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Inside the mind of a dictator
Chenjerai Hove
February 27, 2007

http://www.mg.co.za/articlePage.aspx?articleid=300329&area=/insight/insight__comment_and_analysis/

The man shuns the beautiful landscapes, the winding rivers that pour down magical gorges and the glossy inland lakes of his own country and goes to Malaysia on holiday. He addresses villagers in complicated English and keeps himself away from any personal contact with his people. Though an avowed “democrat”, he hates elections, and loves the British monarchy. Among his close friends he has counted East Germany’s Honecker, Romania’s Ceausescu, Malawi’s Banda, Pakistan’s Al-Haq, Yugoslavia’s Tito, India’s (Indira) Gandhi and, secretly, Chile’s Pinochet.

Mugabe’s most cherished friend was North Korean’s Kim Il Sung, who would train the army’s Fifth Brigade that later massacred over 20 000 villagers in the western provinces of the country. Mengistu Haile Mariam, the former Ethiopian dictator, still hides under Mugabe’s wings in Harare, after being sentenced to life in prison for crimes against humanity in his homeland.

Such is the man called Robert Mugabe (83), Zimbabwe’s self-anointed life president, wielding absolute power for the past 27 years. A man Zimbabweans nicknamed Marco Polo, then Vasco da Gama, and then “the visiting president” (for visiting his country every now and then). He loves to travel, with a large retinue entourage of advisers and hangers-on.

In my travels in Africa and beyond, I have met diaspora Africans who hold Mugabe in high esteem. They are prepared to verbally die for him as the African hero of a new, reinvigorated pan-Africanism. If ever you dare ask them: “What pan-Africanism?” their response is: Mugabe has the courage to single-handedly tackle “imperialists” George Bush and Tony Blair. Little do they realise the man loves London as much as he fears to walk the streets of his own country. “The city in which I can walk freely is London,” he once said.

For most Africans, African heroism is simple: take over white-owned land and companies, and you are a true African. Mugabe prides himself on that, even though he knows the farms grabbed from both white and black farmers have become bushland. The citizens now depend on donations of food, medicines and other basic necessities, including sanitary pads for women.

More than three million Zim­babweans have left the country in political and economic protest. “They can go,” one of Mugabe’s senior ministers once roared. “We are prepared to remain only with those who support us.” Mugabe rewarded the man with not one, but two ministries (security and land distribution).

Many of Mugabe’s old acquaintances have described him as “a loner” and sadistic recluse, a leader who never mingles or chats amicably with his ministers. One former minister confessed that he had a personal discussion with Mugabe only once in the five years he was in the president’s inner Cabinet.

“Who are your personal friends in the country?” a journalist once ventured to ask Mugabe on the occasion of his birthday years ago. He answered promptly: “I have no friends in this country.” And on being asked what mistakes he might have made in running the country, Mugabe was clear: “None at all.”

He does not care if citizens emigrate, bleeding away the skills so essential for economic and social development. There is hardly a South African organisation without several Zim­babwean doctors and nurses employees. The Botswana education system is virtually run by teachers forced out of Zimbabwe by Mugabe’s policies. Namibia, too, has a new flood of Zimbabwean professionals.

For sport, Mugabe enjoys the game of cricket, not football, which is loved by millions of Zimbabweans. Whenever he demeans himself by going to watch a football match, one knows there is some kind of election around the corner. But if he comes to the match wearing a T-shirt and a cap, then there is definitely some kind of presidential “election” about to happen.

During elections, one never hears Mugabe utter a word of persuasion to the electorate. His election message is clear: if you don’t vote for me, there will be war! Mugabe’s favourite expression is: “We will crush them.” He never speaks of “critics” or “the opposition”. They are all “enemies”, “British and American puppets”, “traitors” and “imperialist agents”.

Throughout his 27 years of ruthless rule, he has thrived on violence in the face of serious opposition. Mugabe believes he has the “right”, not the “privilege”, to rule.

