Posts
by Chido Makunike
US diplomatic cables released to the public
by Wikileaks show that well-known British businessman Richard Branson was one
of many who pre-occupied themselves with how to ease long term Zimbabwean
president Robert Mugabe out of power. It adds to the increasing evidence of the
unusual, astonishing interest in influencing Zimbabwean affairs by the British
media, government and private individuals like Branson. What Branson’s clumsy
efforts do is simply give more credence to Mugabe’s contention that
neo-colonialism and preserving kith and kin interests are the main reasons for
the levels of attempted British intervention in Zimbabwe, rather than any
concern for ’human rights and democracy.’ Mugabe may be a despot, but on the
issue of Zimbabwe, this serves as more confirmation of just how soiled are British
hands.
Rather than reflecting the business acumen
for which he is renowned, the Branson regime-change initiative seems to have
been astonishingly amateurish. Mugabe remains firmly ensconced in power, and
Branson and his motley crew of alleged co-conspirators have egg plastered all
over their faces.
In the (UK)
Independent:
Yes,
there was a secret plot to oust President Robert Mugabe. Yes, Sir Richard
Branson was one of its ringleaders. But the British billionaire has vehemently
denied this week's extraordinary claims that he once offered a £6.5m bribe to
persuade the Zimbabwean leader to stand down.
"It was never discussed. It would have been cheap at the price, but
it just happens not to be true."
According to the story, the mixture of
bribery and flattery was to be mediated by ‘the elders,’ a group of former
global power brokers brought together by Branson to attempt international
trouble shooting. Among others, they include Nelson Mandela, Kofi Annan and
Desmond Tutu.
If a bribe was really offered, it would
show just how little Branson and his band of regime change plotters understood
the man they were proposing to take on. The idea feeds on the thought that all
Africans can be bought, that they are incapable of resisting the lure of money
over ideas, belief, conviction.
There is simply nothing in Mugabe’s history
to suggest that he is remotely buyable. Furthermore, a bribe by a British
private businessman, delivered by a group of ‘statesmen’ Mugabe has expressed
contempt for (‘sellouts’ to westerners for him) would be the ultimate
humiliation. Mugabe would have seen through many aspects of the plan regardless
of how it was packaged, and dismissed it as one more western attempt to see him
go, and rejected it with anger and contempt. Of all the many ways to attempt to
coax or push Mugabe out of power, this would have been one of the most hare
brained. There is simply no way it could have worked.
Central banker Gideon Gono and one time
Mugabe minister Jonathan Moyo already have a lot to answer for to Mugabe in
light of Wikileaks. It has recently become clear that at treacherous times for
Mugabe, these people considered as confidants of his were meeting with American
diplomats and expressing less than full loyalty to him. Moyo, in particular,
has in the last several weeks been frantically trying to explain and justify his
meetings with the Americans in newspaper columns.
The leaked cables suggest that Gono and
Moyo were among many who expressed the view that Mugabe had long overstayed in
power. Gono, officially as well as personally close to the Mugabes, is also
said to have spilled details to the Americans about the president’s
long-rumored prostrate cancer.
Just when it had begun to sink in that many
of the people close to Mugabe were having secret meetings with officials of a
foreign power he considers his enemy, the Branson bribe plot opens up yet
another angle of betrayal. Both Gono and Moyo have been cited as intermediaries
in the alleged Branson plan to flatter and buy Mugabe out of power.
Again in the Independent:
Under
the plan that Gono and Moyo helped hatch, Mugabe was to have been approached by
Nelson Mandela and a collection of other respected figures from the region.
They would have tactfully claimed they wished to protect his legacy, and
safeguard Zimbabwe's future, by organising a
peaceful transition of power. Mugabe was to be offered immunity from future
prosecution, as well as the chance to appoint an interim prime minister. In
return, he would co-operate with a truth and reconciliation process modelled on
South Africa.
