As an army unit paraded flawlessly past Robert Mugabe at a recent agriculture fair, the big voice doing the commentary boomed through the speakers.
”Here they are, President,” the voice said. ”The men that will never betray you — unlike some of these pregnant goats.”
The insult sounds more abusive in Shona.
Chances are, the fawning army commentator was the proud driver of one of the dozens of new Toyota IMV 4x4s that stood row after row in the parking lot of the Harare Showgrounds.
Mugabe spent US$30-million on the new vehicles. This, said a source quoted in the Zimbabwean weekly, Standard, was as ”a reward for the army chiefs who stood by him in his hour of greatest need, after his humiliating defeat in the first round of voting on March 29”.
The Toyotas joined the usual bling wheels on display wherever the Zanu-PF comrades gather — the sleek new Mercedes CLSes, GLKs, Hummers and Land Cruisers — a favourite among the big badges in the army.
It is all kept in the family. Most of the vehicle supply contracts go to businessmen allied to Zanu-PF, just as a company run by the spouse of a top army official is the sole supplier of reflective kit to the army and a top Zanu-PF official supplies beef to the barracks.
For the March election campaign a car dealership owned by a top Zanu-PF official supplied the party with more than 200 overpriced 4x4s.
Despite the repeated media talk of unrest and suggestions that some military figures were cutting secret deals to secure their futures, Zimbabwe’s army bosses remain loyal to the commander-in-chief.
Many are veterans of the liberation war and, as members of Mugabe’s inner circle, their bonds with their leader are sustained by the shared experience of struggle. Many commentators ignore this reality.
But there’s nothing like a gift of a Merc here and a farm there to renew friendship ties.
Zanu-PF is more than a party — it is way of life. Mugabe has built a prolific patronage system, which hands out everything from farmland to wide-screen televisions to loyalists.
There have been numerous public rows within Zanu-PF over military figures hopping from one farm to another every season; a peach exporter in Manicaland this year, a game rancher in Matabeleland the next.
There was public outcry recently when the Reserve Bank splashed out on the judiciary and each judge received a new Mercedes-Benz. And, ”because they can’t use the Benz to travel to the farms”, an official told the state Herald, the judges also each got a new 4×4 bakkie.
To top it all, the judges got generators to keep the dark away, wide-screen Brava televisions and DStv decoders.