I ALWAYS maintained that President Robert Mugabe would meet a humiliating end, and it has exactly come to that. After ruling — not governing — with an iron fist for 37 years, his world has crumbled in less than a week.
By CONWAY TUTANI
Indeed, there is plenty of truth in the cliche that a week is a long time in politics. It’s not an overworked phrase like sloganeering: “Mugabe forever!”
Mugabe was antagonising and stifling virtually everyone with the exception of his innermost circle and his wife, First Lady Grace, from whom he clearly was now taking instructions.
Only last week, he issued a death threat against Emmerson Mnangagwa after he sacked him as Vice-President. It cannot get more chilling than that. With Mugabe, we have had evil in our midst.
Dictatorial types like Mugabe never step down voluntarily. They have to be forced out. Rarely have despots like Mugabe been removed constitutionally. In those rarest cases that they do step down, their political grip would have been severely loosened by old age and infirmity, as in the case of Malawian dictator Hastings Kamuzu Banda.
Mugabe was always going to be driven out. That’s why this week’s military intervention has been tacitly accepted by the majority of Zimbabweans.
To long-suffering Zimbabweans, it does not matter whether the cat is black or white as long as it catches mice.
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No wonder an African political scientific this week said while he is strongly against military intervention in principle, in the case of Mugabe the military option has to be applied.
We can’t always have a detached purely scholarly take. We need to deal with issues on a case-by-case basis. Mugabe types, who don’t play by the rules, should not benefit from those very rules they break.
This has made military intervention inevitable though undesirable.
And coups don’t necessarily draw back countries. In fact, they can usher nations from dictatorship to democracy, from poverty to prosperity.
A case in point is the military coup in Portugal in 1974, which overthrew an authoritarian regime and led to the independence of Angola and Mozambique.
The revolution started as a coup organised by military officers who opposed the regime, but the movement was soon boosted by an unexpected and popular campaign of civil resistance.
This movement would lead to the fall of the regime and the withdrawal of Portugal from its African colonies. If you have to use undemocratic methods to democratise, so be it. There are times to suspend the rules in order to start afresh.
And why should Mugabe get away with subverting democracy right before our eyes to undemocratise? Let’s not be taken in like that. We need to read the situation. We need to be astute. We need to be quickly and critically discerning. We need to be crafty, shrewd and wily. We need to think outside the box, not regurgitate university textbook mantras about the evils of military coups when we have been living under a coup situation in all senses. We need to outfox Mugabe types. We need to beat them at their own game — and this is what the Zimbabwe Defence Forces have done.
No wonder the initial reaction across the nation has been that of overwhelming approval. If people have to close ranks against a common tormentor, why not?
As it stands, I, for one, have no problem with the military intervention. Mugabe overplayed his hand and made it inevitable. For him or anyone to blame the military is like a thief blaming the police when caught stealing. Mugabe has brought this upon himself.
That said, Mugabe, emboldened by trampling over the nation since 1980, thought no rules — even biological rules — applied to him. Said the BBC: “Mugabe’s mistake, at 93, was to assume he was still powerful enough to build a dynasty to back his wife, Grace, to succeed him.”
That big, big mistake is now working in the nation’s favour. Grace has been a gift-wrapped political godsend. Grace plunged headlong into the political deep end when she didn’t know how to play the game.
All she has succeeded to do is endangering her own family and completely destroying the tiny little shreds left of Mugabe’s tattered legacy.
Mugabe was now at the beck and call of his wife. Her word became his command. Did a much younger wife make him feel insecure that he had to do anything and everything to please her?
He has looked so besotted with Grace like a love-struck teenager head over heels in love. It was clear nothing good would come out of it.
Mugabe was being made to do things not befitting his age and status. He was being turned into a teenybopper, a person in his early teens who follows the latest fads, including clothing fashions and the like.
It was most undignified that his hair was still being dyed. How many 93-year-olds have completely black hair? The make-up and makeover made Mugabe look like a caricature, a grotesque misrepresentation of the young, vibrant, alert Bob.
And in her nepotistic march to power, the way Grace portrayed and projected power was most irresponsible. To make matters worse, Grace was as polarising and divisive a figure as her husband.
The book Machiavelli In Love has this passage describing “the foolishness of an old man falling in love with a young woman and literally losing his identity in doing so . . .”
It continues: “. . . he fell in love and began acting like a foolish old man in love . . . ‘as soon as he fell in love with this woman, he neglected his affairs, he let his farmlands go to ruin, and his business fell apart. He yells all the time and for no reason; he comes and goes a thousand times a day without knowing what he is doing . . . The servants, seeing this, make fun of him . . . Everyone does as he pleases . . . and, thus, I am afraid that unless God comes to our aid, this poor household will be ruined.”
This applies to what has been happening in Zimbabwe since Grace imposed herself.
Mugabe had literally handed over Zimbabwe to Grace and the results are there for all to see: neglect, ruin and free-for-all looting.
War veterans leader Chris Mutsvangwa aptly summed this up: “It’s the end of a very painful and sad chapter in the history of a young nation, in which a dictator, as he became old, surrendered his court to a gang of thieves around his wife.” Indeed, the beginning of the end of a dictator.
My sincere hope and earnest prayer is that it won’t come to the stage where someone begs for his life from an attacking mob like slain Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi.