Mugabe has on several occasions expressed
barely disguised contempt for Mandela. Adored as he is in the West for being
the face of ‘forgiving Africa,’ for roughly the same reasons he is dismissed as having sold out
black South Africans in exchange for western accolades. It might have been
difficult for people like Branson to comprehend, but the Mandela who is an
African saint for the West would probably have had a hard time just getting to
meet Mugabe, let alone ‘organising a transition of power.’
Even if Mugabe had agreed to meet Mandela
out of politeness, he certainly would not have had the time of day for the
likes of Tutu and Annan. It is quite predictable that he would regard them as
‘tools of the imperialists,’ and in any case both have been openly critical of
Mugabe in a way he would neither forget nor forgive. Moyo has said he advised
Branson & Company that the makeup of the group mooted to approach Mugabe
was a non-starter. That they did not understand this shows how out of their
league they were from the start.
Their long failed initiative having finally
come to light, Branson and Moyo are obviously keen to cover their backs. Many
people in Zimbabwe and in Britain would like Mugabe gone, though for quite different reasons.
However, Branson will not win any plaudits, especially in Zimbabwe,
for the revelation that a foreigner, and a Briton at that, cooked up what was
effectively a mercenary plot.
Many/most Zimbabweans may want Mugabe retired,
but that is not at all the same as saying they would be welcome an exit plan
with British fingerprints on it. Even for Mugabe opponents, there is much
evidence to suggest that Britain’s
keen interest in Zimbabwean affairs is not about ‘promoting democracy and human
rights.’
There is simply no way for Britain to deny
the suspicion/charge that its unusual interest in Zimbabwe is out of sympathy
for white and British business interests, and a desire to see at least a
dilution of Mugabe’s land reform. It is obviously, naturally a sore point for
dispossessed whites of mostly British stock and for ‘mother Britain,’
but there is no significant sentiment for reversing it amongst black
Zimbabweans, even those who think Mugabe should now go. Mugabe sticks in the
craw of the British for deeper and different reasons than Zimbabweans’ reasons
for wanting political change at the top.
Jonathan Moyo would certainly understand
this, even if Branson and his other co-conspirators did not. Independent of his
selective bootlicking of Mugabe (when he has not been a Mugabe
critic/opponent), Moyo has also expressed a Britain-distrusting nationalism in
his writing and his statements. It is therefore very odd that he got mixed up
in Branson’s bizarre plot.
It is true that at the time Moyo had been
sidelined by Mugabe and was in a bitter, foul mood of rejection and listlessness.
The former ZANU-PF minister and big man in town was then (2007) an independent
MP without the benefits of membership of the ruling party and closeness to
Mugabe. In his resentment he had once more reverted to being a trenchant Mugabe
critic.
But even then, it seems reckless, even for
a man often referred to as a political prostitute, to go as far as
participating in what he would have known would have been, if discovered, seen
by Mugabe as unforgivably plotting with the British imperialists for his
downfall. While Moyo has got away with a lot over the years in his sometimes
love/sometimes hate relationship with Mugabe, the Branson plot was crossing a
dangerous line from which it would be very difficult for Moyo to turn back in
his relationship with Mugabe. It is no wonder that even before this latest
Wikileaks revelation, Moyo has seemed in a panic to ascribe innocent or noble
motives to his clandestine meetings with Mugabe’s bitter foreign foes.
Their abortive secret plan having never got
off the ground, and now unexpectedly revealed to the world, it is amusing how
Branson and Moyo have sought to distance themselves from and downplay the role
of the other. Both assert that they initially met by accident at an airport in South Africa. Moyo suggests it was love at first sight, and that just from that
first ‘accidental’ couple of hours meeting, the plan to sweet talk Mugabe out
of office begun to take shape.
On being questioned about the plot
recently, Moyo says his advice to Branson and his elders group about how best
to approach Mugabe was rejected because he was ‘labelled a Mugabe loyalist.’
This sounds like a self-serving explanation by Moyo. After all, his being an
embittered, disaffected ‘Mugabe loyalist’ might have been just the quality that
made him initially seem like a useful tool to Branson.
