Maurice Cummins (Fine Gael)

I welcome the Minister to the House.

Ireland has a long and special relationship with Africa. Our missionaries offered a unique lifeline between the continent and this country, not merely in educating Africa, but in educating Ireland about Africa. As we too are a former colonised country, we can empathise with its struggle for freedom, its desire for independence, its resentment of outside interference.

We have sought to work with Africa, not lecture it. That makes our stance at the situation in Zimbabwe, and the dictatorship of Robert Mugabe, all the more powerful. We have, and can have, no business motives, no echoes of past colonial dominance. We condemn what is happening in Zimbabwe for one reason and one reason only, it is wrong.

When we refer to the dictatorship — I use the term deliberately — of Robert Mugabe, let us not pretend that Zimbabwe is a democracy. A democracy does not send its police to harass voters and threaten voters who support the Opposition. A democracy does not send its police into polling stations and demand to see people's votes. A democracy does not continually arrest the leader of the Opposition to silence him during a general election. No democracy rigs an election to effectively deny the people a choice in who governs them, and rushes through the presidential inauguration within hours, to complete the coup, a coup against its own people.

Many of us here remember the days when Zimbabwe achieved legal independence in 1980. The early years of Robert Mugabe seemed to us to embody all our hopes for that proud but war-torn country. Prime Minister Mugabe, as he was then, was admired internationally for his attempts to bring reconciliation between white and black, the factions of the independence movement, the old Rhodesia and the new Zimbabwe.

When he visited this country he was acclaimed. Here was a man, we believed, who could lead Africa from the dictatorship to democracy. We felt a special affinity for him because he was a product of education by Irish missionaries, and spoke movingly of the role Irish people had played in his life.

We were badly deceived. Under his rule the thriving economy he inherited has been turned into an economic basket case. Under the reign of Robert Mugabe, thanks to his policies, life expectancy has fallen to the lowest level in the world, at around 35 years of age in 2006. Zimbabwe, and before it Rhodesia, was one of the best educated electorates — a key role in which was thanks to Irish missionaries such as those who educated Mr. Mugabe.

Today education levels in Zimbabwe are tumbling as the best educated flee from a country unable to guarantee its own food supply. Yet, incredibly and sickeningly, Mugabe's Government in 2008 banned non-governmental organisations, as the Minister has stated, from distributing food to feed thousands of people in some rural areas.

On 29 May 2008, Zimbabwe's Minister of Social Welfare, Nicolas Goche, banned one agency from distributing food in Masvingo province on the preposterous idea that feeding people was somehow helping the Movement for Democratic Change, the main Opposition party. It appears that in Mugabe's Zimbabwe, the Government would prefer people to starve to death than live and vote for the Opposition. According to Human Rights Watch, "The decision to let people go hungry is yet another attempt to use food as a political tool to intimidate voters ahead of an election". President Mugabe's Government has a long history of using food to control the election process. Ultimately, President Mugabe had to announce the importation of 600,000 tons of maize to feed people in a country that used not only to feed itself but millions in other countries. Zimbabwe, as the Minister has stated, once the bread basket of Africa, has become its basket case.

The food problem in Zimbabwe came about through a crass and incompetent land redistribution policy. Like Ireland in the 19th century, Zimbabwe, as Rhodesia, saw most of its estates held by a small minority of the wealthy. Like in Ireland a century ago, major land reform was needed in Zimbabwe. In Ireland land reform was achieved through a simple basic rule: the land went to those who had worked it as tenants. What this meant was that those who got the land were farmers who were committed to using it. That did not happen in Zimbabwe. Large efficient farms were seized, often brutally, sometimes criminally. They were broken up and given out not to those who could work the new farms, but as bribes to Government supporters, many of whom had no experience in agriculture. It gave Zimbabwe the worst of all worlds — no food, no agriculture, and its best land lying fallow in the hands of people who did not have the experience, the knowledge and the resources to farm it.

The economy collapsed and inflation reached levels that, if repeated in a Marx Brothers movie, would have sounded unbelievable. Yet the more people suffered, the more chronic and stupid mistakes Mugabe made. We now face the crisis we have today, namely, a dictatorial president who has in 28 years reduced his country from riches to rags; a society in which a corrupt political elite uses farms and food as bribes to keep itself in power, with no concern for the people; a president, who, as the recent election shows, has such an inflated ego, that he equates his own survival in power with the good of his country, even when his policies are destroying the country.

I will not go through the details of all that has happened in the recent so-called elections. We know that in the first round the Opposition leader beat Robert Mugabe but suspiciously just failed to get an overall majority. We know that in the weeks that followed, Opposition leaders were targeted, bullied, starved, burnt out of their homes and in some cases killed. We know that in the end, the Opposition was forced to pull out of the election to save lives. Even then President Mugabe sent the police into polling stations to make sure that people voted for him. That is Mugabe's type of democracy. It was a coup, a cynical seizure of power by a corrupt dictator who will do anything, say anything, and kill anyone, to hold onto power.

One thing we in Ireland need to make very clear, is that Mugabe's claim that the criticism of him is all the work of the former "imperialist power", Britain, attempting to subvert Zimbabwean independence, is false.