Justin Trudeau has unique opportunity to help Zimbabwe
Last week, the North Korean-trained, Chinese-armed, military forces of Zimbabwe moved to bring an inglorious end to 93-year-old President Robert Mugabe’s 37-year rule.
Having failed to heed the dictum of controversial British politician Enoch Powell — “all political careers end in failure, unless terminated at midstream” — Mugabe’s once lauded 1970s liberation era now lies shattered.
Zimbabwe’s ruling party, the ZANU-PF, which won independence for the southern African nation in 1980, has voted to expel Mugabe from its ranks and will launch an impeachment proceeding this week to force Mugabe to resign.
Mugabe, a contemporary of Nelson Mandela, and his young band of liberation fighters, started the southern African movement in the late 1960s, which ended the racist regimes in then Rhodesia, Portuguese Mozambique, Namibia and South Africa.
Mugabe’s success in 1980 signalled to other liberation fighters in Namibia and South Africa that they could also one day end their anti-apartheid/white colonial struggles and live in relative peace with their neighbours of other races. Famously, after Ian Smith had been toppled by Mugabe, he lived unharassed for two decades in Zimbabwe, before dying in 2007 in Cape Town, South Africa.
The end of Mugabe’s regime signals the end of an era in Africa and the beginning of a new vista that could benefit from a strong positive influence of Ottawa as Canada still enjoys enormous goodwill in Zimbabwe.
On Sept. 23, 1975, then prime minister Pierre Trudeau dramatically boycotted the opening celebration of the World Plowing Championship being held in Oshawa in a sign of Canada’s moral opposition to Smith’s racist regime in Rhodesia. Rhodesia was participating in the event and Mugabe and his allies never forgot Trudeau’s actions.
Today, Prime Minster Justin Trudeau now has his own historic opportunity to lead international efforts to help Zimbabwe onto the path of peaceful, sustainable development. Both the U.S. and U.K. have almost no standing with the Mugabe regime. And China’s influence in the matter could be detrimental to Zimbabwe’s democratic future.
Trudeau will be able to call on Canada’s, and his family’s, unique calling card to help coalesce international efforts to midwife the next stage of southern Africa’s history. Canada has spent more than $300 million since 2001 on international developmental aid to the beleaguered nation.
If the decade-long crisis in Zimbabwe is not brought to a more peaceful, democratic and prosperous end, Canada and the world may have to someday pay an even higher price to restabilize the southern Africa region as it copes with the millions of refugees that will inevitably flow out of Zimbabwe into neighbouring South Africa.
In the early 2000s, after a chaotic land reform process that left the country hungry and reeling from hyperinflation, South Africa bore the brunt of the exodus of refugees, an event that later triggered violent xenophobic attacks in the country.
If Canadian companies, reputed globally for their equitable governance practices, corporate social responsibility (CSR) protocols and respect for labour rights, Indigenous rights and environmental consciousness, prepare to work in tandem with the Canadian government to co-invest in a new Zimbabwe, more exploitative non-Canadian companies will not win one of Africa’s final investment prizes.
Which major foreign companies and nations will benefit from a new Zimbabwe? Will exploitative non-Canadian mining companies, which have no regard for CSR or environmental standards, become the prime movers in a new Zimbabwe? Or will the country continue to suffer general neglect by Canada? Canadian companies seeking new frontier markets opportunities may yet look to invest in a post-Mugabe Zimbabwe in the areas of mining, renewable energy, construction, health care and education.
Zimbabwe has one of Africa’s most educated workforces and significant quantities of coal-bed methane for power generation.
It also has valuable deposits of platinum, ferrochrome, asbestos, coal, chromite, copper, diamond, ferrosilicon, gold, granite, and nickel.
And unlike some other landlocked African nations, Zimbabwe’s major cities and industrial centres are connected by excellent rail links to Botswana, Mozambique, South Africa, and Zambia. The country sits at the heart of the Southern African transportation and energy grid, providing ease of access to foreign investors who need to ship exports out and machinery in. Zimbabwe is getting ready to “open up.” The question is: Will the Trudeau government help it, and are Canadian businesses ready for the vast opportunities that await it in the nearly three trillion dollar southern African economic region?