Over a month after the voting, the results of the Zimbabwe presidential election still have not been officially announced. The autocratic president of Zimbabwe, who has been in power for almost three decades since the fall of Rhodesia, is clearly reluctant to hand over power. The current government has turned the breadbasket of Africa into an economic disaster with the highest inflation rate in the world. It raises the question: Why did Rhodesia work when Zimbabwe doesn't?
by Melvin Rhodes
The last prime minister of Rhodesia was Ian Smith. His death on Nov. 20, 2007, should be a cause for reflection on Africa's past, present and future, for it raises a very important question the mass media won't address.
Ian Douglas Smith was born in 1919. He fought for Britain, serving in the Royal Air Force during the Battle of Britain. He became Rhodesia's first native-born prime minister. Fearful that the nation would suffer the fate of others in postcolonial Africa, Mr. Smith led his governing Rhodesian Front party to a unilateral declaration of independence from Great Britain, on Nov. 11, 1965.
If Ian Smith had ruled his country 50 years earlier, he would have been hailed around the world as a hero. But he ruled in our ongoing age of political correctness. Consequently, he was almost universally reviled. Hardly a positive word was written in published obituaries following the news of his death.
But the press overlooked the following: When Smith was prime minister, the peoples of Rhodesia—both black and white—were well fed, the economy was growing in spite of international sanctions, the educational and health-care systems were the best in Africa, and the press was free to criticize the government (and usually did).
Contrast Zimbabwe today: The people are starving, the country has the highest inflation rate in the world, the educational and health-care systems have collapsed and the press is not free to say anything critical of the president, who has been in power since 1980.
