Whites fine for Zanu-PF, not for MDC

The Zimbabwe Times
September 8, 2008
Geoffrey Nyarota

THE campaign pitch of President Robert Mugabe in recent elections has been consistent.Since the electorate shocked him out of deepening complacency in the aftermath of the constitutional referendum held back in February 2000 Mugabe has sought to portray himself as a patriot, while presenting his rival, Morgan Tsvangirai, as nothing more than a groveling puppet of the West.

Mugabe and the former ruling Zanu-PF have paraded themselves as paragons of post-colonial political virtue, while dismissing those who oppose them as shameless sell-outs, permanently at the beck and call of a dispossessed white farming community and a Western world seeking to re-colonise Zimbabwe.

In the world of make-believe painted by Mugabe and his surrogates at Zanu-PF campaign rallies, political correctness entails having nothing or as little as possible to do with white people especially those of Zimbabwean commercial farming stock or with the representatives, even accredited diplomats, of Western nations, particularly the United Kingdom, the United States or Australia.

This essentially racist posturing was evolved and fine-tuned in the period after the 2000 referendum, when it suddenly dawned on the Zanu-PF leadership that they no longer enjoyed the fawning support and unquestioning loyalty of the Zimbabwean electorate.

Evidence abounds, however, that Mugabe’s and Zanu-PF’s racist pretensions are based on a false premise and shrouded in hypocrisy and double-speak. Zanu-PF has thus continued to delude both itself and party loyalists over the years simply because its rivals in the MDC have somehow allowed the party to get away with what essentially amounts to telling two self-serving falsehoods.

Mugabe in the early days of Zimbabwe’s independence basked in the glory of overstated Western adulation, while Zimbabwe benefited from the backing and support of a Western world anxious to support a government they somehow believed would constitute a departure from the African post-independence stereotype of corruption, economic mismanagement, lawlessness and abuse of civic rights. Aid funds poured into Africa’s newest nation while Mugabe was toasted in Western capitals. A knighthood was conferred on him by Queen Elizabeth the Second at Buckingham Palace while members of the Zanu-PF Women’s League ululated in Harare. A number of universities on both sides of the Atlantic recognised him through honorary degrees.

The first lie is that Western nations are natural enemies of Zimbabwe.

The second falsehood, more significantly, is that Zanu-PF hates while people. Nothing could be further from the truth.

In fact, Zanu-PF has built a strategic circle of its own white friends over the years. Not only does Zanu-PF have dealings and cordial relations with its white allies; the people concerned are in most cases capitalist entrepreneurs who have prospered magnificently in Zimbabwe through their association with the ruling elite. Some prosper through exploiting the very people Zanu-PF pretends to protect.

Back in 1980 Mugabe went out of his way to prove to an anxious world that he was more than willing to abide by the non-racist tenets of his party’s first election manifesto.

Zanu-PF’s election manifesto stated categorically: “Zanu wishes to give the fullest assurance to the white community, the Asian and coloured communities that a Zanu government can never in principle or in social or government practice, discriminate against them. Racism, whether practiced by whites or blacks, is anathema to the humanitarian philosophy of Zanu. It is as primitive a dogma as tribalism or regionalism.”

The Zanu-PF of today publicly castigates and demonizes opponents such as the MDC who espouse similar non-racist policies and openly engage with members of the white community, branding them as enemies of the people and as puppets of the West.

Surprisingly, supporters both in and out of the country who hailed Mugabe for his former concern for the welfare of the ordinary man and his policy of national reconciliation, still glorify him long after he abandoned both the concern and the policy and now constantly spouts racist diatribe without the mandate of the majority of his people to do so.

But then to a considerable extent Mugabe and his acolytes depend for their survival on the existence of powerful white supporters who manipulate and strategize behind the scenes.

In the eyes of Zanu-PF and some post-colonial African political opinion the grievous error that the MDC
makes is to parade its Roy Bennetts, David Coltarts, Eddie Crosses, Ian Kays and Trudy Stevensons in public; granting them a manifestly conspicuous frontline role in the fight for democratic change.

The MDC strategists perhaps never read George Orwell’s Animal Farm or took serious note of Squealer’s constant exhortation to “Tactics, comrades.” Squealer was the porcine equivalent of Zimbabwe’s former Minister of Information, Prof Jonathan Moyo. In the Zimbabwean context, Mugabe did not preach reconciliation until he had the keys to the office of the Prime Minister in hand. Yet Tsvangirai practices appeasement and magnanimity from a position of powerlessness. Maybe if he could persuade Bennett to withdraw from the front he would soon have real power to share with him.

