For the last twenty-nine years, Robert Gabriel Mugabe has ruled Zimbabwe. That means that there are fully grown people in Zimbabwe who have known nothing more than Mugabe’s brand of leadership. These people are going to be tomorrow’s leaders, and the example that Mugabe has shown is all they know.

How does someone run a country so that the population, even if they had the money to purchase food, are unable to feed themselves - at least not local produce as the agricultural sector has broken down following the last nine years of agrarian ‘reform’?

How does someone run a country where the people are penniless, jobless, unable to pay for what little transport services are available, unable to afford medical services and unable to tell you where the next plate of food is coming from?

How does someone run a country where it is illegal to look at the President’s motorcade as it speeds past? Or that the free press is unable to make any in-roads in the country because he has the reporters arrested at every event?

How does someone purport to lead a government of national unity when he has his police force arresting MDC officials on trumped up charges, organising that they go to prison on these charges so that he can claim the majority in parliament again?

How does someone belittle the Prime Minister for the meagre pickings of his three week tour of the West, stating that he will send his minions to the East - but that any money raised will not be for the country’s improvement, but will be used by the political party to re-invent themselves - making them more acceptable to the people?

What food will the people eat while his people run a junket of his financial desire?

What medical services will the people use in the event of illness or accident?

What wisdom will he have the education ministry impart on the children when the people have no money to pay the school fees and exam fees?

What will he offer the unemployed having reduced the economy to a mere shell of its formal self?

What money will he offer the people of the country, having abandoned the local currency?

But Robert Gabriel Mugabe doesn’t bother himself with such trivial matters. What matters to him is the survival of himself and ZANU PF. He spends his days manipulating events so that ZANU PF comes out the stronger - no matter the cost, either financially or otherwise.

Mugabe is a slave to his own importance and has become a master of deception, a conqueror of all opposition and dissent. He no longer rules as a benevolent man, but as a violent and vicious unelected leader.

His own party members view him with fear, trepidation and loathing, masked only by their outward show of admiration and love. He is feared because he has, so many times in the past, crushed his detractors, perceived opponents and critics using violence, subterfuge and ZANU PF’s own brand of righteousness.
If that involves putting people in the ground, then so be it, as it just means one less to worry about.

Mugabe is comparable to Idi Amin, Pol Pot and Adolf Hitler (he has called himself “Hitler - tenfold”) and until Mugabe departs from this earth, breaking the shackles will be an uphill task.

Robb WJ Ellis
The Bearded Man