Cluff: On Mugabe and white farmers

via Cluff: On Mugabe and white farmers – NewZimbabwe 16 January 2015

LEGENDARY British resources entrepreneur, Algy Cluff, travelled to Zimbabwe within weeks of the country’s independence in 1980 to explore investment opportunities.

Shortly after that he had established Cluff Resources which owned the country’s biggest gold mine, Freda Rebecca, at Bindura.

He would therefore be familiar and have had dealings with President Robert Mugabe and the local white community; a bitter falling out between the two has been at the centre of the country’s political and economic problems since the turn of the millennium.

Critics blame the effective collapse of the economy on Mugabe’s decision to move against the white farming community, having protected them since independence in 1980.

Beginning around the year 2000, the Zanu PF leader unleashed veterans of the country’s liberation struggle, letting them forcibly and even violently seize farms owned by whites, supposedly to correct colonial injustices in the ownership of land.

The country’s agriculture-based economy expectedly seized-up, a crisis worsened by the emotional response of major western powers who imposed debilitating sanctions after being angered by the killing of some of the farmers.

But in an interview this week, Cluff said the white farmers rewarded Mugabe rather terribly after enjoying the protection of the veteran leader for years.

He felt the white farmers should have, but failed to, meet Mugabe halfway.

“They (farmers) had a lot to answer for. They were in a catatonic state after independence,” Cluff said in an interview with UK financial magazine MoneyWeek.

“They should have gone to Mugabe and said: ‘Look, we realise we’ve now lost this war, it’s about land. Why don’t we give you half our land, train some Africans to run it?’

“But there was nothing. They were absolutely in a kind of sclerotic state so Mugabe just got fed up after a while. Extremely regrettable.”

Of the Zimbabwean leader, Cluff said: “I knew him very well.

“I remember clearly a stand-up row with him 15 years ago. But I always thought that he nearly got it right.

“He preached reconciliation long before Mandela did, and protected the white farmers, notwithstanding the fact that he’d won the war.

“I thought he behaved, for the first 15 years, really rather well.”

Mugabe was, for years, a darling of Western powers, welcome and feted in London and Washington even as his administration allegedly massacred some 20,000 civilians in the Matabeleland and Midlands regions.

Now, although he remains a liberation icon in Africa, Mugabe is considered an unhinged despot by the West and has to use the excuse of attending United Nations meetings to force visits to western capitals.

He regularly lambasts western leaders, the British in particular and Cluff said betrayal by the former coloniser forced him to change.

Cluff reckons Mugabe felt he was double-crossed by the British government – that he was promised tens of millions of dollars as part of the Lancaster House Agreement, but it was never delivered to him.

“The money in question was partially, I think, destined for the white farmers, to buy them out on a willing sale basis. And with that [financial] consideration, I think the problems could have been defused,” said Cluff.

Again, the death in 1992 of Mugabe’s first wife, Sally, also robbed the veteran leader of a calming wife.

Widely popular with Zimbabweans, Sally was, Cluff said, a very intelligent woman who had great sway over her husband.

“When she died, I think that kind of removed a kind of calming influence,” Cluff explained.

“She knew the capricious character of her husband. She’d chuck a bucket of cold water over him when he started getting excitable.

“But when she had gone… he was always very solitary anyway and never had any friends.

“He became more and more remote and isolated; and obsessed by this fact that Britain had, as he saw it, double-crossed him, betrayed him.”

Nearly 35 years after taking over a fairly healthy country by developing world standards, Mugabe remains in power but weakened by advanced age and failing health.

Mugabe turns 91 in February but the country’s economy is in ruins and his Zanu PF party effectively splintered in two.

He is again under the ever increasing but unhelpful (say liberation colleagues recently booted out of the party and government) influence of his current wife Grace, a former presidential typist he had an extramarital affair with while Sally struggled with the kidney ailment which eventually killed her.

Grace led the campaign which resulted in the dismissal of former vice president Joice Mujuru and several cabinet ministers over as yet unproven allegations they planned to either topple or, failing that, assassinate Mugabe.

After claiming for herself a key position in the ruling party, the First Lady is now thought to be actively considering succeeding her husband.

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