ACQUAINTED WITH IBBO

ACQUAINTED WITH IBBO
Everybody is writing about `Breakfast with...' or `Dinner with...' but I have never dined, I was only acquainted with Ibbo Mandaza. You could say that I have had a bone to pick with him once he opted for slavish devotion to a political party which any fool could see was taking Zimbabwe to perdition.

Perdition by attrition I call it.

This is a very personal review of the way that Ibbo touched my life. We never had more than eyeball contact but I watched his career with huge interest because of the good turn he did me the first time we met. More than twenty years ago, I was lined up with two underqualified men for a promotion to head a department at the Harare Polytechnic. Present at the interview was Ibbo, then a civil servant, Secretary for Labour I guess. I was gobsmacked when my promotion went through, I fully expected a man to get the job, especially as my competition was black.

Next sighting of Ibbo came with AAPS, the Association of African Political Scientists. He promoted regular debates, mostly brilliant speakers and packed the Great Indaba room of the Monomatapa hotel with newly liberated Zimbabweans eager to air their views from the floor. I was hooked and never missed the event. Then there were early SAPES publications, full of long-overdue Afro-centric views.

So far so good. Dr Mandaza seemed to be his own man, maybe a little imbalanced in correcting the `imbalances' of the colonial past, but understandably so. As Ibbo's empire, and his waistline expanded, things went downhill, nothing admirable from then onward about his abandonment of principle. I began to worry about his insecurities: he had been Ibbotsen Joseph, a person of mixed race, before Independence. Ruth Chinamano, who claimed to have taught him at a school for children of blacks and some of mixed race in those apartheid Rhodesian days said that he scorned offers of `sadza duri' the staple food of black schoolmates. White people didn't eat sadza. Her story may have been apocryphal but it is true that after independence, Ibbo became a Mandaza, and good luck to him.

It seemed to me that he had little choice other than to do what Joseph Culverwell had done, taking a wise father's advice and supporting `the nashies' if - with his racial mix - he wanted to get on in an African country. It remains the tragedy of our times. Ibbo deserved recognition for his talents because they were what made him. His name or his DNA should always have been irrelevant. My view will inevitably be called patronizing. But who needs to patronize him now? Wealth and power did nothing to build his character except in the image of his dreadful political masters. His close acquaintance with Jonathon Moyo may have had something to do with his most recent troubles: that Tsholotsho `conspiracy'took plenty of casualties. But now that he has been pushed out of his media power-base, even Wallace Chuma, a former editor of his Mirror newspaper has reserved a drop of sympathy for him. Wallace, now working in Cape Town experienced Ibbo's arrogance and cruelty and has written a lengthy and savagely revealing piece about his former employer, published on The New Zimbabwe website on October 17. The hard exterior is pathetically vulnerable with the carapace stripped away. I have provided a hyperlink* but there can surely be no better illustration than the folowing excerpts:

"He took the opportunity [in 2001] to outline the [Mirror]paper’s editorial policy, which he defined as “nationalist” and “non-partisan”. He urged the journalists to report objectively, and frame events and issues from the point of view of their impact on what he roughly called the “national interest”....

But I soon realised I was naïve if I thought Mandaza meant what he said....

Mandaza called to congratulate me on the piece[on Jonathon Moyo] on a Friday morning. Early in the next week, after he had spoken to Moyo during the weekend, he called again to complain about the same piece, saying we should avoid making unnecessary criticism of some Zanu PF officials....

It did not take me long to notice that Ibbo’s loyalties were with Zanu PF; in fact, a PARTICULAR FACTION within that party...(DM’s emphasis)

But from the first week of 2002, Mandaza became shrill in his editorial interference and paranoia. He thought the paper was not supporting Zanu PF enough, and convinced himself the entire newsroom had been ‘infiltrated’ by MDC supporters....

Ibbo would insist we run with the conspiracies, in the process making fools of ourselves...

The whole things had less to do with the ideology of nationalism and the “national interest” than newspaper economics. The Mirror was founded on weak financial footing, and never made a profit...

… the paper relied heavily on the “benevolence” of CBZ Kaguvi Branch for operations and salaries....

Ibbo enjoyed the dual, if contradictory, identity of being an indigenous solid capitalist and an independent intellectual and academic running an independent research think-tank. I’m sure this carried tremendous prestige. And yet Ibbo’s lifestyle and assumed identity could not be sustained by his struggling business “empire”. Things became even more difficult when Sapes Trust, his research think tank and occasional source of forex, became cash-strapped as a result of donor fatigue…

...And then I [CHUMA]left in a huff.

When I read about the way Ibbo had been brutally ejected out of the Mirror by the CIO, I felt for him, in the spirit of ubuntu. But I also remembered the brutality with which he offloaded those among his staff who questioned his occasionally strange decisions".
ENDS
* Sorry. No hyperlink. I have to practise how to do it again.