A Response to the Chairman of Anglo American’s Letter in ‘The Times’ of London.

In response to the Chairman of Anglo American’s letter on the 30 June. First, having ‘been investors in Zimbabwe for 60 years’ is not necessarily something to be proud of. And secondly, there is justifiable outrage at Anglos proposed £200 million investment in Zimbabwe. Those who argue for applying sanctions are all to painfully aware that disinvestment will hurt the least advantaged, but they realise that continued investment will assist Mugabe in maintaining his grip on power.

Sir Mark Moody-Stuart’s promise to improve access to water and food assistance is not meaningful considering Mugabe only allows assistance to reach his own supporters – or at least those who will support him rather than die of starvation. This coupled with the fact that the taxes paid to the Mugabe regime are used to commit crimes against the Zimbabwean people suggests that there is a very strong moral imperative to pull out of Zimbabwe all together. This is, after all, what prelates such as the Archbishop of York John Sentamu and Desmond Tutu have been calling for.

I feel it is worth noting that not even the moral precept of the Doctrine of Double Effect (that condones the foreseen yet unintentional bombings of civilians) can be dredged up to defend Anglos’ case for continued involvement in Zimbabwe. The DDE would, for example, condone the bombing of civilians if (a) they were not the intended target of the bombing (e.g. the intention was to target a munitions factory) and (b) the good in bombing munitions factory significantly outweighed the evil of killing the civilians. It is now quite clear that the good of Anglo’s presence in Zimbabwe is outweighed by the evil that they are unintentionally sponsoring.

Does Mandela’s silence on Zimbabwe threaten to blight his moral stature?

Mr. Mandela said in an interview with Alistair Sparks in 1995 that during the Kagiso massacres of 1992 it became clear to him that de Klerk was just ‘an ordinary white man’, because ‘he was not moved by the massacre of so many people, that he still regarded black lives as flies.’ By not speaking out against Mugabe and the massacres occurring in Zimbabwe the question should at least be asked if Mandela is guilty of the same sentiment.

I understand that there are large divisions within the ANC and that, although seen as the father of the new South African nation, he is a weak and frail man within the party. That he has no power to direct policy can quite clearly seen. One only has to evaluate his stance on the Aids issue and compare it with that of the South African Government’s to see how his views have been entirely disregarded. Anyone who follows South African politics is acutely aware that Mbeki and his cabal have treated Mr. Mandela without the slightest respect and in 1999 spat him out like a piece of distasteful charred fat into the Transkei.

A South African newspaper asked a few months ago: ‘Where are the leaders of our first government?’ Well, the simple answer is that they are there but they, like Mandela, have no power within the ANC, and so like Mandela they have fallen silent. Their silence is, to a degree, understandable. They quite obviously do not wish to weaken the structures that they created. However, in doing this they have undeniably done some damage to the South African democracy.

What is notable is that Mandela himself is on record as saying there are some causes that are greater than ‘ANC unity’ (an expression which seems to me to be the quintessential oxymoron), ‘when a leader must move out ahead of the flock, go off in a new direction confident that he is leading his people the right way’. With tens of thousands dead in Zimbabwe, hundreds of thousand displaced, millions living in exile, and the secretary-general of the MDC in jail and facing the death sentence, it seems like now is such a time to move away from the flock. It has been devastating to me, and I know many others, that Mandela’s sage voice has spoken only once on this matter (and that was eight years ago) when he said that ‘They want to die in power because they have committed crimes.’ But then when he was asked who he was talking about he merely replied, with the equivocation that rivalled apartheid era expression, that: “Everybody here knows who I am talking about”.

Since then Mandela has remained silent as the grave on this matter, a matter that at this moment in time perhaps exceeds Aids as the most imperative in Africa. I realise that he is nearly a man of ninety, but surely it is precisely because of this that he must now speak out? For otherwise he will go to the grave with this silence. And he may be judged, unjustly, as just another black man who was not moved to speak out by the massacre of so many people, and that perhaps he was just another African leader who ultimately regarded black lives as flies. I, for one, do not believe this, Mr. Mandela’s untiring work with regards to the Aids crisis is beyond reproach. He has successfully and urbanely exonerated himself from the blame of Mbeki’s criminal Aids policy. There does, however, seem to be an urgent need for him to offer a less equivocal statement concerning Mugabe and the genocidal crimes that are occurring in Zimbabwe.

