In two previous write-ups, I had called attention to how the Ubuntu spirit needs to be rekindled in Zimbabwe leading to the detailed expatiation on Ubuntu and Omoluabi and their continued relevance in Africa. I now turn to the third write-up on my short visit to Zimbabwe as Nigerians voted during the first part of our recent elections. I have chosen not to write any details on the conference I went to on the plight of landlocked least developed as well as small island countries and the possibility of the African Continental Free Trade Area Agreement (AfCFTA), improving their respective lots.
As at January, 2023, the AfCFTA agreement has been signed by 54 of the 55 African Union member states, with 44 countries so far depositing their instrument of ratification. The AfCFTA is being put forward as a game-changer. But is it? The jury is still out. However, I have my doubts on the aspiration on AfCFTA given the quality of leadership we currently have in Africa; the level of impunity on the corruption of our leadership compared to other places developing in the world; the preference for the storage of stolen African patrimony in Europe, America and the U.A.E; the paucity of infrastructure for development in Africa; the gap on the needed manufactured products for trade; the huge debt burden that is gathering momentum as encouraged by the Western institutions that are benefitting from the failure in Africa, as well as the fact that only 4 countries have signed the Protocol on the Free Movement of Africans on their continent.
If I went through what I did to attend a conference in Zimbabwe, why should Nigerians with hard earned or even stolen wealth be eager to invest in Zimbabwe? I once listened to Aliko Dangote complain about what he, in spite of being the richest African, goes through travelling in Africa. Even though some level of trade currently exists between Nigeria and Zimbabwe in leather goods, to what extent can such paltry-trade be boosted when Africans cannot easily visit themselves?
After some delay, I was allowed to enter Zimbabwe. At the arrivals welcoming point of the Robert G. Mugabe International Airport, there was the sign of welcome to Zimbabwe by the UN Economic Commission for Africa (ECA) representative. Gada's wide smile was indeed very welcoming. Quite a difference from the tension I had just gone through over visa issuance and a clear governmental rip-off that I wrote about in the first part of my three parts writings on my visit to Zimbabwe. Other arriving passengers from Johannesburg had collected their luggage and had moved on. It was time to part with my compatriot Sebastian after he introduced me to his wife, who had asked him to cooperate (with him persuading me to do the same), and allow official stealing of $30 from us over visa.
Gada took me to his car and we drove into the greenery of the immediate surrounding of the airport. Nice. I asked Gada if the road and the airport were new. His response was in the negative. It was not my first visit to Zimbabwe. One of my daughters once worked in the country and liked it very much and had insisted that myself and my wife must visit and we did in December 2006. When I told him that I did not think I used that airport in 2006, he laughed and pointed out that the road and airport had been upgraded in a continuing process under Chinese construction companies.
I recollected the cleanliness and functional infrastructures of Harare in 2006. At that time, I left feeling that the West had demonised Robert Mugabe because he dared to be assertive and suggest that Africans needed to free themselves from the continuing physical and mental slavery. I had the opportunity of listening to him at the 2016 African Union Summit as he handed over the leadership of the African Union to the late strong man of Chad, Idriss Debby. Though clearly very feeble, he still gave a speech that got Africans on their feet as Western diplomats in the Auditorium looked uncomfortable. He carefully separated the person of Ban ki-Moon, then the Secretary-General from his condemnation of the United Nations. He condemned Africans for going on pilgrimages to the UN General Assembly annually without having much to show for the huge expenditures.
A lot has changed since 2006. A negative but significant change was the Harare heavy traffic like is our lot in Lagos, Nigeria thanks to a leadership that has failed Lagos with respect to a planned mass transit arrangement that Governor Lateef Jakande had started implementing over 40 years ago before Muhammadu Buhari, yes the same Buhari that is President today, took Lagos decades backwards. The same Muhammadu Buhari was voted in twice as President (2015 and 2019), hoping that he would be different and all of a sudden play the type of role Deng Xiao Ping played for China. Didn't they say that insanity is repeating the same thing over and over and expecting a different answer?
It was a pleasant ride with Gada as he nourished my inquisitive mind in a way that made me think of him as an enlightened and literate driver. My guess was confirmed, as I learnt he is an Engineer with some experience on electronic security installations, but one with a fantastic immersion into life in Zimbabwe and beyond, who enjoys knowledge sharing and engaging conversations too. As we approached the Holiday Inn where the conference I was attending would take place, he showed me the statue of Mbuya Nehanda in the Carrefour of Samora Machel and Julius Nyerere major roads. He gave me an introduction to the first "Chimurenga" and we agreed he would bring me back to that spot before my departure as I must learn more about such a woman who predated many on the African continent in leading her people in an uprising against a British commercial enterprise led by Cecil Rhodes who had the backing of the British Crown to steal African lands and resources under the pretence of bringing civilization to a people who were more civilised in human relationships and even artefacts, by making Ubuntu a basis of living as opposed to brigandage from the use of weapons to waste human lives.
Sequel to the Berlin Conference of 1884-1885, at which Europeans sat and shared the African continent, Britain granted Charters to companies, including: the Royal Niger Company in West Africa in 1886, the Imperial British East African Company in 1888, and the British South African Company (BSAC) in 1889. These Chartered companies were tools of empire building to play economic and political roles in different locations on the African continent. They had no pretences as the religious entities that had arrived earlier to pacify the people and introduced them to the Bible that supported the need to be docile before masters, justified taking from the "weak" and adding to what the "stronger" already had as well as defined the Africans as the Children of Ham with ancestral curse, thereby making Africans lose self-esteem. Religion, in this respect, played its natural role of ensuring ideological control to disempower Africans. Of course, Christianity, in particular, socialised and educated Africans into Western culture/civilization, and pushed them to abandon emphasis on their own ways of doing things. Nothing was unique about Western civilization and Western education. The sole purpose was to disempower Africans and ensure that African ways of life were destroyed and a dependency for things Western got created. Part of the socialisation of this new way of life was emphasis on looking forward to the angelic good life in heaven as the conquerors laughed as they accumulated African material assets and they became richer here on earth.
