The writing's on the wall, Comrade Mugabe

Special to USAfricaonline.com

Robert Gabriel Mugabe, president of Zimbabwe, just doesn't get it. Where the trend in much of the world is to pluralise and devolve presidential powers, he comes along with a draft constitution that seeks, perversely, to widen his already sweeping powers so as to perpetuate his never-ending rule.

The stinging rejection of this constitution in a plebiscite last week was an unaccustomed slap in the face for this proud and increasingly neurotic leader. Whether it opens his ageing eyes, at last, to what Zimbabweans have come to think of him is the issue now. Let him not delude himself that the vote was all about some draft document. The referendum was implicitly a statement on his extended, 20-year rule.

Twenty years ago, Mugabe was a genuine African hero, the guerrilla idol who had vanquished Ian Smith and his white supremacist regime. Over time, he has turned into a paranoid, peevish autocrat whose standard answer to all those who can see he has lost his touch is to tell them to get lost.

The man has become quite grumpy lately &endash; even by his own cheerless standards. "I don't see any other party or government in this country for a long, long time," he announced to his countrymen last December in that matter-of-fact, take-it-or-leave-it tone that so infuriates his opponents. In the same month, as his country's economic woes worsened, he told the IMF to "shut up" and added that he saw no reason "why there should be a limit to government debt".

Give credit where its due: He does have a way with words, even when they grate. Indeed, his insults can be gems. Not too long ago he denounced foreign-owned banks &endash; Standard Chartered, Barclays and Stanbic &endash; as "the devil incarnate". A provincial party official who had offered that perhaps it was time the old man called it a day was sacked and accused of being a witch.

Britain, with which Mugabe has had many a run-in, has been dismissed by him as a "sheepish little power" while Tony Blair is "a small man". The put-down on Blair arose after British authorities ignored a scuffle the Zimbabwean leader got into with a number of noisyhomosexuals while on a London visit last year.

Mugabe's hatred for gays is deep and undisguised. But sometimes uncompromising positions can come up against implacable ironies. A few years ago, Canaan Banana, Zimbabwe's first (non-executive) president, whom Mugabe had propped up, was exposed as a predatory homosexual, to the latter's acute embarrassment.

To be sure, Mugabe is not your conventional despot. He is not particularly bloodthirsty, though the atrocities committed by his North Korean-trained Fifth Brigade in Matabeleland in the early 1980s left a permanent blot on his legacy. Neither is he your typical peasant-made-good who once too often betrays just how far he has come.And he is certainly nobody's idiot.

His problem, however, is no less disquieting. He is intolerant and vain. He thinks he knows it all. Those who disgaree with him are targeted with abuse and ridicule. He imagines he is God's very own gift to Zimbabwe probably to Africa as well. And he believes it is his destiny to rule Zimbabwe forever. That is what makes him unpleasant.

There is another unfortunate habit of the Zimbabwean leader: He travels far too much. There are very few places on this globe that he has not visited during his two decades in power. Last year alone, he flew to some 30 different countries, prompting many people to wonder whether good old Robert would rather be employed by Zimbabwe as its foreign minister or roving ambassador.

Some suspect all the globe-trotting is a reaction to the long years of confinement he spent in Ian Smith's jails. Whatever it is, this excessively nomadic instinct has provoked his countrymen to nickname him Vasco da Gama, after the itinerant 15th century Portuguese seafarer.

A few years ago, Mugabe married his ex-secretary, the striking and fashion-loving Grace Marufu, following the death of his long-time Ghanaian-born wife, Sally, a formidable freedom fighter in her own right who unfortunately was unable to bear him a child. The nuptials with Marufu were barely over before the couple embarked on an expansive foreign tour, prompting one of the President's critics to quip that a besotted Mugabe had gazed lovingly into his young bride's eyes and panted: "Come, let me show you Rome."

One can sympathise with Mugabe's frustration with the freak situation where 40 per cent of Zimbabwe's arable farmland is controlled by the country's tiny but rich white minority, which forms less than one per cent of the country's 12 million people. He is quite right to be vexed by the huge and uncomfortable disparities in wealth, which happen to be neatly delineated by race.

But the way he has taken to railing at whites on everything under the sun hardly helps matters. It even hurts his own case, especially with Zimbabwe's donors. Worse, by personalising matters so much with the white minority, he keeps reminding some of us of the twisted vitriol that we continually hear in Kenya against such-and-such a perodically unwanted community.

He has insisted on prosecuting an unpopular war in the Congo in support of, of all people, the buffoonish Laurent Kabila. It is rumoured that there is a diamond deal in it for him, but no less an impulse behind this expensive adventure is an over-developed ego.

Mugabe has certainly come a long way from the ascetic, Marxist-Leninist devotee of the liberation struggle, a man who used his time in Smith's jails to acquire a long list of degrees, and whose only surprising indulgence was that he was an avid fan of Elvis Presley. The transformation has brought forth a run-of-the-mill African potentate who has an embarrassing weakness for luxury, the good life and endless jet travel.

The problem with Mugabe is that he has yet to wake up to the realisation that it is time for him to go. That is the message which Zimbabweans were giving him last week with their "No" vote. They are simply heartily tired of him. It would be a great pity that somebody who started off so well could end up looking like those petty dictators who have simply refused to grasp that their time is up.

Last week's misfortune for Mugabe should also offer us Kenyans another lesson: Don't cobble together some document in non-inclusive, closed-door committees, call it a constitution and imagine Kenyans are going to embrace it, much less its author(s).
This commentary appeared as the editorial position of the Daily Nation of Kenya on Sunday, February 20, 2000.

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