According to Hilary Andersson, the BBC Africa Correspondent, President Robert Mugabe has "set up secret camps in which thousands of youths are taught how to torture and kill" opponents of the government.

The government insists the camps are job-training centres, but anyone who knows the history of Mugabe realises this is yet another bluff, a futile attempt to 'explain' the unexplainable.

According to the BBC Panorama programme, published this week, those who have escaped say these camps are "part of a brutal plan to keep Mugabe in power".

The programme is one of the few highlighting yet again the plight of many innocent Zimbabweans, most of whom have either died or have been displaced by Mugabe's terror campaign.

This wave of politically motivated violence is not new to Zimbabwe, and of course not untypical of its 'patron' Mugabe.

President Mugabe of Zimbabwe is leaving no stone unturned to make sure that he rules the country until 'the donkeys grow horns' as the African saying goes.

When I lived in Kenya in the mid 1990s I used to be told by friends that it was a treasonable offence to even imagine President Moi being corrupt or dictatorial. I used to laugh about this, but now I do not find it funny anymore, because this is the reality in Zimbabwe where it is suicidal for anyone to criticise Mugabe and his government.


In the 1980s Mugabe presided over the massacre of the Matebele people whom he accused of being 'pythons in chicken runs' simply because they dared to speak out against the government. A North Korea trained ruthless militia, then known as the 5th Brigade or Gukurahundi (the rains that washes away chaff) was unleashed on the region. Thousands of innocent people were maimed, killed or displaced.

In the late 1990s Mugabe experienced a new wave of dissenting voices that culminated in the formation of Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), a formidable opposition that he could not ignore. At the same time War Veterans from the War of Independence in the 1970s became restless, as long promised pension payouts had still not materialised. The president then paid them handsomely and in return used them to invade white owned farms on the pretext of land redistribution. Overnight this once venerated group of people evolved into yet another feared militia that ended up terrorising villagers and farmers. Ordinary people were intimidated into joining this new wave of political violence.

At about the same time Mugabe turned his razor sharp political bayonet towards anybody criticising his leadership. The demolition of the infrastructure upon which a democratic society is based, had started. There was a purge in the judiciary and the media. Independent journalists became ‘terrorists’, while human rights groups ‘enemies of the state’.

The moment of truth for Zimbabweans has come. The nation and the world at large will soon learn, and some of them have already done so, painfully, about how they created a monster leader. Hopelessly they realise that the land of milk and honey promised by Mugabe at independence is not to be.

Instead Mugabe's legacy will demand answers about the fragility of democracy and the naive character of the Zimbabwean people. The people whom he misled and deceived so easily in his climb to power, are now realising that the democratic process failed at the most critical time, when the rest of the world had started looking at Zimbabwe as a promising democracy and a role model for Africa.

Mugabe will leave behind a political legacy of sustained negativism that far transcends the damage to his own party, his people and the country. He will as well leave behind a political environment that smells of hate, shame and violent confusion.

In this atmosphere of political siege Mugabe has subverted the lofty image of the presidency using his office as the commanding post for waging war against political opponents with this new group of young recruits in the training camps.