Tactics, comrades!

While the MDC’s white supporters love to shout from public platforms, Zanu-PF’s whites are voiceless but powerful backroom strategists. Their rare forays onto newspaper front pages are often prompted merely by the pressing need to defend themselves in the face of allegations of corruption, outright fraud or other impropriety while making money for themselves and Zanu-PF.

Being dedicated capitalists, even when Mugabe was still an avowed socialist, their major preoccupation is to make as much financial hay as possible, while the Zanu-PF sun still shines. Over the past 28 years of Mugabe’s rule leading entrepreneurs such as the gregarious British businessman Roland “Tiny” Rowland, the somewhat eccentric Nicholas van Hoogstraten, also British, John Arnold Bredenkamp, who constantly parries accusations of arms dealing, and Conrad Muller “Billy” Rautenbach who took care of Zanu-PF financial interests in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, have forged strong alliances with the Zanu-PF leadership, Mugabe himself included.

So too have emergent businessmen such as Lt. Col Lionel Dyke (Retired). He quickly rose from the relative obscurity of an officer in the Zimbabwe National Army and was thrust into the limelight by the turn of the century as a political broker.

He was assigned by two men he claimed to be his allies in Zanu-PF, Emmerson Mnangagwa, then Speaker of Parliament and retired defence forces commander Gen Vitalis Zvinavashe to broker a partnership deal between the ruling party and the MDC. Dyke said the MDC was represented by the party’s secretary general, Welshman Ncube and Paul Themba Nyathi, its secretary for information and publicity.

Dyke revealed these details to me in December 2002 when I was editor of the now banned Daily News. He disclosed that he had also been assigned to secure the support of The Daily News, then the country’s largest newspaper, for the ambitious political initiative. The initiative sought to sideline both Mugabe and Tsvangirai, in favour of a new leadership. I turned Dyke’s proposal down, and blew the plot in the newspaper.

Col Dyke, one of Zanu-PF’s most trusted white allies now rakes in millions through landmine recovery operations in Zimbabwe, the Middle East, Kosovo and other trouble-spots of the world. South Africa’s President Thabo Mbeki has since taken over the role of mediator in the Zimbabwean political crisis.

Dyke, who was commander of the Rhodesian African Rifles during Ian Smith’s war against the guerilla armies, was in charge of a regiment of paratroopers in 1983 to 84 during the Gukurahundi massacres in Matabeleland. The Catholic Justice and Peace Commission’s report “Breaking the Silence: Building True Peace” says Dyke expressed support for the deployment by government of Five Brigade against civilians, saying this strategy “brought peace very, very quickly”.

While Zanu-PF publicly berates opposition politicians for associating or having links with whites, behind closed doors Mugabe and his cohorts exploit clandestine relationships with their own white partners, most of them extremely wealthy capitalists.

There was Tiny Rowland, that colourful British businessman who was the most conspicuous epitome of western capitalism in Rhodesia, in Zimbabwe and elsewhere on the continent. In Rhodesia he was a friend of Ian Smith and in Zimbabwe he cultivated the friendship of both the late Dr Joshua Nkomo and Mugabe.

Rowland was the founder and chief executive of Lonrho, one of Zimbabwe’s largest multi-national conglomerates. After independence he became one of the most generous benefactors of Zimbabwe’s ruling elite. Rowland’s Metropole Hotel in London became home away from home for the top echelons of those fighting for the liberation of Zimbabwe, with full board on the house. The friendship between the controversial British tycoon and Zimbabwe’s new rulers flourished after independence. The Lonrho end-of-year dinner party became the social event of the year in Harare. Meanwhile, the Lonrho pavilions at the Harare Agricultural Show and the National Trade Fair in Bulawayo were the favourite haunt of cabinet ministers under the patronage of the flamboyant Herbert Munangatire, now late.

So revered was Rowland by Zanu-PF that when he was ousted in a board-room coup, Dr Nathan Shamuyarira, that eminent custodian of the party’s ideological values, lamented that the controversial businessman’s ouster was likely to end the “warm relations between Lonrho and the government of Zimbabwe”.

It is only after the constitutional referendum of 2000 that Zanu-PF has become openly critical of Zimbabwe’s white citizens and representatives of Western governments, especially those who challenge Mugabe’s excesses and point at his failures.

