I remember the euphoria that swept through the country when news came down that the war was as good as over and that even if the country was to be renamed, peace was in all of our grasp.

I lived all of my formative years in Rhodesia with the bush war as a backdrop to my education and life.

It wasn’t fun hearing reports of people being killed – and more than once, the people concerned were people I knew, not much older than me, who were seniors at school. I can probably rattle off a half dozen names without much cue of friends that lost their lives.

The same is probably true of many of my friends - black, white, coloured…

And so, as we left school to embark upon our chosen careers, we all wanted the political agreement to work, and the country – whatever they called it – would continue to flourish.

It wasn’t long before we realised how misplaced our hopes and aspirations were.

I has joined the police force – something I had wanted to do since a very young age – and was focussed entirely on upholding law and order.

Luckily, the force was not starting from scratch and much of the infrastructure of the former BSAP remained in place and the training was very thorough.

But politically things began to go wrong for Mugabe and he had the Korean-trained Fifth Brigade run riot over the Matabele people in an orgy of violence and death known as the Gukurahundi.

Today the country remains divided – to a degree – and Mugabe leads the Shona people in Mashonaland (even though he is not a full Zimbabwean – if the truth be told, he has as much legal right to be the President of Zimbabwe as I do!).

Mugabe is happy enough to rule using the simple Roman exercise of “divide and conquer” – and we see it best in the division into two factions of the Movement for Democratic Change.

Mugabe never goes for the jugular – preferring to pick on the old, infirm and weak An example I give is the dehumanising Operation Murambatsvina where houses of perceived MDC support were knocked down and the inhabitants scattered far and wide. Mugabe will claim that the houses destroyed were ‘illegal structures’ but has not moved on his much lauded program to rehouse these people, preferring to hand the few houses built to ZANU PF loyalists…

Without going too far into current affairs in Zimbabwe, we need to ask the question: just what has Mugabe achieved in 29 years? Apart from ruining a once beautiful country?

He has managed to split the country between his apologists and the poverty-stricken population. He has caused the life expectancy of Zimbabweans to be less than 40 years. The inflation figure is the highest in the world, reportedly spiralling into many million percent.

The country has no fuel (apart from government), no medical services, no jobs, no money – nothing.

Mugabe has achieved an AWFUL lot in the years since 1980. Hopefully his antics will be taught to future generations of children around the globe – as a “How Not To” example.

What I don’t understand is the support he enjoys. Are these people so blind that they do not see the damage his rule has wrought? Or are they so indebted to Mugabe that they will happily fight to the death to protect him.

One way or the other, the answer to the headline question is: “Nothing good.”

Robb WJ Ellis
The Bearded Man