Human Rights and Sustainable Development

Graham Hatty in Nigeria

2009-09-09T06:07:00.000-07:00

About four years ago I published a story of a white Rhodesian farmer, son of post- WW11 immigrant friends of my mother. Graham Hatty was driven off his hugely successful wheat farm in Norton, near Harare. A British newspaper (the Times) published a photograph and article, showing Graham Hatty to be successfully farming in Nigeria. Here is the story I wrote and I want to know what happend next....

"He stands in a wide, dark brown ploughed field. The sky is lit up with a radiant burst of rain clouds, silver white and heavily black, fanning out from the far horizon. In the near distance a crowd of black farmhands are dotted across the field, their faces turned solemnly towards him. He is smiling, really smiling. A sun bronzed, leathery face with fine-chiselled bone structure is shaded by a floppy hat. The man has the distinctive features, the rimless spectacles and relaxed stance of a prosperous businessman farmer. I see a white, Zimbabwean commercial farmer who is organizing the production of a seasonal crop of maize. I am seeing a ghost. I think I am looking at Sir Cyril Hatty.

But Cyril is dead. He was a highly successful farmer in Norton, near Lake Chivero some twenty five miles from Zimbabwe’s capital. Harare. He was ninety three when I saw him shortly before he died in the same year that we fled the country where I was born. For me, opening the World News section of the Times on July 23, 2005 to find Chris Harris’s brilliant photograph of Cyril’s apparent re-incarnation was quite shock. Then the ghost vanished as I read the caption: `Graham Hatty with some of the Nigerian subsistence farmers whom he hopes to train: “I would not have missed this for the world. I am very optimistic,” he is quoted as saying. Graham Hatty’s most enduring inheritance, the quality of purposeful enthusiasm is surely his best legacy from his illustrious father.

Sir Cyril Hatty was knighted for his service as Finance Minister in the Central African Federal parliament. He and Graham’s late mother, the statuesque Doris were my parents’ friends. Doris was big, built like an Amazon. With her booming voice, she was in great demand, singing and acting the Pearly Queen in the Bulawayo Theatre Club which my mother ran. The British colony needed all the theatrical talent it could get. The club and its members provided welcoming meeting grounds and embraced new English immigrants arriving in Southern Rhodesia after the war (WW2). Cyril was an accountant then – the country was carefully recruiting skilled settlers many of whom had been trainee RAF pilots in the sunny, peaceful environment of a British colony. Cyril made a great success of his business and political career. His two sons were African-born.

I thought I could call upon the family friendship after Ian Smith declared UDI. I was one of a little band of Rhodesians opposed to this foolhardy move. We were trying to recruit successful (and wealthy) individuals to join our nacent opposition group, the Centre Party. I drove out of Salisbury, as it was then, to see Cyril in Norton and found him taking a morning break, working on his sketch book. My mission was a failure. He was friendly but firm. “Sorry, Diana, it’s no good going against this Rhodesian Front lot”. He avoided my accusing gaze, as he continued drawing his favourite baobab tree. “The only thing to do when you have a cowboy government is to become a cowboy”. I got the message.

Cyril Hatty was no mean cowboy: probably the biggest and best cereal farmer in the country, The red soil of his flat, wide lands, lay in the shadow of a range of low hills around the man made lake, formerly known as McIlwaine. He turned the fields into a sea of lush green wheat. Graham, the `cowboy’ farmer’s son had a great heritage. There was overhead irrigation equipment and huge combined harvesters with their gigantic wheels. The tyres, Cyril once told me, had cost more than a modest family house. Zimbabwe inherited a commercial farming success which had delivered self-sufficiency in wheat – there were no bread shortages and the millers flourished. Built up after long, painful experience, commercial farming was hugely profitable if you knew what you were doing..

I am glad that Cyril and Doris did not live to see their work trashed. It must have been a terrible shock for Graham to find himself, in his middle years, thrown off the land which had been his whole life. But I had noticed, soon after I heard that his farm, like many others, had been grabbed by Robert Mugabe’s minions, that Nigeria’s President Olusegun Obasanjo had `embraced’ him and a group of the outcasts – yes! quite literally, embraced him as he welcomed them to his country as immigrant farmers.

Those farmers have planted maize in the `magnificent soil’ of Nigeria’s western Kwara state and Graham Hatty, for one, says he would not return to Zimbabwe even if he got his farm back. I should add, his `stolen’ farm, but this is meant to be a happy ending. The restored, happy Hatty tells reporters that he never thought he would be so happy again. He is proud to boast that the incomes of the subsistence farmers that he has begun to train have trebled. The state governor acknowledged that `these people (the white farmers) see themselves as African” and he intends to give the ex-Zimbabweans every encouragement to stay and prosper. His delight in introducing the prospect of successful commercial farming appears to be boundless. He wants more of Zimbabwe’s dispossessed farmers to take out long leases, paying minimal rents so that eventually his people may be able to export agricultural produce".

