Ciaran’s Peculier [sic] Blog

Most people would agreed that President Robert Mugabe should be an international pariah. He has cynically impoverished a once rich nation while enriching himself and his cronies. He is no delusional madman, but a shrewd, dare I say Machiavellian operator, and he would not be able to do anything without well-placed friends.

The extent to which this pariah has been able to act with impunity in the face of international sanctionbs and condemnation comes in a report carried in this fortnight’s edition of Africa Confidential. An “Arms and the Men”  details investigations into payments in excess of £25m by British Arms company BAE to a British Virgin Islands’ registered company Kayswell Services, whose majority shareholder is arms-dealer John Bredenkamp. Bredenkamp is a major supplier of the Zimbabwean Defence forces and friend of Robert Mugabe. He is also known to be particularly close to Emmerson Mnangagwa, one of Mugabe’s most hard-line supporters.

Mugabe’s campaign against the country’s white farmers has often been marked by blood-curdling racism. The farmers have been portrayed as a greedy and selfish white minority lliving in the lap of luxury, who as a legacy of colonialism have nothing to contribute to modern Zimbabwe. But the reality is that many of the white farmers were not fantastically rich (or any form of rich). Their farms were often owned by banks and finance companies while they were dependant on the vicissitudes of global commodity prices. But Mugabe and his circle seem to have no difficulties hob-nobbing with mega-rich white businessmen such as Bredenkamp and Nicholas Van Hoogstraten. The reason for this apparent contradicition is that both groups have something to offer Mugabe & co that they crave. The white farmers had land, which could be handed out to ZANU-PF loyalists so as to bolster political control. The white businessmen have money – and lots of it, and you can be that it’s in dollars and pound sterling, not the fantastically denominated Zimbabwean dollar.