Dear New Era team, allow this article to be published in your respectable newspaper as I believe we have the democratic right to hear the other side of the coin in every debate. I do indeed not see why you cannot be a comrade and friend of Zimbabwe without supporting Mugabe. The Mugabe of today is not the comrade of yesterday anymore. If a friend does something wrong, you have to tell him straight away, and if he does not want to change, you have to turn your back on him before he pulls you down as well. When Mugabe came to power he was told by (Julius) Nyerere that he inherited a jewel from the British, and should treat it that way. Zimbabweans were highly-educated and skilled people; Mugabe in the initial years was a good leader who saw the benefit to work with the British in building up his nation. Plans were done to redistribute wealth and the country had a strong economy and was a net exporter of food. As a reminder, when Mugabe took power in Zimbabwe the Zim dollar was trading at about the value of the US dollar. Today the U$ dollar is 500 000 Zim dollars, depending on the day and exchange market. Then corruption started finding its way in and showed its ugly face. Money earmarked for veterans and land was misused, and at the end of the Nineties the ministry and Parastatals CEOs responsible for buying fuel for the country pocketed it for themselves. A country without fuel is on an economic down-slope. Under the pressure of his peers, Mugabe needed a scapegoat. He found it in the commercial farmers, forgetting that he now touched the backbone of the Zimbabwean economy. If you cut off one leg of a table it becomes unstable and falls. The supply chains as well as the supply companies of agricultural inputs started to wind up as well. Workers lost their jobs and exports plummeted, so did the desperately-needed foreign currencies and investments. It is one thing to redistribute land which was taken from mud-hut farmers for cattle a hundred years ago; another thing is to destroy a sophisticated agricultural industry where people invested and contributed to the economy of the country. Even in the EU, agricultural land is owned by less than 5%, but they produce for the rest of the population and bring in foreign currencies. The majority of the people in the industrialized world do not have agricultural land, but jobs to feed their families. Just go to the USA and Europe and see for yourself. So while redistribution is a necessary thing to do, you cannot promise land to all if you don’t want to go back to a pre-industrial society. The government was supposed to look in a more cooperative way to develop the country with all parties involved. From a Zimbabwe that exported wheat, flowers, tobacco, tea, cotton, maize, etc. yesterday, we now have one that only exports prostitution and poverty. The 4 million Zimbabweans who left their country are not tourists, and the 80% unemployed are not on holiday. While I supported Fidel Castro of Cuba who got rid of the mafia, prostitution and unemployment in the Sixties in his country, I do not support Robert Mugabe who succeeded in only five years to boost just that … unemployment, hunger, hardship and made prostitution the main export factor. From the latter, Namibia “has benefited” a lot since 2001 (sic). Talking about the days of the independence struggle, yes the armed struggle was an important part and our former allies who should be our friends, but some of them have become corrupted by power. I also don’t agree by saying that the Western powers just stand by. During the end of the apartheid regime in South Africa, a lot of civil societies in Europe put a lot of pressure on the government to make South Africa give in. While the USA under Reagan and Britain under Thatcher took their time to withdraw their support from South Africa, the civil societies in these democratic countries were actively supporting the struggle. It was when the Cold War between the West and the East came to an end, and when the West including the USA turned their backs on South Africa, that they gave in and things started to change for ever. I remember when I was eighteen in 1987 how we collected money for the ANC during a huge fund-raising party in Luxembourg and elsewhere. I also remember when I was once sitting in a plane that stopped over in Harare in 1998, next to a white Zimbabwean commercial farmer who spoke very proudly about his country and people. He was exporting flowers from this country and explained to me how he started that business and how he loved his people and farm workers. He was a kind man and a real ambassador to his country, promoting it to the outside world. He felt like a citizen of Zimbabwe and not a British one, but already at that time, long before the land-grabbing started, he did not speak kindly about Mugabe’s management skills. It was a premonition of things to come. The South African government was boycotted and economically isolated everywhere by the end of the Eighties. It was this requirement of good government and pressure by the West which helped to accelerate things. It is the same pressure the West is putting on Sudan and who was allowing slavery until recently (just like Mauritania, by the way), and still has apartheid-like policies, but the AU is doing nothing. Only now the African independent countries do not seem to value as much as before what they have fought for. For political reasons, we prefer to stay quiet and even congratulate the Chinese for the policy of non-interference and non-conditional aid. Well, it was the interference and conditions which made us independent and democratic, so it should be our duty to act. For once I congratulate the leadership of the French government for not inviting Mugabe and the Chinese government for choosing this time to leave Zimbabwe out. It is quite a subtle gesture of maturity without taking sides, and always better than the steps our Namibian leaders choose to make because of some historical feeling of comradeship. Comrades and allies can change their dress and side, as history has shown us before (just referring to people like Savimbi, Mishake Muyongo, etc.). Nobody would call them comrades these days, so why do we still receive Mugabe with honours? He went astray and should not pull us down with him. Look where Namibia is today and where Zimbabwe is, while only eight years ago we looked up to them as a model. Today the picture is a different one – with a pension of Zim $4 000 per month one struggles to buy half a loaf of bread, a single egg, tomato and onion per month. The value of the stamp on the envelope is worth more than the entire monthly pension. Zimbabwe’s once famous national beef herd is on the verge of extinction, exaggerating the famine already faced by half the population. In 2000 the national herd numbered 1.4 million. The herd is less than a tenth of its 2000 size, and numbers are falling fast. I will spare you the other data. Maybe the inflation rates summarize best the economical downfall of a country. The sanctions on Zimbabwe are on Mugabe’s and his buddies’ personal assets as well as travelling restrictions, arms and other minor measurements such as the restrictions of donor aid which are necessary to make people change their minds, the same way the West put sanctions on South Africa during the last days of apartheid. After all, you don’t want to give donor aid to a lawless government. The economic downfall has nothing to do with sanctions but with a country becoming lawless. When roadblocks are becoming the means for the police to bribe drivers and pocket the money for themselves, when the youth terrorize elderly people, when people destroy property assets, when title deeds are not respected and when the judiciary loses its independence, a country is doomed. Let’s open our eyes comrades!