Moyo, then relatively in the political
wilderness, says he then put Branson in touch with the close-to-Mugabe Gideon
Gono to take the plan further. The excited Gono is reported to have given Moyo
the okay to give his contact details to Branson, whose books on business Gono
had apparently read. Perhaps Gono was star-struck by Branson, although even that
could not account for the dangerous, obvious foolishness of somebody in his
position participating in the alleged scheme, if he in fact initially did so. Even
if a then particularly embattled Mugabe had been looking for a safe way out of
power, it is very hard to conceive that a plan such as Wikileaks has made
public would have been one he would have acceded to.
Moyo at first generously described his one
time pal Branson as ‘a good man’ in an interview about the scheme. But
interviewed separately, Branson was dismissive of Moyo, and suggested that
Moyo’s involved was deeper than Moyo had indicated.
Said Branson, "I remember meeting
Gideon Gono at an airport. I can't remember whether I also met Moyo then. Maybe
they were together. We did later meet Moyo, and we did put him up in Johannesburg for a few
days, but we decided not to continue with him."
Branson’s ‘I can’t remember’ is of course
possible, but it does not at all sound plausible. And in spilling the beans
that he had actually hosted Moyo in Johannesburg ‘for a
few days,’ he contradicts Moyo’s version of events, which is that their
‘accidental’ airport meeting was the only one they had. Where Moyo was trying
to make his association with the plot seem as brief and fleeting as possible,
Branson suggests that Moyo was in it quite deep before it all fell apart for
whatever reason.
While he is still struggling to explain his
meetings with the Americans at a time they were particularly vocal in their
criticism of Mugabe, now Moyo has the additional burden of trying to extricate
himself from allegations of plotting against Mugabe with a British neo-colonial
capitalist! How does Moyo dig out of
this one?
His ‘good man’ peace offering to his
co-conspirator Branson haughtily spurned, Moyo came out swinging in vintage
style:
‘’Sir Richard just about confirms
everything that I have said about this initiative, except that he can’t
remember whether he met me or Gono, or whether the two of us were at the
airport. I am not sure whether that’s just a memory weakness or a cover-up. But
whatever it is, it reminds me of racists in the American south who suffer from
the folly that all black people look the same.”
In about a two day period, the ‘good man’
Bronson has turned into something rather different for Moyo! This is of course
one of the strongest kinds of ‘collateral damage’ that can be attributed to
Wikileaks: in the scramble for people named in the once secret US cables to
protect their reputations, livelihoods and their very lives, many who had once
worked together are now viciously turning on each other.
There are many layers of significance in
Moyo’s lashing out at his previously ‘good man’ Branson in the racially loaded
way he does. Moyo succeeds in pointing out the absurdity of a man, Branson,
prepared to use his personal resources to drive regime-change in Zimbabwe
claiming to not be able to tell apart his chief implementing agents.
Although Branson talks about Gono and Moyo
in an offhanded ‘who are they’ way, it is extremely unlikely that someone with
as much interest in Zimbabwean affairs as he obviously did/does would not have recognized
either man, even long before he met them. At different times and in different
ways, Gono and Moyo were each once the face of Mugabe’s government to the
world.
Gono and Moyo do not share the slightest
physical resemblance, hence the dubiousness of Branson’s claimed failure to
distinguish whether he met one of them or the other, or both. That kind of
memory failure is of course possible (Branson is no doubt a busy man, meets
lots of people, etc), but Moyo’s immediate suspicion that it is Branson’s way
of slapping him in the face is also entirely understandable, and not entirely
without foundation. What seems like an over-reaction by Moyo is partly the
ghost of old-style, deeply entrenched colonizer-colonized relations coming to
the fore.
