Mugabe resigns: how the mighty are fallen
Robert Mugabe is gone. The man the news media called “the world’s longest serving dictator” resigned this week, thus heading off both impeachment and forcible removal from office by Zimbabwe’s army.
My first thought: “How the mighty are fallen.” The quotation seems oddly apt. The legendary Hebrew King David uttered those words as a lament for the death of a man who had once been his closest friend, and then became his adversary.
King David and Robert Mugabe have more in common than you might think.
Both started as rebels. Today they’d be called traitors, or terrorists. Both started with enormous promise. Both initially led their nations to success. Both had extra-marital affairs with a younger woman.
And both overstayed their welcome. Both ended up weak, feeble, incompetent. In one of his final public appearances, 93-year-old Mugabe needed help finding the right page in his speech.
It’s worth remembering that all leaders of the new independent nations of South and Central Africa were once considered terrorists. Jomo Kenyatta in Kenya headed the notorious Mau Mau. Samora Machel led the Frelimo in a 10-year war against Portugal in Mozambique. Namibia attained independence only after a 23-year war; Angola, after 25 years.
Kenneth Kaunda of Zambia and Hastings Kamuzu Banda of Malawi were both jailed for terrorist activites, although neither actually led armed insurrection. As everyone knows, Nelson Mandela spent 27 years in a South African prison.
Mugabe earned his stripes in this elite with eight years in prison.
Some emerging African leaders were, uncharitably, thugs. By contrast, Mugabe came to power as a bright shining hope. He was well educated. He had seven -- yes, seven! -- legitimately earned university degrees. He understood politics, administration, and economics.
For a while, he seemed to be fulfilling that promise. Rhodesia, formerly Southern Rhodesia, had been Britain’s most prosperous African colony. After Mugabe took over as prime minister in 1980, the new nation of Zimbabwe continued to prosper. For a while. Over the next 20 years, the number of secondary schools increased ten times, from 177 to 1548, Literacy rose to 82 per cent. Childhood immunization reached 92 per cent.
But in the 1990s, the economy began crashing. Some blame the International Monetary Fund’s austerity policies. Some blame Mugabe’s own repressive rule. When a delegation of Roman Catholic priests documented lists of military atrocities, Mugabe dismissed their allegations as unpatriotic falsehoods.
By 2000, life expectancies, wages, and employment had all fallen lower than when Mugabe took over. Unemployment surpassed 50 per cent. The country’s GDP shrank to half its former levels. Zimbabwe set world records for inflation, reaching an unimaginable 100,000 per cent per year by 2009. Three quarters of the population relied on food aid.
Violence flared. White citizens lived in fear. White farms were torched, cattle killed, businesses vandalized. About four million, white and black, fled the country.
In Botswana, I talked with a woman too young to remember Zimbabwe before Mugabe. “We dared not drive with open car windows,” she said. “If garbage wasn’t thrown in, they’d reach in and grab us.”
She said they lived in gated communities, behind walls topped with razor wire. “We never opened the gates if there was a car behind us,” she told me. “The robbers would ram through before the gates could close.”
Was she prejudiced? Probably. Was she being honest? Probably.
One incident encapsulates, for me, Zimbabwe’s long downhill slide. After a scheduling foul-up, our flight landed at the Victoria Falls International Airport in Zimbabwe.
Every other airport had computers. Zimbabwe still used carbon paper.
The first line inched forward to pick up visa application forms. We filled out the forms. Took them into a second line. Where an immigration officer sitting next to the first officer examined the pages, took our money, wrote out individual receipts by hand, copied our data by hand onto a certificate which he inserted into our passports, and stamped each piece of paper. Twice. With rubber stamps. We moved to a third line, where a third officer, sitting beside to the other two, diligently checked our receipts, stamped our papers once more, and waved us through. The process took over two hours. I know it’s not fair to judge an entire country by a single example of bureaucratic inefficiency — even if it was at the entry point for Zimbabwe’s biggest tourist destination. But that incident sticks in my mind as a metaphor for 37 years of Robert Mugabe’s rule.
Mugabe is now relegated to Zimbabwe’s past. May its future be brighter.
Jim Taylor is an Okanagan Centre author and freelance journalist. His column appears Saturdays. He can be reached at: rewrite@shaw.ca