Robert Mugabe won’t go 01/08/2013t By Jon Lee Anderson: Early returns are showing that Zimbabwe’s election on Wednesday, the country’s seventh since it gained its independence, in 1980, has once again conferred the glory of victory onto Robert Mugabe, who is now eighty-nine years old. Even before the polls closed, Mugabe’s political opponents were claiming that there had been widespread vote rigging, including the disenfranchisement of up to a million voters. On Thursday, Morgan Tsvangirai, Mugabe’s comparatively youthful rival (he is sixty-one), called the election “a huge farce.”Mugabe pressa at State 01 Mugabe, who has led Zimbabwe for thirty-three years, seems determined to die in office. Indeed, few politicians in modern times have been as willfully enduring or as spitefully determined to hang around, wraithlike, as Mugabe. (A notable exception is Fidel Castro, though even did step down, in 2008, after forty-nine years in power.) Earlier this week, Mugabe, the Emperor Palpatine of African politics, gave a press conference in Harare, flanked by stuffed lions and cheetahs, in which he promised to “surrender” if he lost the election. But, when speaking to Lydia Polgreen, of the Times, he scoffed about his age being a political liability: “The 89 years don’t mean anything. They haven’t changed me, have they? They haven’t withered me, they haven’t made me senile yet, no. I still have idea, ideas that need to be accepted by my people.” Mugabe’s track record, even more than his poisonous narcissism, belies the conviction that he alone deserves to rule his birthplace. In the course of his long and twisting career, Mugabe has repeatedly bedeviled his critics and outsmarted his foes, apparently for the sole purpose of continuing to govern. Age has added an edge of foolish decorousness, especially since the death of his wife of three decades, Sally Hayfron, in 1992, and his remarriage four years later, at the age of seventy-one, to his secretary, Grace, forty-one years his junior. In 2005, he and Grace moved into a twenty-five-bedroom mansion that they had built with funds of unknown origin. Grace built another mansion, called Graceland, which was later sold to the Libyan government, at the time run by Muammar Qaddafi. Mugabe himself allowed that some “foreign governments” had contributed to his lavish lifestyle; the word around Harare was that Chinese money was involved. China made lucrative inroads into Zimbabwe in the wake of Mugabe’s decision, in 2000, to “empower” the country’s landless black majority by violently divesting the country’s white farmers of their land (at the time, they were the backbone of the country’s thriving agricultural economy). The poor were not the ones who benefitted from this action. Rather, the campaign resulted in numerous deaths, and it was followed by the collapse of the economy. The Zimbabwean currency became worthless, and hyperinflation reached two hundred and thirty million per cent before the government stopped counting and hastily printed trillions of Zimbabwean dollars. Eventually, the currency was scrapped in favor of the U.S. dollar. In a wholesale exodus, millions of poor Zimbabweans left, looking for work in neighboring countries. In June, 2008, while reporting for The New Yorker, I drove five hundred miles through once-fertile farmlands—they were barren and overgrown, and, in one area, poor peasants were chopping down citrus orchards for firewood. While all of this was going on, Mugabe made private deals with foreign entrepreneurs, including mining companies, which promptly moved onto the commandeered land. I drove through one such operation, where a couple dozen Zimbabwean laborers were building a worker’s camp supervised by several Chinese men. They had brought in mining equipment and were setting off explosions in nearby hills. During the following two years, neighboring farmers sent me photos they had taken of the rapidly expanding operation. By the end, it was huge. The economics can’t be explained in the bookkeeping; there have been steady reports of bribes and kickbacks to those in Mugabe’s circle. Many of the apparent beneficiaries are members of the security forces, who kept some of the best farms for themselves. A missionary-educated carpenter’s son who went on to earn as many as seven university degrees (several of them by correspondence), Mugabe was radicalized in Nkrumah’s Ghana and then returned to his birthplace, at the time a British colony called Southern Rhodesia, and joined the early independence struggle against the white-minority rule. Having honed his talent for oratory, Mugabe became the head of the clandestine ZANU-P.F., (Zimbabwean African National Union—Patriotic Front), but in 1964 he was arrested and imprisoned on subversion charges, and he spent the next eleven years in prison. He emerged to lead ZANU-P.F. through the country’s bloody independence war, in the nineteen-seventies, and the negotiations, brokered by the British, that ended white-minority rule. He came to power in 1980, as the country’s first black leader. But despite an initial appearance of moderation—his gestures included allowing whites to keep their land and welcoming others to come and invest—Mugabe proved to be no Nelson Mandela. First, Mugabe went about consolidating power by finishing off his erstwhile revolutionary partners in ZAPU, a rebel faction led by Joshua Nkomo. Just as ZANU was dominated by Mugabe’s ethnic group, the Shona, Nkomo’s ZAPU represented the southern, Zulu-speaking Ndebele. By 1986, up to twenty thousand Ndebele had been killed in Mugabe’s purge, in which he made use of North Korean military advisors. In the take-it-or-leave-it reconciliation agreement that followed, Nkomo agreed to merge his ZAPU with Mugabe’s ZANU, and to become Mugabe’s vice-president, a title without real power which he retained until his death, in 1999. The way that Mugabe dealt with Nkomo was a bloody foreshadowing of the game of ruthless co-option he would use in 2008 against Morgan Tsvangirai, of the Movement for Democratic Coöperation (or M.D.C.). Tsvangirai had lost an earlier election to Mugabe, but March, 2008, he won the first round, with forty-seven per cent of the votes cast, to Mugabe’s forty-two per cent. In retaliation, Mugabe unleashed armed gangs, terrorizing Tsvangirai’s supporters, who were raped, hacked, beaten, and shot. Over two hundred people died. In the end, Tsvangirai went into hiding. In the second round of voting, held in June, Mugabe was unopposed, and he won handily. By September, however, Tsvangirai had been lured into talks with Mugabe by the prospect of a power-sharing agreement. During the negotiations, Tsvangirai told me, in frustration, “I am trying to get a good deal from a bad man.” Not long afterward, like Nkomo before him, Tsvangirai succumbed, and he took up the post, as well as the empty perks, of Prime Minister. And so it goes. During the past five years, Tsvangirai and many of his M.D.C. officials—once opposition underdogs, now part of Mugabe’s government—have been seen by their countrymen to be enjoying the trappings of power and privilege. Whether or they have genuinely lost at the polls or merely allowed themselves to be outfoxed, the results are the same—Robert Mugabe, President-for-life. The losers, as always, are the ordinary Zimbabweans, who deserve a leader better than a man who has inflicted himself upon his countrymen for far too long, and who clearly lost any connection between his ego and his conscience a long time ago.
Posted on: Thu, 01 Aug 2013 20:17:58 +0000
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