Mugabe’s personal friend Nicholas Van Hoogstraten, the British magnate whose status as the largest private owner of fertile Zimbabwean land complements is unchallenged, spoke with understandable warmth and affection when he described Mugabe as “100 percent decent and incorruptible”. Separately he said: “I don’t believe in democracy; I believe in rule by the fittest.”

Among Zanu-PF’s white allies, van Hoogstraten is the most vocal supporter of Mugabe, whom he regards as a personal friend. More significantly he is said to be a financial backer of the President.

Van Hoogstraten holds extensive investments in Zimbabwe. The Rainbow Tourism Group’s shares register shows that van Hoogstraten’s Messina Investments has a stake-hold of 2.17 percent with 35 727 640 shares. He owns 32 percent of Hwange Colliery Company and seven percent of CFI Ltd, one of Zimbabwe’s largest agro-industrial enterprises. He is the single largest shareholder in NMB at 20 percent. The founding owners of the bank were hounded into exile by Reserve Bank Governor, Gideon Gono.

The President’s friend also owns 600 000 acres of prime farmland. Not unexpectedly, van Hoogstraten’s farms have been spared the treatment reserved for the farms of less “patriotic” white commercial farmers.

Van Hoogstraten, who is reported to have relocated from the United Kingdom to Zimbabwe, is said to manage his vast business empire of 200 residential and business properties in Zimbabwe from an office in Harare. In January they hauled him to court. The police had caught him red-handed while receiving rentals from tenants in hard currency.

The phenomenal success of van Hoogstraten is clear testimony that Zanu-PF merely pays lip-service to its anti-white and anti-western mantras.

Another strategic Zanu-PF ally, wealthy businessman, John Arnold Bredenkamp, has publicly expressed his open support for the Mugabe regime. He told the Zimbabwe Independent that because of his vast business interests and extensive travel experience he had become a friend of politicians and he had no regrets about it. He said he sincerely believed that it was in the “best interests of Zimbabwe for Zanu-PF to win the presidential elections next year”.

Mugabe narrowly missed losing the election in question to Tsvangirai in 2002.

Bredenkamp’s forlorn hope was understandable, given that at the material time he had just won a major tender to supply fuel to the National Oil Company of Zimbabwe. In any case, freedom of speech is enshrined in the constitution of our once great land.

Yet when British premier Tony Blair stood in the House of Commons to pronounce that his Labour government worked hand-in-hand with Tsvangirai’s labour-backed MDC, Information Minister, Jonathan Moyo, went totally ballistic in Harare.

That single statement by Blair and its opportunistic exploitation by Mugabe and Moyo may have made a considerable contribution to the recovery by Zanu-PF in 2005, of a significant number of parliamentary seats that it had lost to the MDC in the 2000 parliamentary election.

Reports in the international media have consistently referred to Bredenkamp, as an “arms broker,” “arms dealer,” “arms merchant,” “weapons dealer,” “weapons broker”.

Challenged by Bredenkamp to substantiate allegations of arms dealing against him, one British publication, Executive Intelligence Review, defended itself haughtily.

“In describing the charmed life of John Arnold Bredenkamp,” the editor wrote, “it is difficult to know where to start. In fact, it is difficult to find a media reference to him that does not mention his business in arms trafficking. From the London Observer, to the Washington Times, to the Guardian of the U.K., to WorldNet Daily, to the UN Association of the United Kingdom, to a broad swath of British-based organizations and NGOs that specialize in opposing arms proliferation, Bredenkamp is repeatedly mentioned in the context of arms trafficking – selling, brokering, and violating sanctions.

Bredenkamp gained his reputation as a shrewd “sanctions buster” while supporting the racist regime of rebel Rhodesian leader Ian Smith.

“Like many of my contemporaries, I have adapted to change,” Bredenkamp says. “I was Rhodesian; I am now a Zimbabwean. I was a tobacco merchant; I am now an investor in many different sectors.”

When the George W. Bush administration imposed sanctions against Zimbabwe and Mugabe in 2001, Bredenkamp was reported to be among Zimbabwe’s businessmen included on the sanctions list. He was charged with violating international sanctions.

On February 18, 2000, The Washington Times published a report that the DRC and Zimbabwe were purchasing arms from Bredenkamp, who was said to be based in Belgium.

After independence Bredenkamp, indeed, left Zimbabwe and moved his base of operations to Belgium.

