Just yesterday, I wrote on my main page a sentence which inspired this editorial.

“Mugabe’s successes are outweighed by his excesses.”

I spent some time yesterday trying to think of Mugabe’s ‘successes’ - and do you know that I haven’t been able to think of even one. Not one!

When Mugabe ascended to the throne in April of 1980, we heard all manner of promises…

Health for all by 2000... Free education for all... Better transportation… and many more promises besides. The aspirations of a new government were all about for us to read and hear.

All much vaunted aims which, if they had transpired, would have made Mugabe and his government equally vaunted, worshipped and admired.

But it soon became apparent that all of the catchy lines and fortune telling were lies and more lies. The government had no intention (or ability) to achieve these targets. And as the years dragged by, the results of their non-achievement began to surface in every day life in the country.

Prices began to creep up - although initially goods were still affordable as the price was so low to start - now prices are hugely exhorbitant and no one has anything worth selling in the shops anyway - and utilities began to break down. Electricity supply, the telephone network… The rail network all but stopped working… Even the people have stopped working - not out of choice, but more because the productive part of Zimbabwean life has juddered to a halt.

I could go on and talk about the non-existent health service, the pathetic Zimbabwean financial world, the inept police force, the people who have no shelter following Operation Murambatsvina in 2005.

But much of that is known ground.

Mugabe, however, does not suffer like the people he was elected to represent and serve. He has once mentioned that he had to go without hot water for his bath…

I know of some Zimbabweans who are unable to find a tap with running water, let alone hot water! For months!

He lives in his mansion in Harare, built using other people’s money and he gets to be chauffeured around in bullet-proof motor vehicles (though the fear of being assassinated has come through his own ineptitude). Cars have to stop when the huge motorcade speeds by - even pedestrians have to stop in their tracks, and a surly glance at the motorcade will result in a public beating.

His wife accompanies him on his regular junkets out of the country and she regularly withdraws much-needed foreign currency from the Reserve Bank to finance her famed shopping sprees.

Grace is known as “The First Shopper”…

Once Grace shopped so much that a second airliner had to be commandeered from its schedule to fly her purchases home - and she was not charged one penny in duties…!

Mugabe is an egoist who will look after himself before he worries about the population of Zimbabwe. He couldn’t care less about the average Zimbabwean, preferring to blame his country’s woes upon the West and blaming ‘sanctions’ on plots to effect ‘regime change’.

For Mugabe to have been a successful leader and politician, when he took power in 1980, he needed to have changed nothing. But he chose to fiddle and change, move and restructure.

Now his successes are outweighed by his excesses.

Robb WJ Ellis
The Bearded Man