In the gloomy land of Mugabe
By Kofi Akosah-Sarpong

Zimbabweans are dying of cholera in the face of dire poverty and primitive politics. When the caring international community responsibly queries, Harare says Zimbabwe has no cholera – and by extension no existential crisis. The two minds come from different universes – one closed, the other opened.

The relationship between health and politics normally do not play out openly but in Zimbabwe it is. Zimbabwean politics is counter-productive, and that has affected everything, creating a cycle of defaults and devaluations that has turned Zimbabwe into inflation-ridden basket case.

At the centre of the Zimbabwean mounting cholera deaths is never-say-die Robert Mugabe, 80-something years old, who has turned the African values of empathy upside. Mugabe has got into the habit of ruining Zimbabwe by lurching into anti-imperialism accusations and seeing all of Zimbabwe’s troubles as caused by outsiders but him. In Mugabe, some important part of the Zimbabwean mind has gone into a terrain of denunciation and avoidance.

As the denunciation works, Mugabe cares less about the need to find genuine solutions to Zimbabwe’s dilemma. Zimbabwe is failing, its eyes glaze slightly, and clouds close over the sight of death.

Mugabe refused entry visas for global statesmen Kofi Anan and Jimmy Carter to help solve Zimbabweans’ pains. Anan has achieved similar feat in Kenya. Mugabe sees Anan and Carter as light – Mugabe is allergic to light, he is prone to darkness. Zimbabweans’ immense suffering fails to instruct and urgency vanishes. Zimbabwe wheels into a poisonous partisanship – its politics caught in a dance of bereavement. Mugabe has become Roman Emperor Nero, caring less as Zimbabwe burns behind him.

This has made Zimbabwe having the world’s highest annual rate of inflation - 231,000,000 percent - and only one in ten adults have regular jobs. Mugabe has ruined “a wonderful country” and turned a “bread-basket” into a “basket case.” In African cosmology,

 Mugabe’s unfatherly insensitive tendencies toward Zimbabweans’ stark reality could be described as witchcraft - a treacherous destroyer, a dark-minded Satan, an archetypal Pull Them Downer.

Part of Mugabe’s loss of sight to Zimbabweans’ anguish may be his massive dabbling in juju-marabout mediums – a flash of what has partly stalled Africa’s progress, where its elites are controlled by irrational spiritual mediums to the point of self-annihilation. As much as Zimbabweans know it is a common knowledge to see juju-marabout mediums, witch-doctors and other spiritualists trooping the State House in Harare. In Mugabe’s State House, it is always darkness, no mourning anymore but a somewhat tattered and agonizing season.

Despite Zimbabweans suffering in the face of Mugabe’s enormous confusion, Mugabe believes, in his grand delusion that Zimbabwe’s predicament will vanish and Zimbabwe will be well. Mugabe’s old, tied mind billows off to locate better memories, the nationalist as fighter of colonialism, imperialism toppled and spinning on mid air, old glories, folklore of its own innocence, old strength, wars won when Zimbabwe was healthy and inspired Africa and reggae superstar Bob Marley, and when its traditional virtues shone.

Mugabe has conned himself into nostalgias. Was it during the 1970s that the Central Africa Republic’s Jean-Bedel Bokassa, who made himself Emperor in a dirt poor country, that the addiction to this sightlessness to immense suffering got out of hands? Today, Central Africa Republic is a collapsed country and nobody hears about it.

But Zimbabwe has more gravitas. To salt away Zimbabwe, Archbishop Desmond Tutu has summoned African traditions and punched into Mugabe’s stupidity and asked Mugabe to “resign or be sent to The Hague for the “gross violations” committed against” Zimbabweans and, by extension, Africans. Tutu is a very serious man, a conscience of Africa, who doesn’t play with immense human suffering, taking on the apartheid juggernauts in South Africa and winning. Tutu wants Mugabe “removed by force if he refuses to go.” Julius Nyerere’s Tanzania marched into Uganda and removed the buffoon Idi Amin.

Despite the Tutu and other concerned voices, Zimbabwean politics – shortsighted, vicious, stupid – plunges on. But in Tutu, Zimbabwe’s pain should be confronted no matter what; Mugabe will be made to awake to Zimbabwe’s grim realities.