London’s Mayoral Race

London’s incumbent mayor Ken Livingstone, like his strongest opponent in May’s London mayoral election, Boris Johnson, has miraculously survived the fallout from racially tainted verbal slip-ups. Although Livingstone’s slide in the current polls may have something to do with the race issue (in that it has in part to do with fall of his advisor of race relations Lee Jasper) it is Johnson who, despite his lead in the polls, has the major hurdle of projecting himself as capable of embracing the ethnic minorities that make up 26% of London’s population.

Johnson has in the past been outspoken in his condemnation of what has been termed the ‘race relations industry’ – an industry that Ken Livingstone extols. In a recent interview on the BBC Johnson refused to be drawn on whether he would do away with a ‘race relations advisor’ answering that he would put a ‘lot of energy’ into getting institutions, like the police force, to be more representative. He added finally that many of his advisors would be from ethic minority backgrounds.
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Resentment or Revolt

My last two months in South Africa were, from a political standpoint, the worst I have experienced since the end of apartheid. They saw the government and the ruling party testing political depths that many of us thought were the preserve of the National Party. Alongside the election to the ANC presidency of Jacob Zuma (a man already adjudged to have shared a ‘corrupt relationship’ with a convicted felon) they saw a lead prosecutor of the National Prosecuting Authority arrested on trumped-up charges only days before he was to be in court prosecuting Police Commissioner Selebi, the very man in charge of those arresting him. This development was followed by President Mbeki’s claim that he had not heard, until the previous day, that Selebi was closely connected to a convicted drug dealer. Mbeki’s claim strained the bounds of credulity given that Selebi himself had acknowledged the association in public. Shortly thereafter followed a rare mea culpa from our President on an unrelated national issue. Mbeki opined that it was not in fact Eskom but his own government that was to blame for the fact that we were all going to experience rolling blackouts for the next five years which could result in economic growth, initially projected at about 5% falling to anything between 3% and 0.5%. Perhaps with a hint of irony these blackouts have gained the title of ‘load-shedding’ which suggests a surplus rather than a paucity – it perhaps refers to the ‘shed load’ of government incompetence, mismanagement, greed and corruption that is within the ruling structures. Finally, came the coup de grace – the announcement in Parliament by the Minister of Police that the Scorpions (this country’s singular crime-busting success story) was to be ‘disbanded’. Needless to say, the rainbow of hope that was in a considerable state of tohubohu.
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Dr. Chitiyo’s Zimbabwe

Reflections on a lecture I attended at the London School of Economics dealing with the crisis in Zimbabwe. The title of the lecture was ‘Zimbabwe: 1980 – 2007: Past, Present and Future’ presented by Dr Knox Chitiyo, head of the Africa Programme at the Royal United Services Institute.

Political commentators have found it difficult to put the troubles in Zimbabwe, and South Africa’s response to them, into perspective, often proffering analyses bordering on the Quixotic. There have been those (many in the South African liberal establishment) who have decried Mugabe’s apparent fall from a once liberal leader to the anathema who can utter such lines as ‘let me be a Hitler tenfold’. Others have argued that Mbeki’s policy of quiet diplomacy has been delicately crafted to stop Zimbabwe from imploding, and (astonishingly) that the policy has achieved a measure of success. Finally, there have been those who have trailed out that old hat that Mugabe’s policies are deranged, that he has gone mad (some even suggesting through venereal disease), and that his policies are selected out of the lucky-dip-hat of evil deeds.
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How to Get Everybody to Hate You

Hello and welcome to my blog.

Recently I have been doing some work on a concept for a book that I wish to get underway in 2009. Its working title is, How to Get Everybody to Hate You: the Liberal Pursuit. It will broadly evaluate at the views expressed by liberals such as George Orwell, Isaiah Berlin, HLA Hart, Karl Popper and Albert Camus and look into why such antipathy has been directed towards their views and to them as people. In this research the person whose thoughts have most awoken me from my dogmatic slumbers of late have been those of Isaiah Berlin and his notion of pluralism; a word that has been tainted by its association with moral relativism. It is widely believed that pluralism and relativism both express the same notion; the conception that just as giving money to the poor can be considered as morally good in Britain so the cutting off the heads of western aid workers in Iraq can be considered morally good within certain Muslim sects. This is to say that morality is merely relative to the society one finds oneself living in. This is an unqualified misinterpretation of Berlin’s thesis.
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In the Same Space

Nick Sunderland is a twenty-something drifter in London, caught in one of the world’s oldest quandaries. Deft, compelling and piercingly witty, Blackman’s debut is a morality tale for the twenty-first century.