Ageing Mugabe turns on the charm

There is another side to him – which he is using a lot these days as
Morgan Tsvangirai, the new prime minister, moves around government
buildings, holding 8am meetings on time, (which shocked slothful
Zanu-PF ministers last week, who turned up 90 minutes late). He can
turn on the charm.

He has to smile at his enemies last week because he hopes Tsvangirai,
whom he has insulted continuously for 10 years, will save him from the
terrible mess he has made of Zimbabwe.

Mugabe was an unimaginative plodder

He is not particularly well read and often fails to anticipate world
trends, as he did when he woke up one morning and found that his
comfort zone, the Berlin Wall, had crumbled and his chum, Romanian
dictator Nicolae Ceacesceau, had been shot.

He was comfortable with obedient, rigid societies. He learned his
"conspiracy" vocabulary from people like Ceacesceau and slowly but
surely created a one-party police state after he violently rid himself
of Joshua Nkomo’s Zimbabwe African People’s Union party.

Edgar Tekere, Zanu-PF’s former secretary-general, told a Dutch
documentary maker in 2001 that watching Mugabe struggling with his
university assignments in detention had put him off trying for a
degree. Mugabe was an unimaginative plodder. His main talent is
plotting. It’s all he does most of each week.

The plots aren’t clever. His Central Intelligence Organisation isn’t
efficient at executing them. Most of them fail, although people get
hurt as they unfold.

The ones that succeed against opponents only do so because he has
bought off the judiciary, one by one with the exception of a couple in
the higher courts.

His birthday party will be a predictable day of praise songs

The kidnapping of scores of Movement for Democratic Change activists
ahead of the unity accord after the September power-sharing agreement
was one such plot, to try to force Tsvangirai to pull out.

That agreement came because of Mugabe’s post-election plot after he
discovered he had lost heavily to Tsvangirai. He turned to the generals
to save him and they manipulated a five-week delay while they deployed
hit squads to rural areas. Those killed and beat enough people to
ensure they would not vote for Tsvangirai again in the runoff. Mugabe
uses treason charges with dreary and predictable regularity. They never
succeed, even in the corrupt courts.

It happened last week again, when Roy Bennett, a leading member of the
MDC, was charged with treason – just like he was three years ago in a
case that failed because of lack of evidence.

Mugabe needs to be surrounded by incompetent leaders who would never
succeed in the private sector. Even though he acknowledges that they
have failed, he needs their reverence and praise.

Mugabe’s appointments to his half of the power-sharing cabinet last
week demon-strate just how much he needs the comfort zone of the old
guard. His appointments, all old faithfuls, are a duplicate of
Zimbabwe’s last "worst-ever" cabinet.

He is plotting now, in the first week of the unity government, to
ensure that either he or his successor beats Tsvangirai in the next
elections, which are less than two years away.

Many are worried there are two centres of power: the new government and the other, which meets Mugabe privately.

Although Mugabe needs Tsvangirai to rescue him, many fear Mugabe will do nothing beyond smiles and hand shakes.

He has demonstrated that he lusts after wealth. He has succeeded in
accumulating assets locally and in Asia – and not because he made
clever investments.

He certainly didn’t make enough out of his paltry salary to account for the Mugabe portfolio.

His birthday party will be a predictable day of praise songs and masses
of food. This year he has chosen a part of the country where he will
find pure devotion, near his home district, about 80km north of Harare,
where he remains "father" to obedient, poorly educated rural people.

Mugabe’s constant theme is defending the "revolution". The gains he
made after independence were massively funded by the West and a brigade
of dedicated technocrats who have all since abandoned him.

Once they began leaving, the rot set in. Long before he destroyed
commercial agriculture, many schools had begun to fail. The University
of Zimbabwe was already losing its best staff and students. Government
agricultural research stations began disintegrating shortly after
independence. He stamped on the co-operative movement and ensured that
trade unions remained weak.

As the economy began to contract from over-regulation, and with
unbudgeted payments to thousands more veterans than ever fought the
liberation war, he had dwindling resources used to keep himself in
power.

That was why he seized the white-owned farms. He had promised a group
of white farmers near his rural home in July 1981, behind closed doors,
that in public they would have a "rough ride", but that they should
never feel insecure.

He told them he wanted them to stay.

Of course he did. The wealth they earned funded most public revenue and
earned foreign currency to pay for service delivery which, in turn,
helped communal farmers become the major maize producers.

The war inside the country in the early days of independence was in the
rural areas of Matabeleland. People nearer Harare either didn’t believe
what was going on, didn’t know about it or didn’t care. Many thought
Mugabe couldn’t possibly have known about it.

Yet prominent Catholics made sure he knew.

Human rights lawyers began to emerge. One, David Coltart, was sworn in
as the education minister last week. He was messed around in the courts
in the 1980s trying to defend people Mugabe saw as enemies, much as the
human rights lawyers have been messed around since the MDC became the
opposition.

This birthday party Mugabe really needs to show off – two weeks after
Tsvangirai has learned from inside the chamber of horrors of the public
service the extent of the disaster Mugabe has left him to fix.

Independent Foreign Service