Purposely or unwittingly, Branson’s implied
‘I couldn’t tell Gono and Moyo apart’ is reminiscent of old-style British
colonial attitudes to Africans. It makes Gono and Moyo look even more foolish
for having had dealings with Branson. It also undermines his claim that his
only motivation for the bizarre idea was simply his humanitarian concern for
the suffering-under-Mugabe Africans of Zimbabwe.
He is so overcome with concern for those Africans but he can’t even tell apart
two of the most prominent, famous ones he dealt with rather closely on a rather
important mission.
It is possible that Moyo’s retort is an
unfair slur on an ‘innocent’ Branson who is just genuinely, simply memory
challenged in this case. But the point that is being made here is just how
treacherous are Zimbabwe-Britain relations, how deep racial issues on both
sides inform attitudes, and why it is preferable that former colonizer Britain
and its citizens keep as far away from the intricacies of solving ‘the Zimbabwe
Crisis’ as possible.
Britain obviously had a key role in shaping the country that is now Zimbabwe.
Perhaps it might in future again have another important, different role. But at
this juncture in Zimbabwe’s progression, no matter how well-intentioned it might be, almost
no good at all can come from British interference in which way Zimbabwe
goes. The chances of that interference going sour are much greater than they
are of producing a good result, for Zimbabwe
or for Britain. Change in Zimbabwe that has too much of a British association is almost guaranteed to
prolong the country’s troubles.
Mugabe has a deep understanding of how
African sensibilities have been affected by the colonial experience, and how
that affects modern day relations/attitudes to Britain.
For example, he has very effectively painted Morgan Tsvangirai and his MDC as
dim-witted African tools of imperialism. His message has been, ‘‘the foreigners
who are supporting/funding Tsvangirai to depose me do not respect Africans and
are using them (Tsvangirai/MDC) for their own ends.’’
To westerners this sounds absurd and
paranoid. But it strikes a responsive cord with many Africans because they can
so easily recall incidents from their own lives where they have felt this way
in their interactions with colonialism and its after affects. The MDC has lost
both support and ‘face,’ in Zimbabwe and in much of Africa, by being so
carelessly close to Britain, whose reasons for wanting ‘change’ in Zimbabwe are
not necessarily the same as those of Zimbabweans. It has not been particularly
difficult for Mugabe to portray the MDC as imperialist stooges. This is an
insult that still has a lot of sting in Africa.
Branson’s ‘I can’t remember if it was Gono
or Moyo’ conjures up many of these latent, just-below-the-surface elements of
relations today between Africans with their former colonizers. Moyo offered the
olive branch of ‘Branson is a good man’ and Branson contemptuously slapped him
with an effective, ‘I couldn’t even really tell you apart from that other
African, Gono, who I wanted to hire to buy out that third African,
Mugabe.’
Branson, Gono and Moyo have all been
‘outed’ in many more ways than the obvious, and none of them look good in this
caper.
Whatever the exact details, Gono and Moyo
were already in a tight, uncomfortable position for having anything at all to
do with this plot, no matter how innocent they may claim their meetings with
Branson were. But their being effectively spurned and diminished by their
British ‘boss’ has additional implications.
For
whatever reason, Branson found Gono and Moyo not useful to the achievement of a
plan that was silly to begin with anyway. Where they were once important enough
to his plan for him to pursue and reportedly host them, now, a mere four years
later, Branson effectively says he can’t even really remember them!
In Zimbabwean ideological terms, Gono and
Moyo fell into just the trap that Mugabe has repeatedly said ‘the imperialists’
were busy laying: seeing Africans only as tools to achieve their ends, and
dismissing them from the mind/memory as soon as they are seen to no longer be useful
to serving those ends. This is Mugabe’s characterization of Tsvangirai and the
MDC’s role in the country’s politics: to reverse Mugabe’s aggressively
pro-African policies on behalf of local and international interests just like
Branson.
