ZIMBABWE has the most sophisticated economy in the region outside South Africa. Over recent years, Zimbabwe adopted an increasingly open-market policy and attracted new investment. The UK is one of the largest suppliers of goods and services to Zimbabwe and is one of the largest investors year on year. Although new investment has greatly diminished recently owing to the present unstable economic and political situation.
Who says so? Tony Blair. Or folk operating on his behalf, at least. The above benign assessment of the murderous, corrupt regime of Robert Mugabe appears on www.trade partners.gov.uk/zimbabwe/profile/index/introduction.shtml. It’s the gov that gives it away as an official source of information, although the sht towards the end might better sum up feelings in Downing Street once the vile hypocrisy behind its attitude to England cricketers visiting Zimbabwe is fully exposed.
Once Blair and the Daily Mail end up on the same side, you know something stinks. And what reeks here is that Nasser Hussain and the ECB are required to be the moral guardians of the nation at a time when men who could genuinely bring a despicable regime to its knees in months, not years, stand back and do virtually nothing.
Thanks to tradepartners.gov.uk, I also understand that the UK is Zimbabwe’s second-largest trading partner after South Africa, that we are its largest investor, with 400 British companies based there, and that the UK also provides Zimbabwe’s biggest export market. I know there are opportunities in the communications and power industry and I’m very glad for the contact numbers the site provides. It would seem, in fact, that I am all set up for a long and mutually profitable relationship with Mugabe — just provided that I don’t want to play him at cricket.
Just like John Brendenkamp, for instance. His company recently got a nice mention in a UN report on Zimbabwe, owing to a July 6, 2001 invoice in which it states he set them up with camouflage cloth, batteries, fuel, boots and army rations. Brendenkamp was recently named the 33rd richest man in Britain and lives in Berkshire. Another of his companies, a sports agency, also represents Graeme Hick, Ieuan Evans and Mike Catt.
The UN goes on to claim that Brendenkamp has a working relationship with BAE Systems (formerly British Aerospace) through his investment in a company called Aviation Consultancy Services. It reckons that in February 2002, Aviation Consultancy Services brokered a deal through which BAE Systems supplied £2 million of spares to the Zimbabwe Air Force for use in Hawk jets, in breach of European Union regulations. Brendenkamp denies this.
But, then again, so would I.
Still, it might be worth asking why Zimbabwe should be off limits for a group of men with nothing more serious than a lump of wood in their hands (and no recent track record of wielding that with any dangerous capability), but not those who produce the nuts and bolts for planes that could be used to deliver weapons of mass destruction.
Hell, while we’re at it, let’s ask why Zimbabwe should be a playground for BP-Shell, Costain, Unilever, RTZ, Standard Chartered, British Airways, Barclays Bank and British American Tobacco, to name just the largest of the many UK-based companies operating there. The tobacco industry alone was worth roughly £400 million to Zimbabwe in 2001 and £200 million in 2002, the drop caused not by a rush of boardroom morality, but the disastrous, brutal incompetence of Mugabe’s farm reclamation programme.
Supermarket shelves in Britain remain stocked with vegetables imported from Zimbabwe. So how we will drive a stake through the heart of this evil dictator? That’s right — we won’t play him at one-day cricket.
Yet hold on. Who is this marching around the perimeter of our City of Manchester Stadium during the Commonwealth Games? Why, it’s our old pals the Zimbabweans. No such qualms about welcoming them over when it was your Government that would have caused the diplomatic incident, eh Tony? And why has it taken until six weeks before cricket’s World Cup begins for this fixture in Harare to become an issue? It has been in the calendar for a year now.
Interesting, too, to note what exactly Clare Short, the International Development Secretary, finds morally reprehensible. She told the BBC that a visit to Zimbabwe by England’s cricketers would be deplorable and shocking. Yet she had no such problems popping into Ghana two years ago with the Prime Minister, the visit timed rather unfortunately to coincide with the news that British businesses had sold almost £60 million of arms to the African continent in the previous year. Give that moral compass a tap, Clare, I think it’s lost its bearing again. There is a huge difference between a sporting boycott of Zimbabwe and that of South Africa more than 30 years ago and it cannot be quantified by comparing two vile regimes. If sport were played only against countries in which proper democracy prevails, half the world would be shut down — and, anyway, who would draw up rules for what is right and wrong? After all, one person’s Financial Times Man of the Year is another’s Republican warmonger.
No, sport becomes political only when politics enters sport — as it did when South Africa refused to play against non-white nations. There is no equivalent restriction in Zimbabwe. It is its politics that repulse, not its sport. (And, interestingly, once South Africa lifted its ban, so the sporting boycott ended. Its cricket tour to India predates the first democratic elections by three years.) There is nothing wrong with sport taking a moral stance. I firmly believe the English FA should have refused to go through with a friendly against Holland in August 2001, when the Dutch named two players found guilty of using performance-enhancing drugs in their squad. But what sport should never do is be made to fight government battles. Cricket in Zimbabwe is not the problem. Politics is.
Similarly flawed is the argument that Mugabe might use the World Cup for propaganda purposes. (Not that our Government has time for that, too busy taking tea at No 10 with Becks and Sven and the gang.) Yet couldn’t he have used the Commonwealth Games the same way? And won’t Zimbabwe’s visit to England and its Test match at the hallowed Lord’s next summer come in equally handy? And can’t he just point to continued trade with companies whose Britishness is trumpeted on every letterhead and claim his Government, like Simon Smith’s dancing bear, is well accepted everywhere? The fact is, boycotting a one-day match in Harare pays populist and cheap lip-service to the notion of bringing down a despicable regime.
This Government wants a dressing-room of young, naive men to display principles it dare not embrace in any other field for fear of hurting the economy. The UN says that BAE sold military equipment to Mugabe as recently as February, yet a year on we will take it out on him by making a stand over cricket? All governments are liars and murderers, as the very serious comedian Bill Hicks opined. Accept that truth and it makes the world a lot easier to understand.
Should the World Cup have been awarded in part to a country as unstable as Zimbabwe? Of course not. But the 2008 Olympic Games should not have been handed to Beijing and Miss World was always a disaster waiting to happen in Nigeria. Stupid people do stupid things and decent people suffer as a result. England’s cricketers, who for once have done nothing wrong, have been put in an impossible situation by crass politicking at the ICC and rank hypocrisy in Britain’s corridors of power.
For if we are to pull our athletes out of every event staged in a country where power was seized by dubious electoral means, where does it stop? Who, for instance, is going to tell Paula Radcliffe she won’t be going back to Chicago?
