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BILL MOYERS: They could operate out of Zimbabwe.
GEORGE AYITTEY: Yes. And, therefore, there's a huge debt of gratitude or indebtedness towards Mugabe. And which is why Mbeki finds himself unwilling to criticize him publicly.
BILL MOYERS: He says he's practicing quiet diplomacy.
GEORGE AYITTEY: Why didn't he apply that quiet diplomacy when he was trying to mediate a crisis in Sudan, for example? Or the Congo, for example? Or Ivory Coast, for example? Now there, Thabo Mbeki wanted negotiation with the warring factions in Ivory Coast. Why is he not using the same negotiation tactic in Zimbabwe?
BILL MOYERS: Is it just gratitude? The gratitude that Mugabe gave Mbeki and others sanctuary?
GEORGE AYITTEY: Yes. That's part of it. The second reason is that Mbeki also faces the same inequitable distribution of land problem in South Africa. So he has to be extremely careful in terms of how to deal with Mugabe. Among the poor in South Africa, Mugabe is very popular because he is seen as doing something to right a colonial wrong.
BILL MOYERS: By what? Doing what?
GEORGE AYITTEY: That colonial wrong is the inequitable distribution of land.
BILL MOYERS: In what used to be Rhodesia, now it's Zimbabwe, five percent of the whites owned 90 percent of the land.
GEORGE AYITTEY: Yes. And then the poor in South Africa tend to see him as a hero because they see him as trying to right a colonial wrong in Zimbabwe. So Mbeki has to be extremely careful in terms of how he publicly criticizes or praises Mugabe because he also faces sadly the same problem in his country. Now, the third reason, if I may?
BILL MOYERS: Sure.
GEORGE AYITTEY: You see, across Africa there is what I call a colonialist mentality or orthodoxy. Orthodoxy in the sense that a lot of things have gone wrong in Africa in the post-colonial period. And time and time again, any time something went wrong, the leadership claims that it was never their fault. It was always the fault of some external forces, some external evil, external colonial, new colonial forces.
BILL MOYERS: You could blame the outsider.
GEORGE AYITTEY: That's right. Never themselves. So Mugabe comes across as the epitome of this particular orthodoxy. Anything that went wrong is always the fault of some white conspiracy, what he calls the white snakes in Zimbabwe. He never takes responsibility for his own failures and incompetence. He blames the World Bank. He blames the IMF. He blames the British neo-colonialists. So that sort of argument plays well among the African leaders who are also refusing to take responsibility for their own mistakes.
BILL MOYERS: Even if the other African leaders wanted to oust Mugabe, could they pull it off?
GEORGE AYITTEY: They could.
BILL MOYERS: They could?
GEORGE AYITTEY: As a matter of fact, there's been a precedent. Back in 1979, when Idi Amin was terrorizing his neighbors.
BILL MOYERS: In Uganda.
GEORGE AYITTEY: Yeah, in Uganda, Julius Nyerere said, "I'm not going to take this anymore." And he sent his troops over to Uganda
BILL MOYERS: From Tanzania.
GEORGE AYITTEY: Yeah, from Tanzania to kick him out. And so there is what I call an African solution. Now, even recently in Togo when Eyadema died, the military staged some sort of a coup to impose the son on the people. The Regional Organization of West Africa -- ECOWAS -- said, "No way, this will not stand." And the military was forced to back down. So there you had the regional sort of organization taking a very strong stance against something that they called a rape of democracy in Togo.
BILL MOYERS: And it worked.
GEORGE AYITTEY: It worked. So this is why Africans are also asking the Southern regional organizations today to also take a strong stance against Zimbabwe. But so far, they have disappointed the people.
BILL MOYERS: Is it conceivable to you that if the African leaders do nothing and Mugabe continues his repressive rule there could be a coup?
GEORGE AYITTEY: There could be a coup or the country could blow up. We've had this so many times. And this is one of the things which is so maddening because it seems that these leaders learn nothing. Somalia has blown up. Rwanda has blown up. Burundi has blown up. Zaire, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Togo, Ivory Coast. Now, must we sit there and wait for Zimbabwe also to blow up?
