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Business as Usual for Zimbabwe
Almost a year ago today, I blogged about Zimbabwe, the African Union, and the monumental failure of African leaders to publicly recognize the enormous catastrophe that the aging oligarch has wrought on his country. How sad to see that, if anything, things have only gotten worse.
The focus of last year's post was a prediction by the departing U.S. ambassador to Zimbabwe that total economic collapse was but a few months away. Zimbabweans needed only to hold on, Christopher W. Dell said, help was on the way. Unfortunately, but maybe not surprisingly (because how many predictions of total catastrophic collapse actually prove accurate?), he was wrong. Zimbabwe may have continued to decline on all fronts, but as far as Mugabe's corrupt regime goes, it's business as usual.
As my fellow Young Voices bloggers Rose and Sean have both pointed out recently, things in Zimbabwe are not good. The results of the recent runoff election see Mugabe still in power, dissenters and opponents beaten, imprisoned and murdered. Meanwhile, at the recent African Union summit in Sharm El Sheik, he was given a hero's welcome by other African leaders, most notably by regional powerhouses South Africa and Egypt.
Politics are politics, and sometimes they don't have much to do with the realities of what is going on, but this week's events are almost too much to bear. As condemnation from Western nations continues to be heaped on African leaders for their tacit approval of Mugabe's regime, very little seems likely to change. And this year, no one's calling for economic collapse, either. Maybe next July things will be better. Or maybe they'll be worse. More likely than not, though, they'll be pretty much the same.