Update: President Mugabe finally admits that starving his own people was a mistake….No $#!+

Over the past few months, I’ve written a series of articles on Zimbabwe’s descent into political and economic hell. In them, I lamented on how the fiendish president of this God-forsaken country, Mr Robert Mugabe:

Guaranteed his reelection earlier this year by dispatching military thugs to harass voters and seize productive farms from white farmers – which he gave to political cronies to maintain their unbridled loyalty. (And on which these political hacks built barren mansions instead of farming the land);

Bulldozed the homes of poor Zimbabweans he suspected of “conspiring” to undermine his authority; thereby politically cleansing and rendering homeless hundreds of thousands of the millions of his already starving people; and

Was fêted recently at a United Nations conference on combating world hunger and starvation, despite his egregious record of cutting off UN food aid from his own people (as a cruel and inhumane political strategy to nourish his dictatorship).

And, with each successive commentary, I expressed increasing outrage not only at Mugabe for his venal treatment of his own people, but also at world leaders (especially Africans) who gave tacit approval of or showed unconscionable indifference to the impact his genocidal policies have had on innocent and helpless Zimbabweans.

But it seems Mugabe has had a political conversion. The BBC reported last week that he now accepts blame for turning this country that was once the crown jewel of Pan Africanism into one that stands as a prime example of African kleptocracy, tribal savagery and congenital political incompetence.

Nonetheless, my serially vindicated cynicism compels me to suspect that this mea culpa is just another amoral Mugabe ploy to elicit sympathy and extract financial aid from Western donors. After all, affecting regret for the suffering they’ve inflicted on their own people has always served Africa’s “big Dadas” (despotic rulers) well in courting relationships with rich countries (like the United States during the Cold War and China today).

And, moreover, just today Mugabe showed discouraging signs that his political dementia and megalomania remains acute. Because, he further alienated the only country that has offered unconditional food aid to Zimbabwe – which Mugabe’s antic and despotic state of mind led him to reject continually – by threatening to expel the U.S Envoy Christopher W. Dell for describing his government for what it self-evidently is: namely, one of “corrupt rule” and gross mismanagement.”

We shall see…

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