A report submitted to the United Nations Security Council in October 2002 by a panel of experts investigating the exploitation of raw materials in the DRC cited Bredenkamp’s role as an arms broker:

“John Bredenkamp, who has a history of clandestine military procurement, has an investment in Aviation Consultancy Services Company (ACS). The Panel has confirmed, independently of Mr. Bredenkamp, that this company represents British Aerospace, Dornier of France and Agusta of Italy in Africa. Far from being a passive investor in ACS as Tremalt representatives claimed, Mr. Bredenkamp actively seeks business using high-level political contacts.

“Mr. Bredenkamp’s representatives claimed that his companies observed European Union sanctions on Zimbabwe, but British Aerospace spare parts for ZDF Hawk jets were supplied early in 2002 in breach of those sanctions. Mr. Bredenkamp also controls Raceview Enterprises, which supplies logistics to the Zimbabwe Defence Forces. The Panel has obtained copies of Raceview invoices to ZDF dated 6 July 2001 for deliveries worth $3.5 million of camouflage cloth, batteries, fuels and lubricating oil, boots and rations. It also has copies of invoices for aircraft spares for the Air Force of Zimbabwe worth another $3 million.”

Bredenkamp protested the findings of the UN panel. The report highlighted the existence of an “elite network” comprising Congolese and Zimbabwean government officials and private businessmen. The network was reported to be exploiting the rich mineral resources of the DRC. The report identified the key strategist for the Zimbabwean branch of the network as Mnangagwa, while the former army commander, Zvinavashe was described as his key ally.

It has been alleged that before independence Bredenkamp effectively ran the finances of the Rhodesian armed forces during the later stages of the guerilla war. In this capacity he is said to have brokered export sales of Rhodesian products, mainly tobacco, and used the proceeds to fund the purchase of munitions and military equipment.

It is said that his complex “sanctions busting” deals sustained the UDI regime for far longer than would otherwise have been possible. Could Bredenkamp now be facilitating the survival of Zanu-PF as Mugabe clings to power?

On his return to Zimbabwe in 1984 after he made peace with the country’s new rulers, he remained involved in commodity trading and defence procurement while making himself generally useful to government and Zanu-PF. Using Zimbabwe as his base, Bredenkamp conducted business dealings elsewhere in Africa and in the Middle East. Not only did Bredenkamp become extremely wealthy, he also helped sustain the Zimbabwean economy in a period of some turbulence.

Bredenkamp made strategic inroads into the post-independence political establishment while gaining considerable clout in the economic affairs of Zimbabwe. Mugabe is often accused of having made a single-handed decision to deploy Zimbabwean troops to the DRC. It is alleged, however, that Bredenkamp may have played a significant role in the events surrounding Zimbabwe’s costly and suicidal intervention in the West African nation between 1998 and 2003.

The Zimbabwean army and air force were deployed to shore up the Laurent Kabila government in its fight with rebels backed by Uganda and Rwanda. In return generous mining concessions were granted by the DRC to key figures in the Zimbabwe political and business elite. It is alleged that Bredenkamp and his Zanu-PF allies were major beneficiaries. Mnangagwa has been the key Bredenkamp ally in Zanu-PF since the businessman’s return from Belgium in 1984.

In fact, it is also alleged that Bredenkamp became something of a power behind the scenes in Zanu-PF. Sources say he overplayed his hand, however, when he sought to facilitate the early retirement of Mugabe in 2004 and his replacement by Mnangagwa.

This displeased rival politicians in the party and government and investigations were instituted into the affairs of Bredenkamp’s Breco trading company concerning tax evasion and exchange control violations.

Controversial businessman, Conrad Muller “Billy” Rautenbach, is one of the handful of white businessmen who have prospered under Mugabe. He owned Wheels Africa, which quickly grew to become Zimbabwe’s largest freight company. He also held the Volvo and Hyundai franchises. He is said to own several thousand cattle north of Harare. The herd remained unscathed as neighbouring commercial farms were violently seized during by Zanu-PF sponsored war veterans and other party militants.

Rautenbach was one of South Africa’s best known businessmen but he fell foul of the law. The police wanted him in connection with massive fraud at his Wheels of Africa Group.

The charges against Rautenbach included stealing 1,300 cars from Hyundai, bribing customs officials and fraudulently reducing the tax liability of Wheels of Africa’s subsidiaries. He fled South Africa in 1999 after justice department investigators raided his office and home. Wheels of Africa was liquidated in December1999.

In Zimbabwe Rautenbach has enjoyed the company of equally tough businessmen, including the ubiquitous