Mugabe – hero turned despot:

Leader’s power threatened as tensions rise between his party and army

Harare: Zimbabwe’s veteran leader Robert Mugabe once quipped that he’d rule his country until he turned 100.

But, aged 93, his grip on power seems to be ebbing as tensions erupt between his loyal ZANU-PF party and the military that has helped keep him in office.

First heralded as a liberator who rid the former British colony Rhodesia of white minority rule, Robert Gabriel Mugabe was soon cast in the role of a despot who crushed political dissent and ruined the national economy.

The former political prisoner turned guerrilla leader swept to power in 1980 elections after a violent insurgency and economic sanctions forced the Rhodesian government to the negotiating table.

In office he initially won international plaudits for his declared policy of racial reconciliation and for extending improved education and health services to the black majority. But his lustre faded quickly. Mugabe took control of one wing in the guerrilla war for independence – the Zimbabwe African National Union and its armed forces – after his release from prison in 1974. It was the seizure of whiteowned farms nearly three decades later that would complete Mugabe’s transformation from darling of the West into international pariah – though his status as a liberation hero still resonates in many parts of Africa.

Aimed largely at placating angry war veterans who threatened to destabilise his rule, the land reform policy wrecked the crucial agricul- tural sector, caused foreign investors to flee and helped plunge the country into economic misery.

At the same time, critics say, Mugabe clung to power through increased repression of human rights and by rigging elections.

“He was a great leader whose leadership degenerated to a level where he really brought Zimbabwe to its knees,” said University of South Africa professor Shadrack Gutto.

Britain’s former foreign secretary Peter Carrington knew Mugabe well, having mediated the Lancaster House talks that paved the way for Zimbabwe’s independence.

“Mugabe wasn’t human at all,” Carrington told biographer Heidi Holland.

“There was a sort of reptilian quality about him. You could admire his skills and intellect ... but he was an awfully slippery sort of person.”

In the final decades of his rule, Mugabe has embraced his new role as the antagonist of the West.

He used blistering rhetoric to blame his country’s downward spiral on Western sanctions, though they were targeted personally at Mugabe and his henchmen rather than at Zimbabwe’s economy.

After decades in which the subject of succession was virtually taboo, a vicious struggle to take over after his death became apparent among the party elite as he reached his 90s and became visibly frail.

He had been rumoured for years to have prostate cancer, but according to the official account, his frequent trips to Singapore were related to his treatment for cataracts.

Mugabe’s second wife Grace – his former secretary who is 41 years his junior and has been seen as a potential successor – boasted that even in his 80s he would rise before dawn to work out. But in his later years, he has stumbled and fallen more than once and delivered the wrong speech at the opening of parliament last year. The First Lady has been viewed as a front-runner to succeed her husband after decades of his vice-like grip on power.

“His real obsession was not with personal wealth but with power,” said biographer Martin Meredith.

“Year after year Mugabe sustained his rule through violence and repression – crushing political opponents, violating the courts, trampling on property rights, suppressing the independent press and rigging elections.” — AFP