Lessons learnt from King Moshoeshoe as war drums sound

IN THE early years of being the president of Zimbabwe, Robert Mugabe won accolades for progressive policies, especially in food production and enabling Zimbabwe to be food secure.

Mugabe proceeded to prod the British on the full implementation of the agreements of independence.

Among these was land purchase with funds the UK had agreed to set aside for that purpose.

But after 10 years of waiting and begging for the implementation of the Lancaster agreements on land sharing, Mugabe decided to start the programme of expropriation of land from white farmers.

Guess what the superior club did? They imposed sanctions on him. The economy of Zimbabwe collapsed and suffered one of the highest inflation rates the world has witnessed. Zimbabweans became billionaires as the dollar came in denomination notes of a billion each. Many across the world have kept them as souvenirs.

The economy of Zimbabwe could not recover.

At the time of the end of World War II, Europe was divided into East and West, with the boundaries splitting Germany into two. Nato deployed warheads in West Berlin facing the Soviet Republics, which included East Germany.

Thatcherism and Reaganomics took root under the advice of writings by Milton Friedman, the free market fundamentalist. The neo-liberal economic thought held sway and found sponsorship in the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.

The Soviet Union faced the worst of challenges at that point and it became obvious that the dominant economic ideology of liberalism also held sway.

Many of the Soviet Union leaders started disappearing due to mortality and with the demise of the last-remembered great leader,

Leonid Brezhnev, time for change was imminent. In time, the Glasnost and Perestroika man, president Mikhail Gorbachev would ascend to the throne, albeit momentarily, before looking at his watch once, twice and a third time, resigning on December 25, 1991.

As the Soviet Union disintegrated, the statistics community had to design tools of measurement that would inform planned economies that were integrating into market economies.

Germany was reunited and the West increased its sphere of influence. Accession countries had to comply with the new statistical standard before they could become a member of the EU.

What that implied was Nato’s programme of expansion had begun and was fast approaching Ukraine, the last station Russia could tolerate.

However, even with that, there was an agreement that the war machinery would not expand beyond where it was.

Today, Nato is reneging on what its sphere of influence should be and the US has turned against its own Monroe Doctrine, as US senator Bernie Sanders elegantly described it.

This sheds light on what we are seeing in the context of the Ukraine-russia crisis.

Russian President Vladimir Putin could not get over the embarrassment of the March 3, 1918 Brest-litovsk Peace Treaty in which Russia lost territory to Germany.

The war has begun. Some say it is the beginning of World War III and, of course, as the crisis precipitates, new complex mutants are more likely to emerge.

But at the heart of all this is the crisis of capitalism, which has shown significant affinity to reimagine and reinvent itself in the context of the information technology and media platforms it spawned.

At all material times, the global South remained the feedstock for capital. The global South provided an economic easy escape route even after World War I and II. The global South was just a pawn, but an important, one over whose resources the warring North trumped.

Now the battle is squarely in the North. Russia had been a strong ally of anti-colonialism and the global South empathises with it.

There are South Africa’s own lessons in history that sheds light on the strife. Albeit not exactly comparable, King Moshoeshoe, during his time as the founder of the Basotho nation, became a victim of Anglo Boer mischief as he successfully defended Lesotho, even though he lost the Free State.

King Moshoeshoe watched and pondered the Afrikaners and British at war and the events that unfolded.

He said: “Let me watch the spectacle of a White Bull Fight.”

The global South might just embellish this respite as it brings in full view what they suffered all along in matters that were propelled by capitalism and imperialism. May it be the end of capitalism? Maybe.

But capitalist evil is so smart it has an affinity to reimagine and reinvent itself.

For now, I remind myself of King Moshoeshoe’s momentary respite.

The global South should abstain from the war in the North, even if the appetite to protect Ukrainian citizens for a bicycle or a long winter coat as a reward might be luring us to participate.

Let the aroma of peace-making ooze instead.