The tragedy of Robert Mugabe

In death, as in life, former Zimbabwean president Robert Mugabe inspires contradiction, with news of his death in a Singapore hospital last Friday eliciting such varied responses they may have been referring to different people.

"He was indeed a leader of immense wisdom, astounding eloquence, charisma, a visionary, a colossus, a beacon of development and a man of purpose," Zanu-PF spokesperson Simon Khaya-Moyo said of the 95-year-old statesman. "He was a towering giant and a gallant son of the soil and has only departed for higher responsibility."

For some, Mugabe was a commanding figure; an articulate and gifted orator who spoke English with an aristocratic eloquence, often receiving standing ovations at international forums. He was a witty and charming figure who made a lasting impression on those he met.

"A charmer," says his friend, Catholic priest Fidelis Mukonori. "That was Robert for you."

To others, he was a tyrant whose 37-year rule robbed them — and the country — of a bright future.

"Robert Mugabe is dead, never to come back again, and so are millions of Zimbabweans who preceded him, dying from easily treatable diseases, and from the violence that visited anyone who attempted to resist his tyrannical rule," Zimbabwean journalist Noreen Welch wrote on Facebook. "The dreams of millions of young men and women — who, to this day, roam the streets of Zimbabwe with university degrees but without jobs or any decent income — were extinguished long before him."

The contradiction is perhaps in sharpest relief in the Facebook post of entrepreneur Norest Marara: "You all marched for his downfall and wished him dead. Now he is gone, why are you weeping?"

When Mugabe took over in 1980 from Ian Smith, prime minister of what was then Rhodesia, he inherited a country with a sound economy, stable currency, vibrant industry and productive agriculture sector.

"You have inherited a jewel," Tanzania’s Julius Nyerere told him at the time. "Keep it that way."

At first, it appeared he would.

On taking office, Mugabe announced a policy of reconciliation and campaigned for peaceful coexistence between the black majority and the white minority.

It was a move that, by his own admission a few years back, took current President Emmerson Mnangagwa by surprise. But it won Mugabe international acclaim and respect. To the global community, he was perceived as progressive and pragmatic — just the kind of post-independence statesman Africa needed. Mugabe’s status was immortalised in images of him with Queen Elizabeth during a banquet in her honour in 1991.

At home, too, Mugabe was initially revered, not only for his liberation credentials but for championing free education. A former teacher, he was passionate about education — so much so that he is said to have given after-hours classes to his office staff.

In the 1970s, 43.5% of black Zimbabwean children were in primary school, and just 3.9% were enrolled in secondary schools. Once in power, Mugabe made education a basic right, free for all, and allocated 17.3% of the national budget towards achieving this. Within a year, the number of pupils enrolled in primary and secondary schools swelled from 885,801 to 1.3-million.

Even today, Zimbabwe’s literacy rate is at 95% — perhaps one of the more enduring, positive aspects of his legacy.

But while Mugabe was forging ahead with educating the nation, the dictatorial bent that would taint his legacy was beginning to emerge. He did not conceal his desire for a one-party state, or tolerate divergence from that path.

In 1982, Joshua Nkomo, the leader of the Zimbabwe African People’s Union (Zapu) and a member of Mugabe’s cabinet, was accused of trying to topple the government after an arms cache was discovered at a Zapu-owned property. In response, Mugabe unleashed the North Korean-trained 5th Brigade in Nkomo’s home territory, Matabeleland.

By the time operation Gukurahundi had ended, about 20,000 Ndebele had died (the number is contested). Survivors spoke in hushed tones of the massacre, telling ghastly tales of the murder of defenceless villagers.

The dark episode would in time cast a shadow over Mugabe’s legacy, but in the 1980s it barely got the publicity it warranted. Instead, international ambivalence arguably fuelled Mugabe’s descent into intolerance.

So, by 1990, he had mastered the art of using state security agents to cow opposition. In that year’s polls, security forces allegedly attacked supporters and killed five candidates standing for the Zimbabwe Unity Movement, a party started two years before by Edgar Tekere, an outspoken critic of corruption in the government. With Tekere’s party disbanded and Zapu neutralised — Nkomo had in 1987 merged his party into Zanu-PF — Mugabe had relatively free rein.

Again, the resort to violence did little to dent Mugabe’s international credibility. Neither did his tolerance for corruption within the ranks of his government.

In 1988, the Willowgate graft scandal implicated top officials in a motor vehicle scheme. Five senior party and government officials were found guilty after an investigation, but Mugabe pardoned them.

