It has to be a harrowing experience to know you are being watched for signs of your approaching death. Bad enough to have weeping relatives around your bed, in sorrow in advance of your slipping away, forever.
But far worse to have people longing for your death, and knowing that those around you will cheer and laugh as soon as your vital signs cease. Or a whole nation erupting in joy?
President Robert Mugabe, now 92 and the world’s oldest head of state, is a prime candidate. In his 36 years of a one-man dictatorship, he has destroyed one Africa’s most hopeful economies, had some 20,000 civilians butchered, corrupted the legal system, wrecked Africa’s best education and health systems, and forced half the country’s population to seek refuge in neighbouring countries.
Yet he betrays no sign of how he thinks his subjects will react when he goes. He was given a vigorous impression of this when a slight tumble he had at Harare airport last year ignited a global burst of speculation and hope on the internet.
Rather, he seems to take spiteful pleasure in disproving predictions of his illness and death, warning ill-wishers they will have to wait for some time, as his mother lived till the age of 102. He flaunts his apparently good health and fitness. He appears surprisingly agile when he mounts the podium to deliver a speech, and drones on for up to two hours without a break, constantly on his feet, speaking clearly, if not logically.
But he has not been able to hide the visits to Singapore where he has been filmed entering the Gleneagles Medical Centre (his wife, Grace, shielded him from a television cameraman), a 10-storey, 380-bed establishment overlooking the Singapore Botanical Gardens, and a top bed rate of US$5,185 a night. Its motto may well have caught Mugabe’s eye: “We create new possibilities for life.”
His trips there have become almost monthly this year. His officials gave up trying to cover up for him two years ago, after trying claim he went for “a minor eye operation.” It was followed by “a check-up” on the operation, and then another check-up on the previous check-up… Since then there has been silence on the reasons for his numerous flights to Singapore.
Now he tries to include international presidential duties as a cover for the Gleneagles visits. Earlier this year he claimed he was attending a conference in Papua New Guinea for a summit of the African-Caribbean-Pacific (ACP) organisation, which no other head of state thought was worth attending. He flew there after a stay in Singapore.
But a reporter on Newsday, Harare’s independent main daily newspaper, caught Mugabe out with the help of a nifty internet site that tracks international flights. It followed him to Singapore where stayed for several days before going to Papua New Guinea. It also proved that a statement from his office that the first stop on his trip he would be India, was a lie.
Other incidents suggest his age is slowing him down. Last week he arrived an hour late at a passing-out parade for police recruits. “We didn’t have a good night at home,” he said by way of an excuse. He claimed that he and his family were “running around and looking for a doctor” for his youngest son, Bellarmine, who had fallen ill with a stomach ailment.
The president turns up late because his rest was disturbed? It sounds like an old man whimpering for sympathy. The president has to go looking for a doctor? The presidential residence doesn’t have medical help ready at the touch of a button? It’s as credible as “the dog ate my homework.”
Earlier last month, he was five hours late for a rally east of Harare. The function had to be held in the dark. He apologised profusely. That’s two apologies in a month. Mugabe has always been late, and is not known to have apologised so profusely before.
Zimbabwe’s barbarous war veterans, the survivors of the guerrilla war against white minority rule in what was then Rhodesia from 1975 to 1979, have picked up that their boss is on the slide.
Mugabe engaged them first in 2000 as a violent mob to crush the new shoots of a national pro-democracy movement. He granted them increased monthly stipends and assured them immunity from prosecution for hundreds of murders, battery and pillaging of those he declared to be his enemies – opposition politicians, liberal ngos, and white farmers and their workers.
The veterans are not a society of old soldiers like Britain’s red-jacketed Chelsea Pensioners. The Zimbabwe National Liberation War Veterans Association is an agglomeration of lawless scroungers of public money extorted from the government. Curiously, the movement‘s numbers have not changed from 55,000-odd at independence in 1980. Neither the government nor the ZNLWVA has bothered to explain why this should be when it is patently obvious that the majority of them could be expected to have died since then.
In 1997 they held a secret meeting with Mugabe and threatened to overthrow him if he wouldn’t pay them huge gratuities. He caved in and ordered US$200 million in a lump sum payments, on top of monthly pensions. The government had made no provision for such a large sum, and the result was an immediate 70 percent dive of the national currency. It kicked off Zimbabwe’s economic failure which now sees the government unable to pay its civil servants.
The veterans held a congress in February this year, which Mugabe attended. One of their officials produced a list – that took 20 minutes to read – of demands for more money for themselves, their relatives, of free land, more generous than any Scandinavian government could afford, let alone a bankrupt, ill-governed African country, and in complete disregard for the critical state of the economy.
Mugabe refused. So last week they issued a lengthy statement which denounced the “dictatorial, manipulative and egocentric tendencies personified by the president,” condemned “the brutal suppression of the freedom of expression,” and his “bankrupt leadership” which, they said, “needs to be uprooted, and right now.”
The statement was rich in unintended irony, written in language that could well have come from any of the pro-democracy organisations whose offices and personnel the war vets have previously laid waste to. And the reason for the sudden disaffection with Mugabe came only after they realised that, finally, whatever their remarks about his “disregard for the values of the liberation struggle,” they would not be able to squeeze any more money out of him.
But it is the first time that any of the organisations that belong to the large family of ZANU(PF) organisations – the “politburo” and the central committee, the women’s league, the youth, and the party structures from village committees to provincial councils – has dared not just to openly criticise, but to demand his immediate removal.
This, for a man in whose presence a host of party sycophants fall to their knees, who they compare to Jesus Christ, insist that he should remain in sole charge of the party and country “forever” and call for his birthday to be gazetted as a national holiday.
The splits in ZANU(PF) have been yawning over the last year over who is to succeed Mugabe when he ceases to be the party leader, either by death or by resignation. The two main factions are vice-president Emmerson Munangagwa, notorious for suppressing a small rebellion in the western provinces of Matabeleland in the early 1980s in which an estimated 20,000 civilians were massacred; and a faction pressing for Mugabe’s widely disliked wife, Grace.
The war veterans’ denunciation of Africa’s best known “strong man” can be expected to begin the dissolution of the aura of sanctity that ZANU(PF) has built around Mugabe. Once political reputations begin to decay, the process accelerates. This may be the moment that reveals the king to be naked.
