/ 26 July 2013

Zim elections: History favours the masked man

Commanding presence: Zimbabwe’s President and Zanu-PF presidential candidate Robert Mugabe.
Commanding presence: Zimbabwe’s President and Zanu-PF presidential candidate Robert Mugabe.

President Robert Mugabe often talks about his mother, Bona, but rarely mentions his father.

What is mostly known in public is that his father left the family in 1934 when the young Robert was 10 years old to work in Bulawayo, where he remained for a decade before returning and dying a short time later.

In the scant references to his father Mugabe shows himself to be a man who feels his father abandoned the family at a critical time during the colonial era, leaving his mother to fend for them.

In his adult life, the Zanu-PF leader has shown signs of wanting to be different from his father, always taking responsibility for those who look up to him.

A story is told of how, in the 1960s, when he was jailed, he made his bank account available to his sister, Sabina, so she could withdraw his savings to look after his younger siblings.

After his release, Mugabe crossed into Mozambique to help fight the war of liberation and his comrades describe him as a compassionate man. He shared the special food reserved for him by the Mozambican authorities with everyone in the camp so that it was finished in a day instead of lasting for weeks, they say.

Two faces of Robert Mugabe
So, when Zimbabweans vote on July 31, it is not surprising that the electorate is confronted by the two faces of Robert Mugabe: a caring liberator, and a brutal despot who has presided over a dire economic crisis.

Since launching his re-election bid three weeks ago, Mugabe has been promising to redistribute the country’s wealth to the majority of black people. In previous polls, the reclamation of land from whites to reverse colonial encroachment was his dominant message.

Now, on the campaign trail, his sympathisers — after seeing him so nearly defeated by Morgan Tsvangirai in March 2008 — see him as a cult figure in Zimbabwean politics, both before and after independence.

This campaign is almost certainly Mugabe’s last — he is 89 years old and, should he be re-elected, he will be 95 when his term finishes.

At a rally in Chiweshe, a man who could have been as old as the president, recited a poem, equating Mugabe with Moses, declaring at the end of it: “This election is the Red Sea; we all want you to win it and take us to Canaan, then rest.”

Mugabe himself has been equating the elections with those of 1980 when he helped black people gain political independence. The difference now is that the independence being pursued is economic.

Empowering the youth and women
“We need to empower our youths and women, and indigenisation is a process to give us jobs. We are saying, let’s have 51% in the big companies. But even that 49% for them is too generous,” he said in Mutare this week.

Few doubt it is an election like any other. Some Zimbabweans may find themselves backing the veteran leader out of nostalgia. Many, too, could vote for Mugabe to save him the humiliation of defeat.

Supporters of the opposition say he does not deserve a sympathy vote because of his record over the past 10 years.

His supporters insist he is worthy; labelling him the country’s liberator, and a land and economic equaliser.

Job Sikhala, a founding Movement for Democratic Change member who later fell out of favour with opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai, vividly remembers the time he met Mugabe.

“I only met him once in my lifetime, in 1997, when I was a student leader at the University of Zimbabwe and our student leaders pressed through mass demonstrations to meet him. During that meeting among the dozen of us, it was only myself, the late Learnmore Jongwe, Fortune Mguni and Qhubani Moyo who rejected Mugabe’s deceitful charisma.

'An answer for everything'
“I noticed he had the answer for everything but was always blaming his ministers for the failures of the government.

“Some of us truly were never satisfied, to be very honest. My conclusion was that he is very good at deceiving,” Sikhala said.

The former student leader says that, despite the upheavals Zimbabwe has gone through with Mugabe at the helm, because of his deceit there are people, not only locally but also in Africa and the world in general, who still think that he stands on the right side of history.

Mugabe was born Robert Gabriel Berlamine in 1924. He says he was in love with books from a young age, shunning activities that required expending energy. As an adult, he began to mistrust white people and at one time said the best white man was a dead one.

He believes the greatest leader of his generation in Southern Africa is Zambia’s Kenneth Kaunda and that Nelson Mandela has been a great let-down for black South Africans.

He is extremely well educated: he has seven degrees (including ones in law, economics, history, English and education) and 12 honorary degrees.

Policies defy logic
But critics say his education seems to have served little purpose as his policies have sometimes appeared to defy logic. He has also relied on his oratory skills and charisma.

Political analyst Ricky Mukonza says that despite Mugabe’s weaknesses his ability to link the grievances of the 1970s liberation war with his party’s policies has served him well. That has seen him making the redistribution of wealth an issue.

“Going into the elections, Mugabe’s strengths include his liberation war credentials, commanding respect from the security establishment and his incumbency. He is viewed as intelligent by both his political foes and his friends, he is able to articulate decisions clearly [and] he is seen as brave and willing to tackle even leaders of superpowers,” said Mukonza.

The man could be president once again.