One of the more surreal themes to emerge from Zimbabwe in recent weeks was that of Democratic Republic of Congo President Laurent Kabila being escorted into Harare by a 28-vehicle convoy while helicopter gunships hovered overhead.
His motorcade, sirens wailing, carefully avoided the townships where tear gas hung in the rubble-strewn streets after police and army units had quelled violent protests against a 67% fuel price hike. Instead it navigated its way through the more sedate former white suburbs.
Kabila had come to town during one of several days of anarchy that have seen Harare’s urban underclass in open revolt against what they regard as a corrupt and indifferent leadership.
While Zimbabweans are preoccupied with their deteriorating standard of living, which they unhesitatingly blame on their parasitic rulers, those same rulers appear concerned with only one thing: the preservation of Kabila’s despotic and equally extractive regime in Congo.
Despite the energetic attempts of his hosts to avert Kabila’s gaze from the mayhem around the capital, the Congolese leader cannot have been oblivious to the mood of the citizenry. Rocks scattered across roads, overturned garbage bins and the smouldering remains of government vehicles were all still visible.
And the cavalcade of spanking new E-class Mercedes Benzes glinting in the sunlight will have reminded the inhabitants of Harare’s other world where public funds are going.
For there is no longer any doubt in the popular mind that Zimbabwe’s most serious economic crisis since independence in 1980 is the direct result of a tenacious political elite diverting public resources to its own upkeep.
Recently the city went for weeks without water while workers rushed to complete work on the mayor’s mansion. The Ministry of Health is struggling to cope with victims of Africa’s most pernicious Aids pandemic while nearly US$1-million a day is spent on maintaining Zimbabwe’s forces in Congo.
Meanwhile, “the nation’s founding father”, as his courtiers now describe him, remains supremely indifferent. President Robert Mugabe, it appears, is suffering from acute myopia. There was a compelling need, he told reporters as a beaming Kabila looked on, to rehabilitate Congo’s socio-economic system.
Programmes should be put in place for reconstruction, he said. “We can’t wait until the end of the war. People must eat, they must be dressed up; people must be taken care of in terms of education, health and medical care.”
That Mugabe had overlooked the pressing needs of his own people who that same day had been vigorously drawing attention to their plight struck everybody, except the founding father himself, as odd.
He has no problem with his fuel bill. And it was revealed recently that he has been helping himself to a handsome housing allowance despite occupying the most stately mansion in the country.
Workers, on the other hand, have seen a 60% erosion in the value of their pay packets in the past two years. Inflation is running at 40%, interest rates at 50%.
Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions (ZCTU) secretary general Morgan Tsvangirai has been quick to establish the connection between the deterioration in living standards and the absence of political accountability.
“The fundamental causes of Zimbabwe’s current crisis are lack of control over public spending, including large unbudgeted expenditure on military adventures like the war in Congo, corruption, mismanagement and pursuance of private interests,” he said this week.
Tsvangirai cited as an example the recent sale of the Hwange power station to a Malaysian company in a deal that saw Mugabe dismiss the Zimbabwe Electricity Supply Authority’s board of directors because they had said the takeover was not in the national interest.
Mugabe negotiated the deal directly with Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad.
This month he returned to the land issue, telling white farmers not to expect compensation for their land, undermining a consensus on land acquisition that had been agreed with farmers and donors.
The result has been a a wave of land invasions that has disrupted agriculture production and compounded the impression of a country descending into anarchy.
While the well-supported work stayaways this week and last week have demonstrated that Zimbabweans are sufficiently disillusioned with his regime to support in their millions the ZCTU’s call for mass action, Mugabe seems determined not to notice.
He was shown on TV recently eating cake at a lavish ceremony to mark his wife Grace’s elevation to the helm of a children’s charity closely associated with his first wife, Sally. Then he was seen telling Michael Jackson he wanted his son Robert Junior to grow up just like the pelvis- yanking star.
“Zimbabwe does not appear to be on his list of priorities,” said a civil society activist. “He is always somewhere else – even when he is here.”
Last week, he was in Kinshasa, where his generals are putting the final touches to their much-vaunted offensive on the eastern front. On it will hang the future of not only Kabila’s embattled regime but Mugabe’s as well.
Zimbabwe’s unyielding ruler has pinned his fortunes – and the country’s – on victory in Congo and the booty expected to come with it. If things don’t work out there, he may end up like one of Jackson’s albums – history.