Happenings under African skies
and white.
Old Bob was a far-sighted man who prided himself on being a modern-day Calvin Coolidge, the former US president who ran the US, and much of the world, into the Great Depression in the 1920s.
But Cal “Tight” Coolidge was a frugal, even parsimonious man who shuddered at the thought of spending any money on himself or on reflating the nation.
He thought he would rather have a hole in his head, a sentiment that the electorate heartily reciprocated by voting him out of House and office.
Old Bob thought that was Cal’s mistake: he knew it was better to live rich than to die rich.
He understood the Golden Rule all too well: those who have the gold, rule.
He had deep insight because he also knew that you couldn’t have too much of a good thing.
That was why his refrigerators were generally stocked with the choicest French cheeses, Chilean wines, Beluga caviar, Iranian artichokes, Pakistani mangoes and Parma hams that his larder was always rated by Michelin.
“It’s not easy being a leader,” he once confessed sadly to a newspaper. “But you eat better.”
Above prosperity line
It was that kind of insightful thought that endeared him to the 2% of his countrymen living above the prosperity line.
There were two distinct phases in the country’s economic history: pre-Bob and post-Bob. In the former phase, the Zimbabwean dollar was the strongest currency in Africa. In the latter phase, the results were decidedly mixed: on the one hand, everyone was a multi-millionaire but, on the other hand, everyone was also broke.
Even old Bob knew about inflation. It was, he declared with his usual verve, “the 100-million Zim dollar haircut for the 10-dollar haircut I used to get for five dollars when I had hair”.
But even his countrymen agreed that he had taste. His clothes were stylishly cut, his shoes, gleaming and his women, young. He had married a former beauty queen 40 years his junior because of principle: he wouldn’t be caught dead marrying a woman old enough to be his wife.
Grace “Gucci” Mugabe was a strong-willed and humane woman who believed firmly in the inalienable right of fashion designers to make money.
Gucci had even contemplated putting up a statue of her outside their Harare branch.
She was also temperamental. Offended once by a wife of a Minister, she had snapped “Never darken my Dior again”.
But she was also practical and had, for example, strong views about style. She spent money as if it were going out of style.
When packing for vacations, she always took half the required clothes but twice the necessary money because she knew a lady could never be too careful.
It is unclear what happened to old Bob. But it is something of an irony that it was the army that proved his undoing. He had treated the army generously so that it would be loyal.
Because he‘d long ago realised that whoever who said that the pen was mightier than the sword had obviously never encountered automatic weapons.