposition. Michael Howard’s every criticism of the hated Tony Blair, who has led the fight for Commonwealth sanctions against Mr Mugabe’s regime, is headline news. “Blair is a drunk,” declared one typical headline in the state-controlled The Herald newspaper this week. After Mr Mugabe took power he made friends with North Korea, which trained the army’s notorious Fifth Brigade, accused of murdering at least 20,000 opponents in Matabeleland in the early 1980s.

In 1991, he offered a safe haven to Ethiopia’s brutal Marxist dictator, Haile Mengistu Mariam, who killed hundreds of thousands in his own country. Mr Mengistu was then given a post as a “security consultant”, and seems to have passed on some useful tips. Informers hang around hotel lobbies, keeping a watchful eye for outsiders intent on recolonising the country before it can celebrate its 25 years of independence this year.

Foreign journalists rarely obtain visas to visit. Instead they have to visit surreptitiously as tourists, risking a possible two-year jail sentence if caught. “Whatever you do, don’t take anything which can identify you as a reporter. They will have you,” my friend warned me before I left, a bag of golf clubs in hand.

Within moments of leaving the airport, visitors have to drive through a roadblock manned by sullen police, some dressed in casual clothes. “They get paid peanuts, so they are always on the lookout for something extra,” said my passenger. “Drive slowly, but don’t look at them.”

Zimbabwe’s descent into economic chaos began when President Mugabe launched his policy of land redistribution in 2000, seizing the farms of “white colonialists” to give to landless peasants and the veterans of the war of liberation.

After 20 years in power, opposition to his rule was suddenly growing, and for the first time since independence in 1980, he looked vulnerable. The whites, though small in number, possessed 4,000 farms and owned large tracts of land. There are now only 400 left, and most of those are in business with Cabinet members.

“We wanted land reform, but we wanted it done responsibly and with compensation. Mugabe had had 20 years to draw up such a policy and had done nothing,” said David Coltart, the Shadow Justice Minister and a leading figure in the opposition Movement for Democratic Change. Aware that there was little sympathy in western liberal circles for Zimbabwe’s whites, largely remembered for their opposition to black majority rule, Mr Mugabe cunningly played the race card to strengthen his grip on power.

“It was never a racial issue, it was a power issue,” said Archbishop Ncube. The issues of “race, colonialism and land” raised by the 81-year-old President, one of the last survivors of the generation of African leaders who defeated white rule, resonated widely in the rest of Africa, particularly South Africa, he said.

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