Many people ask me why I continue to write about Zimbabwe - and it is a good question - one which I ask myself many times during any given week.

But the answer is simple. I am very aware of what the people of Zimbabwe are capable of - and I am hugely angered at the levels to which Mugabe is prepared to stoop to disregard and ignore them - the lengths he will go to reduce them all to paupers…

On Monday I read that Mugabe’s administration is offering Mercedes Benz motor cars to all MDC MPs and senators. There are article on the internet urging them to reject these offers. Senator David Coltart has already rejected his.

If the MDC were to accept these status symbols, then it would be increasingly difficult to differentiate them from the Mugabe loyalists in government.

I say it often. A civil servant is a servant of the people. It is the people that have put these MPs and senators in position and they need to serve the people. Fancy vehicles don’t do anything to help the people.

From the moment ‘go’ - way back in 1980 - Mugabe was intent on not only selling the lie, but making people live it as well.

An example is the Gukurahundi. Mugabe had the Fifth Brigade in place and waiting before the hondo (war) began. Mugabe still perpetuates the lie that there were dissidents aplenty. And he refuses point blank to apologise to the Matabele people excusing his actions as a ‘moment of madness’.

Even older than that is Mugabe’s ‘hand of reconciliation’ speech in 1980. He stated that it made no difference to him which side of the chimurenga (struggle - armed or otherwise) you were on, if you wanted to live and work in a new independent Zimbabwe, that was okay with him.

But even today, he points fingers at people and labels them ‘Rhodesian’, ‘racist’ and ‘British’…

He insists that the MDC is a ‘puppet of the West’, whilst at the same time he pleads poverty to the free world, appealing for piles of money to rebuild Zimbabwe. He also insists that the targeted sanctions are ‘full economic sanctions’ and illegal.

Not that long ago, Mugabe told the watching world that the cholera epidemic had been eradicated - at that time, the outbreak was about a week old. The very next day, his office explained that Mugabe was being ‘sarcastic’.

It isn’t every day that we hear a supposed ‘world leader’ playing games with people’s lives - but Mugabe does t daily.

He is a cold, calculated mass killer. He cares not a jot for the people of Zimbabwe - he is more interested in the barefaced adulation of his closest loyalists.

He is driven by money and money alone. He has the central bank Governor wrapped around his little finger and has reportedly blocked an intended audit of the bank’s activities over the past 29 years.

There are people in Zimbabwe who are approaching their thirtieth birthdays and they know nothing more than Mugabe’s vicious policies, his anger and his murderous ways.

I was seventeen and still at school when Mugabe took power in Zimbabwe. He’s still there and I am now forty six…

There were people in Zimbabwe that lost everything they own, their place of residence and the will to live. They litter graveyards all over the country.

There were other people in Zimbabwe who ‘crossed’ Mugabe - and they litter Heroes’ Acre in Harare - and other unmarked graves in the country.

Living Mugabe’s lie - not a place to wish on anybody…

Robb WJ Ellis
The Bearded Man