... And now he wears his sister's
Goodness gracious. Cometh the hour, cometh Levy "The Cabbage" Mwanawasa. The President of Zambia, a man who I had marked down years ago as a real halfwit, is playing a diplomatic blinder. As far as I can see, in the face of Thabo Mbeki's complete failure to play his allotted role, Mwanawasa has stepped up to the task of organising the orderly disembarkation of Southern African political leaders from the sinking vessel MS Robert Mugabe. Meanwhile, Mbeki seems determined to emulate the boy who stood on the burning deck of this one.
Excellent article in the Observer this week, by the way[1] (a phrase you do not often hear around these parts). I've written about the role of broken land reform promises in the past, but I hadn't appreciated the role that Clare Short had played (I had, however, independently arrived at the view that she had been a disaster as Development Secretary, and a piece of high-handed patronisation combined with a whining argument from personal ancestral oppression would be entirely of a piece with the way she screwed the Montserratians).
The message I take away from the McGreal article is that it's all about land. From the outside, we assume that Mugabe must be wildly unpopular because he's so evil and incompetent, but actually he isn't; even the MDC figures have him with a solid core of about 40% support, which is pretty much dependent on the fact that he has successfully portrayed himself as the party of land reform and MDC as the party of farmer interests.
This ties in with a pet theory of mine; that it's a real asset in commenting on third world politics if at some point in your life you've been involved, however tangentially, in a dispute over land. If you've never had an argument with someone about a patch of the planet that the two of you both want, you have no idea of how intense it gets[2]. When I was a kid my parents wasted large amounts of time for over a year in a dispute over the location of a fencepost and the precise status of a right of way round the back of a cottage with some go iawn joskyns y gwerin down on the Lleyn peninsula. My God, people get pretty bloody worked up over land. Consider the emotional relationship that the UK has with house prices. It's another fact about human nature like the mobile phones and satellite telly point above; us upright-walking monkeys, we like our communications technology and we like our land.
Given this, I worry rather a lot about what the World Bank and IMF have planned in their structural adjustment packages under the rubric of "property rights", "rule of law" etc. There's a distinct danger that (particularly given the undeniable facts about the relative productivity of large-scale agribusiness versus smallholdings) some out-of-town economists are going to impose a land distribution on Zimbabwe which contains within it the seeds of a civil war.
[1](here's an opposing view on what the UK did or didn't promise, from a civil servant present at Lancaster House; disastrous negotiations always tend to have this Rashomon quality)
[2] See also the occupied territories and other global conflicts which are an awful lot easier to solve in game theoretic models where people take a rational perspective view about the value of their land.
There's a good SF short story where an alien tries to rationally convince two neighbouring peasants that their land dispute isn't worth killing one another over. Unhelpfully I can't recall the title, but I'm sure it's in James Sallis' outstanding collection The War Book.
ReplyDeleteGood piece. Going back to the Lancaster House Agreement. In your CT piece you suggest that the British Government actively refused to pay up, as promised. But, if the LHA was a willing seller/buyer deal, surely if no farmers (or very few) wanted to sell, then there was nothing for the British to pay? Is there evidence of the government actively refusing to hand over the cash? Or did the whole thing go to shit once farmers realised it was an empty promise from the British, such that none of them volunteered to sell?
ReplyDeleteClare Short might have profited from reading some actual Irish history and in particular the details of the Land Acts. Notably that the "land question" wasn't resolved until compulsory purchase + govt. funding (repaid by annual charges) came in.
ReplyDeleteTom: the farmers never got offered anything remotely close to fair value (in the sense of either the pre-revolution price or a reasonable multiple of their annual profit; many of them had mortgages so there was a minimum price they could accept unless they were prepared to go bankrupt), but believed that the Lancaster agreement more or less guaranteed their ability to hold out for top price and ignore political reality, while the Zimbabwe government believed for far longer than was sensible that the UK government would pay up (continuing to hold out hope that as soon as the Tories were voted out, New Labour would pay up). Meanwhile the British civil service ... well, it's very hard to understand what they thought was going to happen, but presumably their basic predicament would have been that they didn't have the remit to write a letter like Clare Short's even though it clearly was their policy. My guess is that they were hoping that the white Zimbabweans would gradually get the message, that Zimbabwe would have some sort of economic miracle that would facilitate better payoffs and that, Micawberishly, something would turn up. Everyone involved accuses everyone else of bad faith so it's hard to be sure what really went down. It's one of those "the situation is desperate, but not serious" games.
ReplyDeleteThere's a good SF short story where an alien tries to rationally convince two neighbouring peasants that their land dispute isn't worth killing one another over.
ReplyDeleteOr Else? by Henry Kuttner & CL Moore.
Yeah.
ReplyDeleteIt's a marvellous collection, I hope my copy's not gone missing.
I always thought Clare Short was a bit thick, but that quote in the Observer article just blew my mind. Apart from the fact that it would have taken a kind of genius to imagine a less appropriate context to play the 'oppressed Irish' card, she seems to lack any grasp of the fundamental principles of representative government -- or of the basic distinction between acting in a public and in a private capacity.
ReplyDeleteA good take on Irish land squabbles :
ReplyDeleteEpic
I have lived in important places, times
When great events were decided, who owned
That half a rood of rock, a no-man's land
Surrounded by our pitchfork-armed claims.
I heard the Duffys shouting "Damn your soul!"
And old McCabe stripped to the waist, seen
Step the plot defying blue cast-steel -
"Here is the march along these iron stones."
That was the year of the Munich bother. Which
Was more important? I inclined
To lose my faith in Ballyrush and Gortin
Till Homer's ghost came whispering to my mind.
He said: I made the Iliad from such
A local row. Gods make their own importance.
By Patrick Kavanagh