Mugabe cannot provide basic goods and services for Zimbabweans, has asphyxiated them spiritually, and go on putting up Zimbabwean great-grandchildren as collateral. The Zimbabwean pain radiates Africa-wide and has opened deep wounds on Africans self-worth. Kenya’s Prime Minister Raila Odinga, who has fought the likes of Mugabe and prevailed, wants African governments “oust Zimbabwe’s leader.” Others argue Mugabe is “well past time.”

Mugabe and the main opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) perform a dance of breathtaking fecklessness over power-sharing after general elections that the MDC won but scrambled by Mugabe. It started in September, Zimbabwe in faster free fall. US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice says it was a “sham election” followed by a “sham process of power-sharing talks.” That makes Mugabe’s mind fraudulent for an old man who should demonstrate the African virtues of humanity and empathy.

This is the shape-shifting landscape of a Mugabean insecurity and power compulsion. The two terms mean the same thing: a powerless dependence upon one unreality or another, whether Mugabe denies that there is no cholera outbreak or Zimbabwe’s water supply haven’t collapsed. Here unrealistic boundaries blur and melt. In his paranoia, Mugabe sees himself only as Zimbabwe.

 Mugabe sees opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai and his associates as dangerous aliens. Mugabe has passed into lands of the bizarre and savage, into moral shutdown and passivity.
Contrary to Mugabe’s blind assertion that the Zimbabwean crisis is only Zimbabwean business, African leaders who had generally refrained from criticizing each other in public are breaking the old imprudent unspoken rule. African leaders have not bought the Mugabean blame game – every bad thing happening in Zimbabwe is caused by either the opposition MDC or Western imperialism. This is coming from a Mugabe who has big image among Africans as an intellectual-leader.

The new image is that the rot in Mugabe’s private mind is eating away at his famed intellectuality, mental balance and public responsibility. No doubt, Mugabe, still running the anti-imperialism con game 51 years after Africa freed it self from colonialism, portray himself as a victim of Western prejudice, and, worse as a man who has mended his ways despite Zimbabwe’s troubling realities saying the contrary. Mugabe is pretentious, self-destruct, self-deluding, careless and allergic to reality.

The Mugabe mentality prevails in zones of African life even when what prevails on the ground say different thing. Africans are addicted to the Mugabes, a true enslavement, a dreary mania. Here real life fades away. Most African society has its Mugabean traits. To name them is to belittle them, of course, to deactivate Mugabe’s craziness in cliché.

Liberia’s Samuel Doe played the Mugabean card and sent Liberia into conflagration. Sierra Leone’s old buzzard Siaka Stevens closed his country to greater freedoms and rots and surely prepared Sierra Leone into one of the horrifying civil wars Africa has seen. Mobutu Sese Seko’s Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of Congo, DRC) run Zaire on fraud and destroyed its innate traditional institutions and is now descended into the chaos that has engulfed the DRC.

But regardless of such parallels, as Richard Dowden (formerly of the London, UK-based The Economist) indicates in his new Africa: Altered States, Ordinary Miracles, each African states should be seen not necessarily from their own distinct milieu but their “different misgovernment.” Zimbabwe should be seen simultaneously in its own environment and Mugabe’s unique foolhardiness.

Mugabe’s Zimbabwe – sorrowful, painful, lopsided, and improbable – reminds me of the diarist Jean Cocteau’s argument that “Stupidity is always amazing, no matter how used to it you become.” Mugabe is used to stupidity. It is inconceivably amazing, though excruciating, to see an old man like Mugabe and supposedly an intellectual giant, thrown off balance morally and spiritually, and destroying his beautiful country without being aware of his actions.

Perhaps in Mugabe’s Zimbabwe, where huge unfreedoms have entangled the country’s progress and created never-ending sorrow, there is at work in Africa some law of equilibrium enforcing the principle that greater freedoms will bring on commensurate progress (as Botswana, Ghana, South Africa, Mauritius, and Senegal prove) and put at bay a Mugabean idiocy.

Kofi Akosah Sarpong, Canada, December 24, 2008