Branson’s way of effectively dismissing
Gono and Moyo in how he explains his recollection of events brings up and
confirms a central argument of Mugabe’s: ‘the whites/British are accustomed to
being in control in Zimbabwe, using Africans as tools where necessary. I,
Mugabe, have upset that age-old dynamic, and that is why so many elements of
the British machine detest me so deeply. That is why they will do anything to
remove me and reverse the changes in the racial dynamics of power that I have
set in motion in Zimbabwe.’
These are peripheral issues to the plot in
discussion, but they are important to understanding both the deep British
interest in Zimbabwe, as well as how Mugabe has explained and deflected it in both
obvious and subliminal ways that all Africans can very easily relate to.
It may never be known how much of this
Mugabe may have known about. Even if he was not aware of all the details that
are now coming out, Mugabe runs a very tight ship intelligence-wise, so it
would not be surprising if he had at least a whiff of these ‘machinations of
the imperialists who want to reverse the gains of the Zimbabwean revolution.’
Branson’s ‘elders’ tried to visit Zimbabwe
in 2009 and were unceremoniously turned down by the government. At the time it
seemed heavy handed and petty to refuse their visit. More recently, but long
before this Wikileaks purported Mugabe buy-out scheme hit the headlines, Branson
expressed an interest to invest in Zimbabwe
in some unspecified big way. That initiative was met with official hostility
which seemed puzzling and irrational at the time.
However, in the hindsight of the latest
Wikileaks revelations, it could be that Mugabe had already long pegged Branson
as a hostile force and part of Britain’s
manifold efforts to push him out of power.
Why is Branson so particularly interested
in Zimbabwe, of all the countries in Africa and the world that are said to be lacking ‘democracy and human
rights?’ Could Branson be more concerned about the ‘democracy and human rights’
of Zimbabweans than he is of Saudi Arabians, Iraqis, Chinese, Burmese or
Somalis? If so, lucky Zimbabweans, but it would still be interesting to
understand why Zimbabwe so particularly touches British emotions.
Branson: ‘‘It has nothing to do with my
businesses. Most of my time now, about 70 percent, is spent on philanthropic
work. And if I’m in a position to help with resolving conflicts, I believe I
should do so.’’
There you have it. He is just a lone, rich,
innocent do gooder who saw a possible opportunity to help with ‘resolving
conflict’ in Zimbabwe! He also explained his recently expressed interest in doing
business in Zimbabwe as philanthropy. Just to help out the poor Zimbabweans, you
understand.
Somehow, coming out and simply saying ‘‘I
see Zimbabwe as a potentially very good business proposition’’ would be a lot
more believable than casting all the tremendous time, effort and money expended
on regime change as philanthropic do-goodism. Even if that’s what it really is
for Branson, his whole approach, including the claimed (and of course denied)
Mugabe buy-out plot, simply reeks of neo-colonial paternalism.
It is another manifestation of the complex,
messy lingering dynamic of post-colonial relations that very often, in how people
from the ex-colonizer say they wish to ‘help’ the ex-colonized, they actually get
in way over their heads and often do more harm than good.
Zimbabwe needs political change, including the idea that presidents come and
go. Zimbabwe is struggling very painfully to find its own way to achieving a
system of political progression. The help that foreigners can usefully give in
this painful process is very limited. When it is underhanded like Branson’s
initiative, and when it also comes from the direction of the ex-colonial power,
officially or otherwise, it will almost always come to no good.
What is emerging from Wikileaks is that if
Mugabe once seemed paranoid about western efforts to ease or push him out of
power, his paranoia was not unjustified after all. Many Zimbabweans want him to
step aside after 31 years in power, but there are British and other foreign
motivations for removing him that do not coincide with those of Zimbabweans.
Branson’s nursery school plot to attempt to
buy Mugabe out of office shows the astonishing stake in Zimbabwe that some
British and other foreigners feel they have. That stake sure as hell isn’t
principally for the generality of Zimbabweans to enjoy ‘democracy and human
rights.’ Which is also exactly why, in addition to the mess of the colonial
past, British involvement of almost any sort in ‘change’ in Zimbabwe
is almost guaranteed to end up badly.
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