This failure to deal decisively with corruption would become a handicap to his rule. Corruption became normalised as a practice in both the government and Zanu-PF, and ultimately gutted the country’s economy.

As it was, the 1990s marked the beginning of Zimbabwe’s economic slide. Under pressure from veterans of the liberation war, Mugabe in 1997 approved unbudgeted pension payouts of Z$50,000.

Then, a year later, he deployed troops to the Democratic Republic of Congo to defend the late president Laurent-Désiré Kabila against a rebel incursion backed by Uganda and Rwanda. It was another unbudgeted misadventure that would cost Zimbabwe more than US$25m a month.

The economic collapse had begun.

Mugabe’s management of the economy was a disaster (this despite, among other qualifications, a master’s degree in economics from the University of London). With growing budget deficits, unrestrained expenditure and unlimited foreign trips, the printing of money became the order of the day. It ultimately rendered the Zimbabwean dollar valueless by 2008. The currency was discontinued in 2009, laying waste to the pensions and savings of working Zimbabweans.

"We are yet to recover from that as a nation and as individuals," sales executive Loreen Gwatidzo tells the FM.

But such economic missteps, coupled with an unbridled thirst for power, would ultimately be Mugabe’s undoing.

In 1999, the combination of a referendum defeat on constitutional reform and the formation of the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) only strengthened Mugabe’s resolve to cling to power.

Under threat, he endorsed a controversial land reform programme under the guise of correcting historical imbalances. The result was the large-scale dispossession of the country’s white commercial farmers.

In his defence, Mugabe said the British government had reneged on a commitment to provide funding for land reform under the Lancaster House agreement. But within years, Zimbabwe went from being "the bread basket of Africa" to a recipient of food aid. Once a grain exporter, the country became reliant on imports to feed its people.

It was his bold decision to lay claim to the country’s land that marked the turning point in Mugabe’s relations with the West. He became obsessed, refusing to accept responsibility for any of his own shortcomings and instead laying the blame for all ills at the feet of the West.

After Mugabe controversially won the presidential election in 2002, the international community condemned the polls. Zimbabwe was suspended from the Commonwealth, and quit the organisation later.

With that, it seemed a part of him died. As the country spiralled into chaos, Mugabe showed a singular disregard for consequences. Food, fuel, forex and other essential commodities were in short supply. The economy was collapsing at an alarming rate. Opposition supporters were under attack. (Later, pro-democracy and opposition activists such as Tonderai Ndira and Itai Dzamara would be abducted. Ndira was murdered; Dzamara remains missing.)

A culture of impunity had taken root, with party officials and state security agents placed above the law. But Mugabe seemed beyond caring — and in no mood to accept counsel.

In 2006 he fired finance minister Herbert Murerwa for his "bookish economics", but retained Gideon Gono, the central bank chief responsible for fuelling inflation.

By November 2008, inflation was measured at 89.7-sextillion percent year-on-year — the highest ever recorded.

That same year, Mugabe lost the presidential election to MDC leader Morgan Tsvangirai.

But when Tsvangirai pulled out of a second round of voting, citing intimidation of his supporters, Mugabe declared himself the winner. The following year, he formed a unity government with the country’s major political players, and stabilised the economy by jettisoning the local currency and adopting the US dollar.

In retrospect, Mugabe should have taken the chance to bow out honourably at that point. Instead, he clung to power and, despite his advanced age, failed to appoint a successor in Zanu-PF. And no-one within the party had the stomach to challenge him at the party’s elective congresses.

This may well have been his greatest undoing; the political miscalculation that led to his presidency ending in a coup.

It wasn’t just that Mugabe was a dinosaur in a fast-evolving political landscape. It was also that he’d sidelined those struggle contemporaries who’d been in any way critical of him. Dzikamai Mavhaire was censured for saying it was time Mugabe retired; Harvard-trained lawyer Edson Zvobgo was pushed aside for criticising him. Even his deputy, Joice Mujuru, was fired from the party amid suspicions she wanted to succeed him.

Mugabe replaced them with docile and incompetent politicians who passed all resolutions without question, prompting former Zanu-PF official Margaret Dongo to describe his cabinet and top party officials as "submissive wives". Mugabe ceded more and more power to his second wife, Grace, who surrounded herself with younger, more ambitious party cadres.

But when Mugabe sacked Mnangagwa as vice-president — at the behest of his wife and her faction — and attempted to detain army general Constantine Chiwenga (now vice-president of the country), he went too far.

In the ultimate irony, it was the military that had shored up his power for 37 years that brought his reign to an end.