Hi, Dr. E. here again tonight, introducing guest voice Mr. Ed Warner, geologist with twenty-six years in exploration geology, including subsurface geology combined with “bright spot”, AVO and 3-D seismic, Offshore Gulf Coast, Michigan Reef Trend, Sacramento Basin and western Kansas Morrow play, and Jonah Field. He is a Libertarian and deeply involved in better outcomes for Zimbabwe. As you will see at end of his article, dictators across the world use the same time-honored scam about elections to retain power, just as seeming took place in the recent ‘election’ in Iran. The similarities between Mugabe and Ahmandinijah are startling.
Disclosure: Mr. Warner is a colleague and friend of many years.
CRY ZIMBABWE
I’m a Denver scientist and Director of the Sand County Foundation. I have made a dozen trips to Zimbabwe since 1999 and, since 2000, worked in community-based conservation there.
I have been an eyewitness to the entire decline of that country.
I found articles across the newspaper world so misleading so as to confound me. One sub-headline quotes Robert Mugabe as blaming the British for his country’s economic collapse… Mugabe being quoted as saying…“I cannot sleep with a clear conscience if there is any cheating.” (In Focus: Suffering in the Wrecked Economy of Zimbabwe, by Angus Shaw, Assoc. Press.) [There was no analysis of this quote, as though blindly accepted.]
The last [many] months demonstrate that America and the Media live in a vacuum, utterly ignorant of African governance.
I’d like to speak truth to the media and governnment lies. In my work in Zimbabwe, supporting wildlife conservation and the livelihoods of indigenous people, this is what I have seen.
In 1999, Zimbabwe was a thriving, budding democracy, the fourth largest agricultural exporter in the world! A rising Black middle class combined with the best race relations I have witnessed in my world travels. The small white minority were the greatest entrepreneurs I’d met anywhere. Zanu-PF, the communist revolutionary party of Robert Mugabe almost lost the 2000 election to MDC the budding pro-democracy opposition.
In order to stay in power, Robert played his last and only-hole card: Twenty years earlier he had threatened to confiscate all ‘white’ farms, but failed to do so through benign neglect. In April, 2000, he pulled the trigger. His “War Veterans” invaded [those] farms, murdered a few whites and drove the rest out of their homes. 50,000 agricultural workers, all black, protested. The great “Land Reform” had begun.
In May, 2000, I interviewed War Vets on the 250,000 acre private wildlife conservancy, Bubiana (subsequently destroyed by land invasions). They were farmers and wanted more land to grow maize. The southeast low veldt where they lived is a semi-desert, poorly suited to farming – perfectly suited to wildlife. In time they would poach all the wildlife out of the once thriving private land conservancies, and their crops would fail 5 of the 6 years since they plowed the sand.
Zanu-PF gave the commercial farms to their political cronies, generals and higher-ups in the national police. The politicos expected to cut deals with the white farmers to skim the profits. The whites refused to play ball, so all that was left was to sell off the farm equipment for cash.
Thus, the Zimbabwean agricultural economy collapsed. W heat production dropped 90% in three years. This is “Gangster Government” (Africa Unchained, George Ayittey) at its worst.
Since then, whenever I’ve thought it could not get worse, it has. In June, 2007, while I was there, I watched Mugabe enforce “price controls” while his central bank created the worst inflations since 1922 Germany, by printing money and stealing foreign exchange as fast as they could.
The prices were rolled back by six weeks (400%) and the shelves emptied in days. The price police would close a store, reset the prices and reopen the store. Like as not, the police, army officers and politicians would be standing in line, first to buy. Businesses went broke and the economy further collapsed. Don’t believe me? I sat in a Harare shopping center in June, 2007 and watched it happen.
Robert Mugabe, Zanu-PF, the army and police have stolen everything. They have converted their soon to be worthless Zim dollars to U.S. and shipped it all offshore. I have purchased large quantities of Zim dollars on the black market to pay for conservation efforts. I know of what I speak.
The world has stood by and done nothing. Why not? Southern African governments cannot intervene. They are all Gangsters themselves, more or less. I have had Ministers in Namibia tell me Robert Mugabe is doing the right thing. “We will take back the white farms in our country someday.”
Mbecki of South Africa is a thief. All of them are. It is cultural. They do not understand the creation of wealth. They think you get rich by taking from someone else. Why haven’t we stepped in? My friends, they are Black and they have no Resources we covet.
–The opposition has been beaten and murdered.
–Over three million black Zimbabweans, the entire black middle class have left the country.
–Many college graduates are working cleaning toilets in South Africa.
–Two million Zimbabweans have died of AIDS. The average life span is 34 years.
–The population has dropped from about 14 million to maybe 10 million yet, Zanu-PF claim 5.9 million on the voter rolls in a country where the average age is less than the voting age. You do the math.
The world could have intervened in Zimbabwe and set Africa on a better course. Instead, we have sat back and watched an entire continent unravel in a matter of years: Rwanda, Zimbabwe, Sierra Leone, Congo, Sudan and Kenya.
–Religious hatred,
–tribal hatred,
–greed,
–gangsters and
–irrational borders imposed by colonial powers…
— all fueled by guns donated by Russia and the West during the cold war have led to the collapse in Africa.
Robert Mugabe, for the moment is the worst of them. By sitting back and doing nothing, the West insured that he will be neither the worst nor the last.
Following Mugabe’s thugs being confounded to discover they really did lose the election,
–they violated their own constitution and ran the election runoff, not 21 days later, but 90 days.
–Enough time for them to viciously attack their own constituency the majority of whom had finally had enough and voted against Mugabe.
–Sure they attacked and murdered MDC politicians, but mostly the sacked and burned Shona villages – their own people.
We now know that Gangsters will not give up power. The election was stolen. SADC, the Southern African Development Community and the African Union, have wrung its collective hands and done nothing substantive.
Western governments decry the results and do nothing as well.
The U.N. is incompetent to act, a bloated bureaucracy that feeds at the public trough.
Only military intervention will overthrow this government and no one has the stones to do it.
In lieu of invasion, I suggest complete embargo. Let the refugees out and nothing in. Let the bastards sit in the dark with nothing to eat. Let them live like their own people. To paraphrase Alan Paton: “Cry, the Beloved Zimbabwe.”
In Liberty,
Ed Warner