I wrote that I wished the senior Hatty's had lived to see this great start for their son, dispossed of a farm of industrial proportions, which had been the life's work of the late Sir Cyril Hatty.

MATUMWA MAWERE RISES AGAIN

2009-07-26T07:40:00.000-07:00

Today's ZWNEWS as rivetting as ever:

“The ferocious battle among Mugabe's cronies and information emerging over the goings-on in the operations of the SMM empire have clearly exemplified the nature of the relationship between politicians and businessmen in Zimbabwe. Since Gono is Mugabe's closest ally, sources say his recommendations will soon be implemented and Mawere will get his companies back. For all that, Mawere will have to thank Zuma for enabling his chance meeting with Mugabe which kickstarted the events that have resulted in Gono's recommendations”.
250709 from Basildon Peta in The Star (SA).

Colonial Relic (DM)’s comment:
Marvellous! We watchers at the time knew full well what was going on. Mawere was not about to hand over his profits (or a large proportion of them) to Mugabe, Gono, ZANU (PF) or any of those profit grabbers. To understand this, you have only to remember what happened to Strive Masiywa when he succeeded with Econet. He too was required, seriously threatened in fact if he did not share or hand over substantial profits of his successful business at around the same time. “Where’s ours”, they asked him. “If you want a share, you must buy shares in the business”, was his reply. (I got this indirectly from the horses mouth).The excellent Basildon Peta, reporting from South Africa now was at one time prepared to lay down his life in opposing the ruling party’s kleptocracy (among other crimes) through his work as a journalist on the Financial Gazette. Thank goodness he fled and still lives and writes to bear witness to what went on and is still going on in the upper echelons of business in Zimbabwe.

I was once a friend of Ariston Chambati who genuinely believed that an economic liberation from the grip of whites should follow political liberation. He believed that black Zimbabweans had the capacity to succeed greatly in business. (He was a personal protégé of my neighbour, a British subject who had big business interests in Zimbabwe and Malawi. But that is another story). Ariston was right, but he could not have fully understood that Mugabe’s cronies, known or unbeknown to the man ZANU (PF) now calls their `Great Leader’ would be surrounded by people who wanted a short-cut to riches, regardless of their incapacity (unlike Mawere et al) to succeed in building big businesses. Ariston was formally a great (PF) ZAPU stalwart but he joined ZANU (PF) in order to achieve his ambition to prove what Zimbabweans could do in business. He was a top business executive at the time. He became Minister of Finance but died relatively young before he could show what he could do.

My own less than humble opinion is that he would not have been allowed to function in competition with the ambitions of to Gono whose major ambition was to retain the financial favours and thus, by cronyism, the power of Mugabe. With Mbeki gone there is plenty of room for speculation about the way the new S.A President Zuma will act vis-à-vis Zimbabwe’s business potential (rich deposits of diamonds recently discovered is one item that comes to mind). Cecil Rhodes a mining magnate, among his other talents, founded Rhodesia which is now Zimbabwe in the belief that gold, not diamonds would help finance his great investment. It was in Kimberly in South Africa that diamonds excited him.

A pun sparkles here: Rhodesia, in spite of the absence of diamonds, and for the sake of gold this and for reasons more complex than mining, became a gem of a country.

"A cruel and heartless act": MURAMBATSVINA mark 2

2009-07-07T02:28:00.000-07:00

CATHY BUCKLE TELLS IT LIKE IT IS
If we, exiles from our beautiful Zimbabwe, find it hard to imagine how the innocent victims of Robert Mugabe's brand of freedom can bear to go on, here is Cathy's latest depiction of what they are enduring. I have abridged her piece which should be published in every paper, journal or magazine where readers care about human rights and, better still, where they might do something to alleviate unending suffering:

".... For the first time ever in my memory the water in my birdbath turned to ice
overnight and didn't thaw until mid morning. A cold wind, drizzle,
mist and grey skies are now the order of our highveld winter days. In
this atmosphere a cruel and heartless act was undertaken in my home
town.

The word being used on the street in my neighbourhood is
"Murambatsvina." People were comparing the cruelty of events this week
to the government's massive human evictions of mid winter 2005.

ZESA, the government controlled electricity supply company went door
to door and disconnected people's electricity. Working in pairs, they
walked through residential neighbourhoods and house by house they
switched people off. In the road where I live, 90% of homes were
disconnected on a freezing July afternoon. The picture was repeated
across town. Families with babies in the house were not spared; homes
with sick and disabled occupants were switched off; homes with elderly
people in their 90's were disconnected. There was no mercy or
compassion, no compromise or humanity - just like it had been in
Operation Murambatsvina.

