Foreign-owned banks, mines, and businesses have heard that, to fulfill a campaign promise made by Mugabe, their assets may be seized and restructured into a majority national ownership arrangement.
Now it appears the considerable property of the Anglican church in Zimbabwe, though it is mostly a black membership, may also be under renewed scrutiny by the unscrupulous.
The chief Anglican bishop in Zimbabwe, Chad Gandiya, this week accused a renegade clergyman and friend of Mugabe of restarting a campaign using brutality, the courts, and police to seize churches, orphanages, and missions owned by mainstream Anglicans.
I notice that this report was filed from Boston. I wonder to what extent it reflects knowledge on the ground. The reference to the Church of England is out of date – the Province of Central Africa was set up in 1955. Second, I was in Harare in January this year and the cathedral of St Mary the Virgin was definitely back in the hands of the real Church and not Nolbert Kunonga’s. However, I take this article to be a pre-emptive warning by the Anglicans that there is more trouble brewing. The situation there is indeed horrible. Reports say that diamond mining has poured something like $250m annually into the lap of the ruling party and Mugabe himself, allowing them to buy in more sophisticated means of controlling the populace – hence the way the election 11 days ago was manipulated without the violence that marred the previous one. People were simply told they could not vote in the urban areas – their registration had somehow not gone through – and in the rural areas the vote, of course, was supervised. I fear for the country. The threat to expropriate business shareholdings in order to distribute them out among the robber barons will paralyse investment once more – even the Chinese, already very prominent in Zim, and backers of Mugabe, will think twice.
Spare a thought also for Archbishop Robert Ndlovu, the Catholic Archbishop of Harare. When Mugabe – already 89 – passes away the archbishop will be under tremendous pressure for a state funeral, the full panoply of the Church, praise-singing, followed by burial at Heros’ Acre at Warren Hills just outside Harare. What a dilemma. To tell the truth: that the president was a manipulator who destroyed his own people’s future and abused their trust again and again, bringing down wrath on your head. Or go along with the fiction which everybody knows is not the case, knowing that you are accommodating yourself to a great lie. A horrible choice. Perhaps it will be said simply that like all of us Mugabe was a sinner and needs the mercy of God.
I thought there was something wrong with this story. And now Get Religion has nailed it as a blunder – reporting as breaking news, items two years old:
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/getreligion/2013/08/a-newspaper-gets-burned-in-reporting-on-anglican-africa/#more-109297