BILL MOYERS: But it seems unimaginable to me that those poor, destitute, frightened people we saw trying to get across that fence from Zimbabwe into Botswana are the fuel for an explosion.
GEORGE AYITTEY: They could be the fuel for explosion, judging from the experiences that we've seen in Somalia, Rwanda, et cetera, et cetera. But quite often, there's always an element of discontent. And it could come from the military as you suggested and to have a military coup, for example. But then time and time again, military coups don't solve the problem. I mean, we've had so many of them in West Africa. And they remove the civilian dictators. And then --
BILL MOYERS: Liberia is a perfect example.
GEORGE AYITTEY: Yes. And then these military dictators, you know, turn out to be worse. You can either have a military coup in Zimbabwe. You could either have a rebel insurgency. It could start from the outside. If you look at Rwanda, for example, Paul, their current president Paul Kagame, led a simple rebel force to remove the Hutu-dominated government.
BILL MOYERS: A few hundred people --
GEORGE AYITTEY: Yes. And in Uganda, President Museveni started out with only 27 men from the bush. And so it doesn't take much to --
BILL MOYERS: Overthrow the government.
GEORGE AYITTEY: Yeah. To overthrow the government. It doesn't take much. And Charles Taylor of Liberia started out with less than 200 men.
BILL MOYERS: I was intrigued recently. President Bush said, quote, that, "Zimbabwe poses an unusual and extraordinary threat to the foreign policy of the United States." Why do you think you'd make such a statement?
GEORGE AYITTEY: Well, as a matter of fact, Condoleezza Rice, the Secretary of State, called Zimbabwe "an outpost of tyranny". And the administration's feeling is that if you have such an output of tyranny, it will always act as a breeding ground for terrorists or maybe pose a threat to US security interests in the region.
BILL MOYERS: Well, we saw that in Afghanistan when a destitute and failed state was taken over by the Taliban and converted into a terrorist operation. You think that's what the president fears in Zimbabwe?
GEORGE AYITTEY: Well, there's that possibility. And let's not forget that back in 1998, U.S. embassies in Tanzania and Kenya were blown up by terrorists because the prevailing type of environment, which is so hostile towards the West, may allow such anti-terrorist activities to ferment in the region. So there is that concern.
BILL MOYERS: Let's talk about Africa as a whole. I recognize it's a huge continent with many differences from country to country, tribe to tribe, people to people. But why is Africa so poorly governed?
GEORGE AYITTEY: Well, to understand Africa, consider Africa made up of two people, two groups of people. There are the elites and then there are the real people. I call them the peasants. Now, the problem is with the elites. Now, quite often, people don't want to criticize the leaders for fear that they may be labeled as racist. So they shy away from criticizing African leaders. Look, the problem is with the leaders and the elite. After independence, they took over power from the departing colonialists and established two defective systems: a defective economic system and a defective political system. Defective political systems of one party state systems, which were un-democratic, which concentrated a great deal of power in the hands of one individual. Now, you don't have to be a rocket scientist to recognize that if you create a political system in which power is concentrated in the hands of one individual, that system, no matter where you are, would always degenerate into tyranny.
BILL MOYERS: Because there's no free press. There's no rule of law.
GEORGE AYITTEY: Precisely.
BILL MOYERS: There's no court system it's all governed under the thumb of --
GEORGE AYITTEY: One person. That's where you have the maximum leader. Now, back in 1990, out of the 54 African countries, only four of them were democratic. Today, the number is 16. Which means that the vast majority of the African people still live under oppression. Okay?
BILL MOYERS: I read somewhere that something like 90 percent of the countries below the Sahara have experienced despotic rule in the last three decades.
GEORGE AYITTEY: Precisely. So you're talking about a continent where political freedom has been elusive. Even intellectual freedom has been elusive. Out of the 54 African countries, only eight of them have a free press. Which means that Africans are not free to speak or criticize their governments. Now, to me, freedom of expression is very, very important. The media is extremely important because, you see, you need the media. The first thing to solve a problem, the first thing that a society has to do is to expose that problem. And that's the job of the media. And even if you want to fight corruption, you have to expose it. But you can't expose corruption if the media is muzzled.
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George Ayittey, Professor of Economics at American University, Washington, DC
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