The ONLY thing that went wrong was that Robert Mugabe "attacked" the Judiciary for the first time. Nothing else was wrong. He made an observation to the effect that "we should have known, that they could not be trusted" . That was all.
We decided to leave because I concluded that this was a VERY Dangerous sign, and marked the beginning of a process in which humans would end up with little or no rights.
Friends and relatives thought we were mad. I was giving up a High Court Judgeship. Pam was giving up teaching at the best school. We lived in the best suburb. We were giving up a really wonderful life.
We gave it all up and went to "safe" Botswana for 5 years before coming to "Mandela's South Africa" in 1996.
We were fleeing from what we concluded was very, very dangerous ... a mind set that was in the process of rejecting the constraint of constutionalism.
We were to be proved right; quite spectacularly.
Our "premonition" about Zimbabwe, on account of Mugabe's "attack" on the Judiciary was realized. Zimbabwe collapsed as Mugabe then followed through in terms of the mindset that the attack had signified.
The rest is history. Zimbabwe is a failed Sate, with over 3,6 million of its people having deserted and others diving under the SA border fence to get here as I am typing this, and despite xenophobic violence.
Unlike Zimbabwe, just about ALL the fundamentals in this country, such as Health, Education, Energy .. etc .. are a mess ....
... AND we now have ANC leadership brazenly breaching the Constitution, treating Court orders with contempt and attacking the Judiciary.
As regards the Al Bashir matter we see much lamenting about the "unfairness" of the ICC. Everyone forgets that Africa did set up an African Court. It was called the SADC Tribunal. It had its seat in Windhoek. It was staffed by African Judges.
The moment it gave one decision against an African government, i.e, Zimbabwe, the AU and SADC gang scrapped the Tribunal/Court.
So the mindset and culture that African leaders should be above the law and not subject to the constraint of democratic accountability is deeply entrenched at AU leadership level.
As Judge Dennis Davis says .. ."Judge for yourself".
Beware ... Hokoyo ... Passop.
PS: There is much hope for South Africa as, unlike Zimbabwe, there are many voices of protest and reason.
By the time Zimbabweans woke up, it was too late.
3 comments:
Very interesting article.
I agree that it is very worrisome indeed that there is now a blatant and public disregard for and an attack on the judiciary - the institution tasked with protecting us from government.
But it should be mentioned that this disregard for due legal process began many years ago - when Jacob Zuma was first brought into the top echelons of the ANC. And our biggest problem to date is the fact that there are many millions of uneducated and uninformed ANC voters out there who have been terrified by the ANC with lies, propaganda and promises who will keep voting for the ANC for many more years to come.
The opening paragraph of this post is naive and misleading - all the fundamentals in Zimbabwe started to decline 1980 when an inexperienced, unskilled black nationalist government changed policy idealistically instead of responsibly.
An analysis of the apparent progress in the first decade shows that it was superficial and unsustainable as it depleted the available resources and did nothing to maintain the infrastructure. In addition the government was corrupt and consistently acted beyond the law, an example of which was the attempted genocide ot the Matabele nation in the early 80's
As a high court judge you would have known this and more... surely if you were to give South Africa a warning it should've been years ago when you first arrived and should have been to learn from the lessons of history and not repeat them... However that warning is too late as South Africa is following the same trajectory of decline as Zimbabwe... All this blog points out is just another consequence of having an inept and corrupt government which you have tried to present as some sort of great personal insight...
Anonymous:
You are right that there was a steady decline as regards resource and infrastructure management in Zimbabwe from the early 80s despite Julius Nyenyere openly warning Mugabe at Triangle in 1981 .. "look after your roads, and look after your Whites".
However, as at 1992, they were still "sound" as compared with South Africa.
I am not aware that the government openly "consistently acted beyond the law" as much as it committed genocide with Gukurahundi and Mugabe's CIO secretly murdered thousands in terms of my estimate.
The difference is that the Mugabe regime got up to its dirty tricks in secret, because it seemingly understood that what is was doing was wrong.
However, once it attacked the judiciary, a paradigm mindset shift occurred and the rest is history.
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