Sideliner Opinions

Africans wanting leaders who looked like them was a legitimate feeling, but a feeling isn't a qualification. Governing needs competence, and that is what the record tests. Smith warned that overnight majority rule would be "a disaster for Rhodesia." He said it would become a bankrupt "banana republic," and by 2008 inflation was in the billions of percent. They printed a 100 trillion dollar note and dropped the currency in 2009. Smith himself said history records that his predictions have materialised. From 2000 about 4,000 farms were seized, and the country that fed itself needed food aid. In 2020 the same government agreed to pay $3.5 billion in compensation for what it took. Three years after independence, the North Korean-trained Fifth Brigade went into Matabeleland. Estimates of the dead run from 10,000 to 20,000, with the higher figure the one most often cited for civilians. Mugabe openly called for a one-party state, absorbed Nkomo's party in 1987 and ruled for 37 years. When he lost the first round in 2008, opposition supporters were beaten and killed until Tsvangirai pulled out. The Daily News press was bombed in 2001 and the paper shut in 2003. Journalists were jailed and foreign reporters expelled. Opening the door to vote and sit in parliament was right. Running a state is a different test, and Mugabe's decades are the evidence. Roads turned to ruins, the airline, railways and state bus company collapsed, sanitation and services failed, and state enterprises went bankrupt. If he was ready, why did he preside over all of it? And since the white population fell from about 275,000 to under 30,000, the skills Smith said would leave did leave.