Zimbabwe: smith did better.

Your editorial in the May issue was a pretty dismal apologia for the oppressive misrule of President Mugabe and his ZANU PF government. A more appropriate by-line would have been the one used in January, Lessons in How to Wreck a Thriving Country as there are many in Zimbabwe's case.

What is so depressing is that Mugabe has wilfully engineered the country's partial collapse, rather in the way former President Kaunda did in Zambia in the early 1970s.

If indeed the whites were "holding the nation to ransom", why did not Mugabe, like South Africa is doing now, start a sensible and controlled programme of black economic empowerment after 1980, instead of waiting for two decades and then going beserk?

He must be condemned for allowing his hatred of the British government, who, I admit, have been no angels in this saga, to blind him to the needs of his own people. It is they who are now suffering as a result.

As for the majority continuing "to show its faith in the ruling party by voting it in again ..."--that statement is about as intelligent as saying the majority of Malawians continued to show its faith in Banda at election time through the 1970s and 1980s.

When free and fair multi-party elections eventually came in 1994, we learnt otherwise.

Just because Mugabe allows an opposition does not guarantee free and fair elections. And how can vote-rigging claims be "sufficiently substantiated" when the judiciary is in the president's pocket?

But my main bone of contention relates to your 'airbrushing' of history. The fact is, and UN figures are there to substantiate it, that despite the liberation war and sanctions Zimbabwe's economy in April 1980 at Independence was already one of the most successful in sub-Saharan Africa.

And, in case you are inclined to say, 'yes--for the benefit of the whites' UN figures show per capita income for blacks was greater in real terms in 1980 than in 1999.

So, while Ian Smith and his white tribe (who, like Mugabe and his followers, had a hatred of the British government of the day) desperately clung to power in the face of world opprobrium (including eventually even apartheid South Africa), the rebel government actually made an economy already booming since 1965, thanks to Federation, even more self-sufficient.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Mugabe, in staying on through fair means and foul has achieved precisely the opposite. Both men have have been disasters for long-suffering Zimbabweans

A D H Leishman

Ngweze, Namibia.