The man who murdered his country
Robert Mugabe wanted to rule at any cost, writes Christina Lamb, the reporter who exposed many of his crimes.
Such a large part of my life was taken up by Robert Mugabe that I could measure his most repressive and destructive years by the age of my son. I was five months pregnant in May 1999 when I flew to Zimbabwe to interview Morgan Tsvangirai, the union leader then heading the recently formed Movement for Democratic Change, the first real opposition to Mugabe.
We met in Tsvangirai’s 10thfloor office in Harare where, not long before, Mugabe’s thugs had tried to throw him from the window. I was shocked by that: he was shocked that I was travelling while pregnant.
‘‘How’s the baby?’’ he would always ask whenever I interviewed him after his party
had lost another rigged election, or he and his members had again been beaten and tortured. ‘‘Morgan, that baby is now 18,’’ I said on the last occasion, two years ago. ‘‘That’s how long your struggle has been going on.’’
Tsvangirai died on Valentine’s Day last year. Mugabe had outlasted him, even if no longer in power. And, it is fair to say, he always outwitted him.
The first time I fully realised that Mugabe did not care what he did to his people to stay in power was in May 2005. I had driven in from Botswana to see plumes of smoke and lines of bedraggled people clutching a few possessions. They looked like refugees from war.
This was Operation Murambatsvina, literally ‘‘clear the filth’’. Mugabe was demolishing townships because they had voted against him.
I was so shocked that I ignored the fact I was in the country illegally (I had been declared an ‘‘enemy of the state’’) and drove to the nearest township, clutching a Lonely Planet guide in a pathetic attempt to look like a tourist.
I could not believe what I was seeing. Police and thugs with bulldozers and axes were smashing homes, shops and beauty salons as stunned residents sat on the roadside; 700,000 people lost their homes. At one point I saw police ask a man to help destroy his own house because it was taking too long.
When people ask which of my assignments have given me the most nightmares, they are surprised when I reply Zimbabwe. Surely, they say, the worst places must be war zones – Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria? Or the aftermath of terrorist attacks?
But they usually were done in the name of a wider cause – however much one might disagree with it. In Zimbabwe, the death and destruction were because of one man’s determination to remain in power, not caring whether he brought down his country in the process. And he pretty much did.
He presided over the biggest contraction of any economy in peacetime and the world’s highest inflation rate, as well as one of the most repressive states on earth.
Yet his first speech on taking power at independence in 1980 was a model of reconciliation of which even Nelson Mandela would have been proud. Urging whites and blacks to work together, he said: ‘‘If yesterday you hated me, today you cannot avoid the love that binds me to you and you to me.’’
These were astonishing words from a man who had spent 10 years in jail, not even allowed out to attend the funeral of his 3-year-old son.
So how does someone go from liberation hero and revered independence leader to despotic megalomaniac?
Years ago, when I talked to people who knew him well for a profile I was writing, they said he changed after the death of his first wife, Sally, in 1992.
But others told me Mugabe was always ruthless, that anyone he saw as a rival met an untimely end – through unexplained car crashes or homes burning down. Famous for having done seven university degrees, some of them in jail, he boasted: ‘‘I have degrees in violence.’’
When I first went to Zimbabwe in the mid-1990s, I travelled through villages of Ndebele people in the south, and heard horrific stories of 1980s massacres by Mugabe’s North Korean-trained Fifth Brigade, which killed an estimated 20,000 people and sent his great rival Joshua Nkomo into exile. Yet the world turned a blind eye.
Zimbabwe in the 90s was stunningly beautiful. The farms were showcases of neat maize and tobacco fields, sprinkled by water from the latest irrigation systems. There were schools everywhere, lines of children in uniform with neat backpacks. Even the traffic lights worked.
Today’s Zimbabwe is unrecognisable. Farms lie derelict and overgrown, fields
burnt, greenhouses smashed, equipment rusted. The latest agricultural technology has been replaced by oxen ploughs.
The schools are still there, but most of the teachers have gone, among an estimated 4m people who have fled the country. Paradoxically, it is these people sending money back to their families who are probably keeping the country going.
The real damage started with the seizure of commercial farms in 2000, after white farmers helped fund Tsvangirai’s opposition movement. Bands of so-called war veterans were sent in, often high on drugs, to take over the farms. Mugabe called this land reform.
About 5000 white farmers controlled about three-quarters of productive land – an unfair situation that needed to be changed. But far from being distributed to the landless majority, the farms fell into the hands of Mugabe’s cronies. His second wife, Grace, had nine.
One of my biggest regrets as a journalist is how we unwittingly helped Mugabe by focusing so much initially on the white farmers, allowing him to frame the seizures as a struggle against the vestiges of colonialism.
Such was the damage that between 2000 and 2008 Zimbabwe’s GDP nearly halved. By 2008, inflation had reached 231m per cent. A banknote for 100 trillion Zimbabwean dollars bought a loaf of bread.
Life expectancy fell to the lowest in the world, as the country that once had the continent’s best hospitals could no longer afford even basic drugs. Yet it was a hard story to tell. The population was dying, but not in a dramatic Ethiopian famine way – more of a slow strangulation, people just fading away.
The worse it got, the more repressive the regime became. In election after election we were supposed to believe that people were voting back into power a regime that had done this to them.
On and on Mugabe stayed. Zimbabweans I met complained the world was not intervening because the country had no oil. I quizzed Tsvangirai about why the opposition did not mount an uprising.
He told me he did not want to be responsible for a bloodbath.
Then he asked again about my ‘‘baby’’.
I came to realise that we all underestimated Mugabe. It was not just the repressive security state he had created but the way he manipulated people, encouraged them to indulge their weaknesses – from illgotten gains to women – then used that to destroy them or keep them in line. A friend who worked at the central bank told me Mugabe had files on everyone.
He never named a successor because to do so might anger another hopeful. He vowed he would leave only in a coffin.
In the end, it was Grace’s ambition that did for him. He made her head of the ruling party’s women’s league and, in October 2017, she got him to sack his long-time deputy, Emmerson Mnangagwa.
A month later, the military staged a coup, and placed Mugabe under house arrest. Encouraged by the army chief, people poured on to the streets to demand Mugabe’s resignation. He resisted to the last, before eventually agreeing to go.
And finally I got to meet him. Last year, just before the elections, he called a bizarre press conference, in which he said he would not be voting for Mnangagwa, his right-hand man for 50 years, who had been responsible for some of the worst excesses of his regime.
But it quickly became clear that, while Mugabe might be gone, his regime lived on. As people waited for suspiciously delayed election results, six protesters were shot dead in central Harare. Even Mugabe did not use live fire on protests.
When I was back last month, the situation was worse. ‘‘No power, no water, no jobs, no cash’’ was the refrain. The government was so broke that it could not pay for electricity.
Children were doing homework by candlelight and people were collecting firewood for cooking as if it were the Middle Ages. Meanwhile, a ruling party MP was posting pictures on social media of his yellow Lamborghini.
‘‘It was better under Mugabe’’ were words I had never imagined I would hear.
Revered by some, reviled by many, his country desperately awaits someone to repair the damage he has inflicted. – Sunday Times