Worst affected were civil servants who earn just 100 US dollars a
month. Not even these dedicated professionals who could be earning ten
times their wage if they left the country were spared. Their
patriotism was punished with the flick of a switch

Since February most civil servants have been paying ... ZESA for their electricity. ... on a salary of 100 dollars, it is 10 or 20% of their wage. Zesa say it's not enough and are demanding massive and backdated amounts ranging from 250 to 500 US dollars for small residential homes.

The reality of the disconnections is very cruel. Teachers at work all
day educating our children are coming home an hour before dark and
having to light fires outside to cook on, to heat water for bathing
and washing and then have to sit and mark books by candle light.
Four months into our supposedly new and improved Zimbabwe the sound
of wood chopping fills the air, smoke constantly rises and women
stream out of the bush with mounds of newly cut Msasa branches
balanced on their heads. Shame on you ZESA!"

May I, this blog writer, suggest that the followers of a failed statesman need re-educating far more than do many unfortunate Zimbawean youngsters who are still being dragooned into brainwashing sessions at those brain damaging, politically led institutions, fatuously and erroneously called Training Centres.

Arresting the law in Zimbabwe

2007-05-16T06:53:00.000-07:00

Oh Mann! What a scandal!

Those ridiculous people who pose as the forces of law and order in Zimbabwe have arrested Simon Mann after he has served his sentence – and now they have arrested his lawyer, Jonathon Samkange for daring to help his client. Reading between the lines in today’s ZWNEWS (M&G- SA) it is fairly obvious that Samkange had the brilliant idea of bringing a living witness to the cruelties of Equatorial Africa’s prisons in order to save the life of his client. The so-called police have cooked up a case against him under immigration `laws' for not declaring his intention to bring the witness from Spain so that he could bear witness in a Zimbabwe court. This is yet another example of arbitrary law making by the Mugabe regime. I remind myself - and anyone interested - that white lawyers, many of whom defended nationalist prisoners before Independence, were not treated like criminals under the Smith regime. Plenty of living witnesses to that. Perhaps Mugabe’s storm troopers, disguised as policemen, will try to search them out and arrest them?

Who will save Zimbabwe's dying prisoners?

2007-05-15T10:36:00.000-07:00

37 YEARS ON – PRISON DEATHS

AND MEMORIES OF LEOPOLD TAKAWIRA

A Zimbabwean emerged from A notorious Harare prison after serving 5 years for armed robbery. Christina Lamb and John Makura reported in the Sunday Times (UK) that he went to jail with two accomplices but has emerged alone. This is what he had to to say:

“I saw two of my friends wasting away as a result of disease… I saw them dying one night and knocked and knocked (..to alert the guards) They only arrived at 9 a.m the following and it was too late”

These words are almost exactly what the late Dr Edson Zvobgo used when recounting the death in Salisbury (Rhodesia) prison in 1970 of revered nationalist leader, Leopold Takawira. Only this time it is black Zimbabwean guards who mercilessly leave a man to die in a prison cell. Takawira died because his diabetes was neglected in prison and the guards ignored Zvobgo’s desperate banging on the cell bars to call for help. Robert Mugabe’s minions imitate the cruelty of that one death with callous treatment of dozens of fellow human beings. Zimbabwe prisoners are starved and diseased and have no rights – except the right to die.

(Diana Mitchell is a former life member of the Rhodesian Association for the Rehabilitation of the Offender – RACRO)

Human Rights and Sustainable Development

2007-05-13T15:33:00.000-07:00

"What has sustainable development to do with human rights?”

Thus spoke Zimbabwe’s UN Ambassador Boniface Chidyausiku when Zimbabwe’s Minister of the Environment, Francis Nhema became the current official responsible for the UN’s Commission for Sustainable Development.

Zimbabwe, being currently ruled by a clique most of whose jobs depend upon kith and kin one must assume that the fellow at the UN got his position because of a certain Chief Justice Chidyausiku. Nothing wrong with that so long as the guy’s brains are in good, working order. Perhaps this morally challenged individual clearly cannot make the connection between an abysmal human rights record under his clique’s 27-year leadership and the near collapse of a once-great country’s economy? Not a chance of sustainable development now or for the foreseeable future. As for the pathetic Francis Nhema who is or was a son-in-law of the real Founder of free Zimbabwe, the late Joshua Nkomo, it is a pity that he lacks the wise counsel that Joshua might have supplied. I offer poor Boniface at the UN a single sentence in answer to his idiotic question: sustainable development has EVERYTHING to do with human rights.