In effect, Chartered companies represented their shareholders as commercial enterprises as they also represented the British state. In the latter role BSAC had the right to create its own political administration at no cost to the British government with such costs being met from the exploitation of gold and diamonds. Little wonder that Cecil Rhodes named Northern and Southern areas after himself, hence we had Northern Rhodesia, now Zambia and Southern Rhodesia, now named after the Great Zimbabwe Empire that was far advanced of its European contemporaries before going into oblivion. The Great Zimbabwe Empire that had stone buildings without mortar. In other places, like Egypt and Sudan, the Africans built the Pyramids and had early advanced knowledge of medicine, mathematics and science that Europeans and Americans continue to ascribe to others in order to keep the myth of Africans being three-fifths of a human being so as to be kosher on slavery among other ills that weapons of destruction allowed them to lord on Africans.
The Cecil Rhodes administration killed Mbuya Nehanda in 1898 by hanging for daring to organise against the stealing of her people's lands and minerals. I felt good that her spirit lived on as freedom fighters took on the successors of Cecil Rhodes until a whole lot of efforts saw to it that Zimbabwe achieved flag independence under Robert Mugabe who clearly overstayed in office and stressed the need to throw off the colonial yoke but lacked the vision to get it done.
During my first visit to Zimbabwe, I did not have the opportunity to visit Mbare, which is like a twin to the city of Harare. In fact, I understand that the name of Mbare, (Harare), was taken and used to change from Salisbury that colonialism had called the capital of Rhodesia. Mbare reflected the typical hurly-burly that accompanies where most of the workers of a clean capital like Harare reside. Run down project housing of several flats (apartments) in big multi-family buildings that had seen good days many years back and are now looking rundown were present. There were also many tiny abodes that were slightly better than shacks for families. The roads were no longer as nice as they were in Harare. The ubiquitous African little shops were all over the place involving the selling of many goods by underemployed people.
What I missed in not seeing how the other side lived in 2006, I was compensated for by my daughter showing us a well laid out Harare with adequate infrastructure at the time. Beyond Harare we had two or so nights at the sprawling Hwange National Park. This was a beautiful experience. Several wildlife were available at the park, including lions, elephants, and rhinos. I did not appreciate a majestic lion that human beings had put a collar on as a way to follow every movement of that king of the forest. It was nice to sleep in a hut and wake up to the roaring of lions. I had fantastic photographs that I have misplaced.
I clearly remember taking two risks with my family as we were encouraged by a black Zimbabwean game guide who took us round. One was to leave the game-car to stand not far watching a rhino munching away as we took pictures. From Kenya, I knew rhinos could charge but the guide, who had taken particular interest in us as Nigerians - thanks to Nollywood films as he enlightened me about many of our actors who I knew nothing about - was reassuring that he was armed and would protect us. As we wondered further in search of wildlife, he sighted a water hole and saw a number of elephants far away. He drove to a place and suggested we park, walk a little and patch by a tree and be in total quietude as the elephants would pass-by us to go to the water hole. My wife and senior daughter refused to participate and wished we left the scene. I decided I would go with my twelve-year-old daughter. We waited and the elephants behaved as he had predicted except that one stopped when it was closest to us, tarried a little, but continued moving. I only appreciated this risk three months later when a British family did what we did and the guide abandoned them as a rogue elephant pursued the three family members in a charge. It killed and trampled on the mother and daughter but the father managed to escape.
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Why did the game guide fail to shoot? This answer, I had learnt during our visit. On our way back at sunset on one of our days on the park, there was a huge elephant in the middle of the road with its beautiful huge tusks but appearing to be ready to charge if we moved. We stopped the car and waited inside until it pleased the largest mammal on land to grant us the freedom to move as it moved away into the forest. I asked our guide about what would have happened if the elephant had charged at us. He said if it was a real as opposed to a false charge, he would have shot the elephant. However, he could not afford to make a mistake because he would personally have to pay $10,000 into the state treasury if upon investigation, he was found to have interpreted a false charge as real. The guide with the British family fled with his gun and left the family to their fate. He either misread the charge or did not want to pay $10,000 for a false charge. The end was the death of a 47-year-old mother and 10-year-old daughter.
We barely passed through Bulawayo on our way to Victoria Falls. This Falls was a beautiful spectacle that all human beings must see. No wonder it is one of the wonders of the old world. The Zambezi river, steeply cascading down over an unimaginable wide breadth of land, and as if it was raining, with the rainbow equally present at this marvel of nature was wonderfully fantastic. I later read the debate among some European tourists as to which part of the Falls whether in Zambia or in Zimbabwe is more beautiful. I am still hoping I would have the opportunity to make it to Livingstone in Zambia to make my own pronouncement. I hope my reader noticed that the Europeans named these attractions after themselves given the outrageous pretence of Livingstone to have discovered the Falls and named one for his sovereign. One day, hopefully, Africa will regain more self-confidence.
Babafemi A. Badejo, author of a best-seller on politics in Kenya, is a former Deputy Special Representative of the UN Secretary-General for Somalia, and currently a Legal Practitioner and Professor of Political Science/International Relations, Chrisland University, Abeokuta.
