You would be hard-pressed to find a non-African (or even a non-Zimbabwean) who has decried Robert Mugabe’s rule more than I.
Here are two illustrative excerpts from the many commentaries I’ve written on point.
__________________
- From “Zimbabweans Pray for Liberation from their Liberator – Robert Mugabe,” March 29, 2005.
The Mugabe government of Zimbabwe is the most corrupt, dysfunctional, and incompetent in Africa. And on a continent that has the most corrupt, dysfunctional, and incompetent governments in the entire world, Mugabe’s achievement in this regard is a truly dubious distinction…
Like his plan for Black economic empowerment, Mugabe’s plan for land reform has been an abject failure: Five years ago, there were 4000 white-owned farms in Zimbabwe; today, there are only 400 (mostly unproductive) farms left. Five years ago, Zimbabwe was the breadbasket of sub-Saharan Africa; today, it is a basket case of starving people…
According to a March 12 report in The Times:
Most of the seized farms went to President Mugabe’s loyal cronies in government who used them for weekend retreats. Virtually every Cabinet minister and senior security official now has at least two farms.
Zimbabwe’s courageous archbishop, Pius Ncube of Bulawayo, has even said a public prayer for a Ukrainian-style uprising to overthrow Africa’s lone reigning big dada.
Alas, the conditions of poverty, disease, and hunger are so severe that Zimbabweans may not have the strength to march in the streets even if they wanted to.
- From “Yes, Save Darfur! But What about Zimbabwe?” February 8, 2007.
In November 2005, long-suffering Zimbabweans seemed to have won a reprieve when the BBC reported that Mugabe had finally agreed to ease his iron-fisted rule, after realizing that doling out White farms as patronage to Black cronies – who had no experience (or interest) in farming – did not guarantee his political legacy…
Never mind the criminally negligent death by starvation of hundreds of thousands of his people that resulted from his seizure of White farms; or the rendering homeless of millions more after he bulldozed their homes pursuant to the ‘Operation-wipe-out-the-trash’ phase of his land reforms.
However, notwithstanding that BBC report (which also cited the prospect of Mugabe soliciting many of the 3,600 White farmers he evicted to return to their farms), I expressed doubts about his conversion – in “Mugabe Finally Admits That Starving His Own People Was a Mistake. No Shit,” November 7, 2005 – as follows:
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, feigning regret for the suffering they’ve inflicted on their own people has always served Africa’s big Dadas (despotic rulers) well when courting rich countries (like the United States during the Cold War, and China today).
Therefore, I was not at all surprised when the Washington Post reported this week (on February 5) that … Mugabe remains committed to keeping his country mired in the death throes of genocidal starvation:
Zimbabwe’s national security minister has told the country’s last remaining white farmers that they will be jailed if they refuse to abide by a deadline that passed over the weekend for them to leave their farms.
__________________
These excerpts should explain why I was so unmoved by a BBC report about Mugabe admitting that his farm policies have failed, abysmally:
Zimbabwe’s President Robert Mugabe has admitted failures in the country’s controversial land reform programme.
‘I think the farms we gave to people are too large. They can’t manage them,’ the 91-year-old leader said in unusually candid comments.
(BBC, February 27, 2015)
Too large?! No, Mr. Mugabe, the problem was giving farms (of any size) to people who clearly intended to use them for anything but farming. Not that anybody expected these congenitally selfish SOBs to farm, mind you. After all, it was too easy for them to buy their food on the black market, despite the threat of economic sanctions – just as corrupt ruling elites from Iran to North Korea had been doing for decades?
The poet George Eliot is credited with coining the maxim:
It’s never too late to be what you might’ve been.
She was wrong. Because, in Mugabe’s case, it’s much too late to be the Black liberator he might’ve been.
To be fair, though, far from being just another amoral ploy to elicit sympathy and extract financial aid, this might be Mugabe’s way of confessing his sins before he meets his maker. Indeed, at 91, chances are that the only things he hears loud and clear these days are the Grim Reaper’s footsteps drawing nigh.
Except that this is a man who based his nearly forty-year rule on blaming Western countries for executing neo-colonial policies, which he claimed not only undermined Zimbabwean independence, but starved millions of its people to boot. This, notwithstanding that those countries provided the only food millions of Zimbabweans got for many years, thanks to his confiscatory farm policies.
Therefore, to give himself the best possible chance of being escorted through the Pearly Gates, instead of the Gates of Hell, it behooves Mugabe to admit that demonizing the West for his catastrophic policies was also mistake.
Meanwhile, apropos of mistake, Mugabe seems intent on anointing his wife, Grace (49), as his successor. Granted, he would only be emulating the “democratic” precedent President Néstor Carlos Kirchner of Argentina set in 2007, when he effectively anointed his wife, Cristina Elisabet Fernández (62), as his.
Incidentally, Mugabe and Grace seemed to be tempting fate when they threw a 91st-birthday party for him last month that was truly worthy of King Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette.
For not since Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier and Michele threw the last of their notoriously lavish parties has a dictator displayed such galling and wanton contempt for his chronically impoverished people. (For what it’s worth, that Duvalier party in 1986 proved to be the final straw for his dictatorial rule.)
More to the point, though, nothing indicates how short his wife’s grace period would be quite like members of Mugabe’s own ruling ZANU-PF party already decrying her ambition and mocking his dotage. Not to mention the scramble for survival (or power) he set off recently when he:
… fired his deputy, Joice Mujuru, and seven government ministers, his cabinet secretary … in the latest twist in a power struggle over the choice of his successor.
The move took place days after Mugabe … publicly rebuked Mujuru, who was seen just months ago as the most likely to take his place when he dies or retires.
(Reuters, December 9, 2014)
Mugabe proffered the plainly spurious (if not paranoid) claim that his deputy and others were conspiring to overthrow and assassinate him.
But whispers dismissing him as just a doddering old fool doing his wife’s bidding have become so loud that he prevailed upon The Herald, his state-owned newspaper, to publish a report on Friday under the headline, “I’m still in charge,” which included this telltale sign that he’s not:
She is not the power behind my throne. She has come into politics in her own right.
Interestingly enough, this dying declaration (politically speaking) came on the heels of an incident, which not only saw Mugabe fall from grace, literally, but caused him to sow seeds of fateful resentment among the bodyguards who have protected him all these years:
[Twenty-seven] bodyguards of Zimbabwe’s President Robert Mugabe have been punished for failing to prevent him falling down the steps from a podium, in an incident that drew widespread mockery online
The 90-year-old dictator was captured on camera as he stumbled on a red carpet and fell to his knees after addressing supporters who gathered to welcome him back from a trip to Ethiopia at Harare airport last week.
(International Business Times, February 10, 2015)
Mugabe spent nearly forty years cultivating an image as an iron-fisted strongman. Yet the irony seems completely lost on him that this image — of a doddering old fool, trying desperately to anoint his trophy wife as his successor — is the lasting one Zimbabweans will have of him. What’s more, having declared his intent to be re-elected in 2018, when he’s 94, Mugabe will only reinforce this image by withering away in full public view.
NOTE: Nothing demonstrates what a statesman and class act Nelson Mandela was quite like juxtaposing his career and character with Robert Mugabe’s.
Related commentaries:
Zimbabweans pray for liberation…
Save Darfur…
Hail Mugabe … again…