By Manasseh Crimson Tazvinzwa:
A journalist based in London
Email: crimsontaz@hotmail.com

Few men have dominated Zimbabwean politics with so much controversy as did Robert Mugabe for almost two decades and still seems far from giving up.

Yet strangely, few people really understand him. Least of all the world media, and even fewer really understand this controversial insulated man.

Mugabe resents the world media with a vengeance, and bashes the local independent journalists with the zeal of a runaway horse. The man sees the media as an institution to be used for indoctrination, pumping his racist ideology into the minds of poor rural people whose only access to information is state owned and controlled radio broadcasts. Public opinion in the rural areas is also shaped by chiefs and village-headmen, which are so powerful traditional leaders on generous state salary.

The media experience Mugabe as a cross to carry all the way, a control freak, a man worried more about holding onto power than to truth and the well being of the nation.

Mugabe made it clear to the world that he is not ready to go. He was quoted last year suggesting that he will only leave office when it suits him.
He said: “I know the way I came to power and I know the way I should leave. I will leave office the Mugabe way.”

He said he would not be able to live with his conscience if he leaves office at this stage when ZANU (PF), his party is in such bad shape. Simon Muzenda, one of his two vices said: “ We shall rule until the donkeys grow horns. We shall answer to God, to history and to our conscience for the way in which we have used these years.”

But Mugabe does not have the eloquence of the other Mugabe, or the purity of evil purpose, that so far has brought the country to its knees. It would be a shame for anyone not to notice that this man is confused. William Shakespeare created a character he called Macbeth, who today personifies Mugabe as he listens to the witches’ prophesies and found comfort in their riddles.

Mugabe like Macbeth is that brave man facing his peril but doomed by his blindness to it.
Shakespeare wrote the case;

“He shall spurn fate, scorn death,
and bear;
His hopes ‘hove wisdom, grace
and fear;
And, you all know, security
Is mortal’s chiefest enemy.”

For Mugabe, the fate security is the land issue that he has always used as a trump card each time he goes for elections and this time he has gone too far and ignored all conventional wisdom and set the war veterans onto helpless white commercial farmers. Most farmers have now fled the country, others have been killed and still a big number waiting in vain, hoping that one day things will change for the better.

Shakespeare goes on to say that while destiny closed on the King, his tragedy was enriched by the cast of minor characters around him who some of them have begun to fall.

Chenjerai Hunzvi, Chairman of the War Veterans Association, died late last year after a “long illness”, a common description for AIDS in Zimbabwe. Hunzvi led war veterans into farm invasions and the killing of several white commercial farmers. Moven Mahachi died in a car crash last year. He was the minister of Defence who led the Zimbabwean army into the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). Then there is Border Gezi who was the minister for Youths, Development and Gender. Gezi vowed that his ministry would not employ anyone suspected of being sympathetic to the opposition. Gezi was also a leading campaigner for farm invasions. He also died in car crash last year.

Today we still have quite a number of the president’s men; Jonathan Moyo, the arrogant minister of Information, the comic mouthpiece of Mugabe who occasionally gets confused himself about which was the truth and which was a lie. Then there is Munangagwa, Speaker of parliament, and was the former minister of Justice. He is tipped to take over from Mugabe. The other one is Joseph Chinotimba, the newly self-styled leader of the war veterans who used to work as casual worker for the city council. Chinotimba is well known for terrorising white farmers and presiding over farm invasions. Joseph Made is the minister of Agriculture, a racist by vengeance.

These are slick and cynical men going for a share of authority and crudely manipulate presidential words and gestures like the facile scorpion whose poison seemed to serve the president only to sting him. When the president needs help they are the men who gather around him, sometimes stumbling on each other, tripping over each other, whom each in his own way help undo him. There are components of an arrogant cabinet coterie that pose as a total aberration of a political barnacle that attached itself to the party along the way.
They can further be described as an arrogant, elite guard of political adolescents that tarnished the image of a nation with their blind stupidity.

The real enemies to Mugabe it seems are not ordinary Zimbabweans, most of whom did not vote for him, neither are they Movement for Democratic Change, nor the independent press, but they are all around him, a coterie of ‘presidential men’, confused as they are – most of them.

This is a tale of small men who did not belong in high places, who perhaps knew deep in their hearts that they did not belong, and wanted desperately to prove that their secret insecurities were wrong.

Anyway for now, that moment of truth for the nation itself, the audience will soon learn, and some of them have already done so, painfully, about their leader, and thus about themselves. How hopeless the situation becomes, and that the “land of milk and honey” Mugabe promised at independence is not to be.
Instead the Mugabe legacy will leave to demand serious answers about democracy and the character of the Zimbabwean people. The people that were misled and deceived in his climb to power, whose democratic process was made to fail at the most critical level, when they were supposed to vote peacefully.

What do we really know about the leaders that we choose? What do we truly know about ourselves when we choose these leaders, I mean, are we insulated enough against coercion and manipulation? Our free from ourselves as well to choose leaders that stand for what we believe in as a people or a country? The leaders that become patrons of human rights, the rule of law and all that bring inner sense of security to everyone regardless of their colour or political affiliation.

It is clear though, that Mugabe will leave behind a political legacy of sustained negativism that far transcends the damage to his own party, his people and the country that used to be the breadbasket for Southern Africa. He will as well leave behind a politics that smells of hate, shame and violent confusion.

By indulging in abuse of power, and by tolerating or encouraging it in his subordinates, especially war veterans, he raised to an unprecedented level public disenchantment toward government officials.

Also in his partisanship and the atmosphere of political siege he sees around him, he subverted the lofty image of the presidency using his office as the commanding post for waging war against political opponents, and another against those that have been most productive to the economy, the farmers.

Today the president is less often heard as a voice of persuasion than a voice of accusation or intimidation.

Politics has always been described as the art of the possible, and his rise to power, Mugabe has almost always been lauded as the master of that art. Yet there is seldom in his presidency the essential quality of compromise, that moral value of achieving the possible. He is a fiercely give no quarter politician driven by failure not to accommodate but to isolate and divide excessively his enemies.

The essence of freedom is that each one of us shares an equal right in the shaping of the nation’s destiny.

Mugabe assumed the leadership with something else that few Zimbabweans knew at the time: a private, compelling drive for greatness, a determination to stand in world history as one of the boldest, most imaginative, most successful African leaders, who overcame the odds of lower middle class origin, lack of family wealth or social status, in Zvimba, his rural home.

Some of the people see him as aloof, a man with an inner sense of loneliness, secretiveness, an apartness in conducting affairs of the state.

Apparently the president has exacted the tragic lot to bring the government to its lowest level of public esteem.