I liberated you, so I have the right to rule you in whatever manner I want, seems to be his logic.

One of Mugabe’s obsessions is “sovereignty”. Any international organisations that criticise his human rights record are threatening Zimbabwe’s “sovereignty” and “independence.” In this age of global networks, Mugabe thinks he should be left alone to do whatever he wants with the citizens of his country, including torturing, starving and killing them, without anyone raising a finger.

While the country decays under the yoke of economic mismanagement and stinks of corruption, the Zimbabwean ruler dares to tell the nation that if they lack the staple food, maize, they should eat rice and potatoes instead.

“They have bad eating habits,” he said recently. In a country which does not produce a single grain of rice, the people are supposed to eat rice. As for potatoes, one has to traverse the entire country to find a single potato farm big enough to feed even one township for a year, let alone the entire nation.

Burdened with a massive inflation rate of 1 600%, the highest in the world, the Zimbabwean president dares to say the economy is healthy. Unemployment is higher than 80%, food is scarce and fuel never seems to flow Zimbabwe’s way. Still, the flowery annual State of the Nation address is a description of dreamland.

Mugabe is some kind of pan-Africanist, a strange one. He takes away land from whites and gives it to his friends, both black and white. His white friends have special privileges. They can own vast tracts of land without anyone being permitted to raise an eyebrow.

The slogan for farm grabbing was: “Land is the economy, the economy is the land.” “Text book” economists try to ask him: “Since when has an idle piece of land been the economy?” But the ruler is deaf with arrogance. In the name of “practical economics”, whenever his army and police demand salary increases, he orders the central bank to print more money on cheap paper.

During the time of Africa’s political struggles for independence, Kwame Nkrumah, the Ghanaian politician, used to say: “Seek ye the political kingdom first, and the rest will follow.” And he had followers. Mugabe says: “Get ye the land kingdom first, and the rest will follow.” Thus the blind nationalism and slogans have led to the destruction of commercial agriculture in a country that used to feed itself and its neighbours. So far, Zimbabwe’s political kingdom seems to rubbish everything it touches.

Zimbabwe is run through a series of military-style “operations”. In order to demolish poor people’s houses and informal residences, Operation Murambatsvina (Reject Filth) was launched by police and the army in 2005. Close to a million citizens were rendered homeless in weeks.

Then came Operation Maguta (Eat Well), in which soldiers took over farms and tried to farm without any farming skills or experience. The small amount of wheat that was farmed rotted in the fields for lack of machinery to harvest it.

There are so many operations in the country that it is necessary to check the news to see which one is being enforced on any given day.

The latest one might as well be called Operation Nyararai (Silence the Critics). Critics of the president are having their passports, and possibly citizenship, withdrawn without notice. According to this new “pan-Africanism”, any Zimbabwean with a parent of foreign origin does not qualify to be a citizen.

In a wounded country like Zim­babwe, the ordinary people are made to feed on illusions of freedom and a better tomorrow, while today is a vast prison. The destruction has taken seven years, but the rebuilding will take decades. How does one reconstruct all those broken souls and hearts, all those visible and hidden scars of political victims scattered in mass graves all over the land?

Africa seems doomed to have a group of leaders whose vision does not extend beyond their own lifespan. The life of the country becomes the life of the octogenarian leader, and so he is prepared to sink with it as he ages.

Mugabe’s loss of his grasp on reality is based on decades of seclusion from Zimbabwean life. From the enclosure of voluntary exile in Ghana, he returned and went into the enclosure of prison for 10 years. On his release, he escaped to the seclusion of Mozambique before returning to another prison -- a vast motorcade from which he sees only the citizens and the streets through tinted glass.

Mugabe, the only pan-Africanist who hates Africans, continues to ruin the country as the continent looks on in silence under the ominous illusion of a new “African brotherhood”.

*Chenjerai Hove is a Zimbabwean writer living in Norway.

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