It promises to be an event of spectacular moral ugliness. Although his people are starving, the ancient despot will convoke 20000 cronies at a lodge near Victoria Falls. In scenes reminiscent of the behaviour of Emperor Commodus, he will cause various exotic beasts to be slaughtered for the feast.
Five impalas will be roasted, two sables, two buffaloes – and then, to the ululations of his drunken Zanu-PF supporters, there will be a series of culinary climaxes, each more revolting than the last. A local farmer has procured two elephants, and after these rare and majestic creatures have been butchered for the delectation of the semi-deified Mugabe, there will be one more type of meat to come – from an animal people would never normally dream of eating. Yes, a lion, the king of the animal kingdom, will lay down its life before the meat-maddened mob and have the honour of surrendering its mortal flesh to the palsied gullet of the man who still calls himself the "Hitler of Africa".
This birthday party is predicted to cost $1-million at a time when Zimbabweans are living on 35c a day. Teachers across the country have been forced to contribute $10 each to put on the show.
Zimbabwe is now the second-poorest nation on earth – beaten only by Congo for overall grimness. The people are so badly malnourished that one in three children is physically stunted, according to the UN. If you go there, you see the ravages of HIV, the emaciated figures standing listlessly on street corners.
But it is vital to recognise that Zimbabwe was not always like this, and did not have to be like this. This Mugabe tyranny is no accident – and Britain played a shameful part in the disaster. Readers will remember the 1979 Lancaster House Agreement, by which Margaret Thatcher granted independence to Rhodesia. At that time the country was a breadbasket, a flourishing agricultural producer, with about 6000 commercial farmers. The only trouble with those farmers was that the most successful of them were white, and Mugabe's long reign has been characterised by one overwhelming objective: to exterminate the last vestiges of white power, whether political or economic.
As he has said: "The white man is here as a second citizen. The only white man you can trust is a dead white man."
So it was crucial that the Lancaster House Agreement protect the interests of these white farmers. They could, of course, be bought out, but their land could not simply be seized. There had to be a "willing buyer, willing seller". The British government agreed to fund the arrangement, compensating the former colonial farmers for land that they gave up.
And then, in 1997, along came Tony Blair and New Labour, and in a fit of avowed anti-colonialist fervour they unilaterally scrapped the arrangement.
It was that betrayal of Lancaster House that gave Mugabe his pretext to launch his pogroms against white people.
The Labour government enlisted Britain in all sorts of wars around the world – Iraq, Afghanistan, the Balkans. Yet here were people with close relatives in Britain – kith and kin – and yet Britain did nothing. The Labour government essentially allowed Mugabe to launch a racist tyranny.
It was this betrayal of the Lancaster House Agreement – driven by political correctness and cowardice – that gave Mugabe the pretext for the despotic confiscations by which he has rewarded his supporters.
Johnson is the mayor of London
Post published in: News