Mugabe Award Draws Scorn

A CHINESE peace award to President Robert Mugabe has drawn scorn from the opposition, which described the honour as a mockery to Zimbabweans, who, they say, have been subjected to gross human rights abuses by the veteran leader.

Mugabe was awarded the Confucious Peace Prize, which is dubbed China’s Nobel Peace Prize, after reportedly beating off competition from Microsoft founder Bill Gates and South Korean President Park Geun-hye, much to the irritation of the opposition.

“It makes a mockery of the word ‘award’,” main opposition MDC-T spokesman Obert Gutu said.

“Robert Mugabe has done everything a winner of a peace award shouldn’t do. He has run down Zimbabwe, from being a breadbasket of southern Africa to a basket case in a short period of 35 years.

“He has pauperised more than 90% of the population of his country because at least 90% of Zimbabweans now live on less than $1 a day in abject poverty.”

Gutu said it was ironic for Mugabe to win the award as he had presided over a co

mplete breakdown of the rule of law and Zimbabwe had become a one-man dictatorship, “with Mugabe as the emperor, and his wife Grace being the empress”.

“Because of his misgovernance, intolerance and political repression, at least five million Zimbabweans have escaped into the Diaspora. He has reduced Zimbabwe from being the jewel of Africa in 1980 to being a pariah State in 2015,” he said.

But the founder of the Confucius Peace Prize — a Chinese rival to the Nobel Peace Prize — Qiao Damo, defended the decision to honour Mugabe for his “outstanding contributions” to world peace this year.

“If he hadn’t come to power in 1980, if he hadn’t played a role, how much talent would have been wasted?” he told international news agencies yesterday.