The curious case of targeted sanctions
Introducing the village philosophy
FOR those, who grew up in the countryside, there is a concept called kufumidza mombe dzemukaka, or early morning grazing of the milk cow before milking it.
Well, for us who did agricultural projects during our secondary education, we were taught by the late Mr. Bhasera that: “When rearing a calf, it’s pertinent that the calf gets the first mother’s milk, called, colostrum, in the first six hours of its life.
“The calf must suck its mother four or five times a day for the first few days to get the colostrum. If the cow is not going to do it, somebody else must do it”.
We would later learn that colostrum is rich in vitamins and minerals as well as antibodies, which help the calf to fight diseases.
So, as village cattle herders, paid or unpaid, vakomana vemombe as we were addressed in vernacular Shona, we had to wake up very early in the morning to make sure the mother cow has done all the work.
When the mother cow is full, most calves easily learn to drink, and can even do without our very unclean or clean hands in a day or two.
But if the mother is empty, angry or hungry, the calf will receive kicks and horns.
During Mugabe’s regime
Before independence, Ian Smith was sanctioned but then chose friends wisely and strategically to help him out. Southern Rhodesia could afford to ignore trade with Britain and America and other occidentals.
There was no gateway to the Orientals. Then enter Robert Mugabe. Who forgets his speech in which he said: “We don’t mind bearing sanctions from Europe... We’re not Europeans, ban us from Europe...so Blair, keep your England and I keep my Zimbabwe”.
That was Mugabe, a whole head of state and government and commander-inchief of the Zimbabwe Defence Forces imagining his ideological speeches without political reality.
But we do not blame Mugabe. He was a political scientist answering the ‘what’ of foreign policy.
We blame the crafters and advisors, the political administrators, who advised Mugabe as the ‘how’ of Zimbabwean politics. And then political scientist, Ibbo Mandaza asked that it should be placed on record why the incumbent President is on targeted sanctions.
And in all this, the response on record is that he was fingered in corruption sagas!
Targeted sanctions
For starters, targeted sanctions are imposed by a sovereign state or their allies against specific persons, entities, or groups of people in another sovereign country following actions that are deemed unacceptable at bilateral, multilateral or international law levels by the imposing country.
For Zimbabwe, the current sanctions regime from the United States (US) are based on human rights abuses and corruption, allegedly against Zimbabwe’s current President Emmerson Mnangagwa and 14 others or so.
Targeted sanctions differ from collective sanctions, firstly in that they are imposed against specific individuals, entities, or groups responsible for objectionable behaviour.
We have heard how entities linked to some of the individuals were mentioned in the ‘Gold Mafia’ saga that trended last year.
Two, they are meant to minimise collateral damage on the general population.
The US government has acted to stop the government of Zimbabwe from using the mantra that ‘sanctions hurt every Zimbabwean citizen’.
Three, targeted sanctions can vary from travel bans, asset freezes, or restrictions on trade with the targeted persons, human, legal, or artificial.
For Zimbabweans, collective sanctions meant that, firstly, the restrictions were on an entire country or the country’s population.
Secondly, they become collectivised so as to exert the pressure on a government by affecting the economy, infrastructure or resources.
We can use the commonwealth exclusion to show for instance how most deserving Zimbabweans could not benefit from the Commonwealth scholarships because Mugabe pulled out of the bloc after his ‘imagined speech’ without political reality’ referred to above.
Thirdly, if the government fails to act as a result of the soft response, hard responses can be invoked from international law.
Soft responses could include widespread humanitarian consequences, which could impact innocent civilians.
They could be accompanied by interventionist hard stances like what happened to Libya when colonel Muammar Gaddafi was brutally deposed.
The hard stances have not been understood in Zimbabwe, thanks to political formations, which came together and found an internal solution through the Global (general) Political Agreement that allowed Zimbabweans to find each other after the bloodbath in the 2008 June Presidential runoff that became a runoff.
What’s there for Mnangagwa
Looking at Mnangagwa’s fate, it is not very bad indeed.
Analogy can be drawn from a squatter farm. A squatter farmer can say, ‘this year, my crop is very good!’ But to increase his harvest, such a farmer may ask for a loan from the Agribank.
The bank might say, well, there is no loan for farming on squatted land. The farmer may choose not to get discouraged and proceed to produce good crop, using only good methods.
But then, someday, the government might decide to evict him from the land and the fields are turned into housing estates and construction is started by some land developer.
What am I saying? Everyone would say, ‘Look at the squatter farmer’s fate, very bad indeed!’ For him, there is no security. Sympathisers might come to the rescue as was done to the proverbial Indian, Kuppan the good farmer.
When the government was about to evict him, sympathisers came together and reasoned, ‘Maybe it is us tomorrow? The nation’s food supply will never be stable!’
Concrete steps needed
In abstracting the Mnangagwa government’s overreliance on Zimbabwe’s sovereignty and America’s or the West’s interventionism, the harmony of the opposites is needed.
Paul Kagame is popular, some kind of benevolent dictator, and a real pragmatist, do not follow him in seeking a third term. Paul knows where to get something that makes his people happy.
When he needs good teachers, he goes to Zimbabwe.
That does not make him a bad dictator. If Mnangagwa was in the village, our people say in Shona, Dai anga ari mumwe njani, meaning, if he was another person, then one, two, three things can be done.
Firstly, it is not too late from listening to former G40 members’ sanctions narratives. Zimbabwean singer Aleck Macheso had some song about being warned to flee the war from a mentally challenged person.
Kasukuwere explained well recently how a sanctioned individual struggles to exchange even US$50 at a bureau de change. Mnangagwa should also strengthen the voice of Fredrick Shava and diplomacy on foreign policy principles of Zimbabwe. Shava was a head of mission for a long time.
This helps Mnangagwa to reduce the noise of fundamentalists around him, who are waging X wars.
He also needs to win the hearts of the people that this is his second and final term.
He should rather be seen as a reformer than a rhetorician. We are far away from the anti-mugabe sentiments in 2017 and 2018.
He needs to build harmonious strategies, including toning down on anti-opposition rhetoric.
On the last point, Zanu PF at the moment is acting like someone who goes for days without eating.
When there is no food, the intestines grind each other to the point of getting chronic gastritis or ulcers.
Destroying the opposition will definitely leave Zanu PF bracing for a brutal self-destructive trajectory.
Even Chris Mutsvangwa is better brought back for he has many friends in the diplomatic circle.
Mugabe was received with soft hands under house arrest.
No one should be dragged in the streets, especially, when everyone is told, ‘kumagumo kune nyaya!,’ loosely projecting a bitter and brutal end.