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Our team must look behind Mad Bob's mask
Jacob Dlamini, Business Day (SA)
August 16, 2005

http://www.businessday.co.za/articles/topstories.aspx?ID=BD4A80174

THE trouble with Robert Mugabe is that he lends himself quite easily to caricature.

Call the man a bigot and he will confirm that by labelling gay people dogs; accuse him of sexism and he will give you the evidence you need by calling Margaret Thatcher a "she-man"; say he is a xenophobe and he will oblige you by saying Zimbabweans are better than their fellow African comrades because they are better educated and Zimbabwe better developed than the average sub-Saharan country, excepting SA.

But that is not to say the man is mad and that President Thabo Mbeki should deal with him the same way he would a madman.

It is also not to say that Mugabe’s only problem is that he lends himself rather easily to caricature by the media. His problems are far, far bigger than that and almost all of them are of his own doing.

This is, after all, a man who would much rather destroy his country than give up power. This is a man who has callously presided over the total collapse of Zimbabwe’s agriculture and economy, which once made that beautiful but haunted country the breadbasket of southern Africa and the second-biggest economy in the region.

Mugabe is also the one to blame for undoing the gains of 25 years of independence, driving Zimbabwe’s middle class into exile and turning millions of relatively well-educated young Zimbabweans into waiters and hawkers in SA. But he is not mad.

Mugabe has shown that he is also not averse to turning on his people for daring to be ungrateful to him for delivering them from colonial evil. He has used the army and the police to crush those who dare to remind him and the world of the promise of independence. But he’s not crazy.

Which is why Mbeki cannot deal with Mugabe as he would a shack lord who tries to turn, say, a squatter camp on the outskirts of Johannesburg into his personal fiefdom. This is not to say that every shack lord (and there are many of them in this country) who runs a squatter camp is a madman. But one can at least treat him as a law-and-order problem, something we cannot do with Zimbabwe.

Yes, Mugabe has presided over the destruction of what used to be one of the best police forces and civil services in Africa. Under him, the Zimbabwean police, for example, have moved from being incorruptible to being a gang of thugs at the beck and call of the ruling Zanu (PF).

The same Zanu (PF) that, 25 years after assuming power, has yet to transform itself into a democratic political party and not a commandist guerilla force masquerading as a political party. The same party that has yet to groom a successor to Mugabe and that is incapable of political innovation and much-needed ideological evolution.

But that is not to say that Zanu (PF) is one big mental asylum filled with mad men and women. It might look like that from a distance, and its leaders might do things that make no obvious sense to us. But that does not mean they are mad.

Behind the caricature that is Mad Bob is a wily politician with an ego to match.

When Mbeki sits down with Mugabe to talk, he knows enough to look beyond the caricature and to take head-on the wily old man with a big but dented ego. We might not like this, but, hey, we do not do the negotiating with Mugabe for this country — our president and his officials do.

And negotiate is exactly what they do. Not with idiots, not with madmen and madwomen, but with neighbours and potential political adversaries with egos to be stroked. Yes, we have the cash they need to get out of a jam created largely by Mugabe. But we will not get the things we want by reminding the Zimbabweans what a sorry lot they are.

We certainly have it in us to play big brother, but what will that profit us? We have it in us to stop Mugabe from using our private hospitals because he has destroyed Zimbabwe’s health-care system. But what good will such spiteful conduct on our part do for poor Zimbabweans?

SA will, let us be sure about that, give Zimbabwe the financial assistance that country needs. We will also insist on constitutional and economic reforms in return for our help. After all, we don’t want to aid Zimbabwe today only to find ourselves in the same mess the following day.

But getting Zimbabwe to accept our conditions will require of us and our negotiators to move beyond the caricatures that have come to define Mugabe and his officials in the local and British media. We may not like the Zimbabwean men and women we have to deal with, but that does not mean they are mad. Neither is Mugabe. He is just hopeless, venal and, possibly, criminal.

*Dlamini is political editor.

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