By Wisdom Mumera.
Harare, Zimbabwe. ( News Of The South) – In 1980 President Mugabe swept to power embraced in a euphoric cloud of ecstatic masses giddy with the glinting images of the future in an independent Zimbabwe.
He was the man to steer the country forward. For a while he did. By 2000 he was something else. Joseph Winter writing for the BBC said Mugabe remained in the past.
“Since Zimbabwe’s independence, most of the world has moved on- but his outlook remains the same. The heroic socialist forces of ZANU PF are still fighting the twin evils of capitalism and socialism”.
In some quarters he had become the most hated man around the Southern African state. He had destroyed the country and had been nothing more than a dictator all along.
Come 2016, two years before the 2018 elections, the President is a 92 year old veteran of scandals and conspiracies hell-bent on contesting for another 5 year term after riding past all obstacles physical and mental. In his party no one is saying otherwise, publicly that is.
They are all pointing to the Congress resolutions mandating him the 2018 candidate. To believe that they agree to this is sheer hogwash.
The man is physically past it to be given such as task.
What should happen, they all know, but they can’t say it out. It’s blasphemous. Telling the leader to retire is apocryphal in African politics. He chooses his own time and place unless you decide to coup
him out of the paradise.
During their times of comradeship Didymus Mutasa, now with Mujuru in People First, summed up the environment in which the President operates when he said kings are only replaced when they die “and Mugabe is our king”.
So no one in ZANU will admit the President for all his mental ingenuity is past his sell-by date and needs a resting bed more than he needs more summits to attend whilst fighting the raging flames of
a burning economy, with a piece of a placard written 2,2 Million Jobs By 2018.
What is however striking about the President is how in all the mess he has managed to not just divide opinions, but come out with a large base of fans across the political divide.
The current economic crisis in the country is such that personalities involved in its brewing should, normally, have been iron clad with negative aspersions for all they have brought upon the country.
What the President stands for should by now have been obvious and his legacy should be definite by now.
However the man has just done the unimaginable by keeping alive his standing and dividing the country irrespective of political sides.
What is ironic is that Mugabe has himself done nothing to sway a large portion of the population back into his none-voting supporters. None voting because they love him but won’t vote for him. They are none paying club members.
It has been nature that has actually mellowed people’s opinions against the increasingly frail old man. Slow and always likely to keel over; prone to slumbering during national events or drawl out a
soporific tale from the past, Mugabe has become the nation’s grandfather.
That picture of someone frail and seemingly defenceless physically has allowed a chunk of the population to identify with him as a man caught in the vicious dirty games of corrupt politicians who surround him.
It’s no longer him who is bad. It’s those around him. In an article on New Zimbabwe Maynard Manyowa wrote about Mugabe’s charisma overtaking all else.
“Mugabe’s leadership is now punctuated by his strong personality. Approbation of the nonagenarian is hinged upon and driven by his unbelievable strength of temperament, charisma and resolve”.
“A lot of people who despise Mugabe in public are embarrassingly, private fans of the comrade, even if that irks the living crap out of them. Nelson Chamisa (a senior opposition MDC member), was wooed and charmed in minutes, his once vivacious dislike for the citizen of Robert Mugabe replaced by an acquiescent chortling demeanour”.
It’s normal nowadays to find Mugabe defenders among MDC supporters, people who froth that others are to blame for the country’s mess and not Mugabe.
Their thinking lines are cleanly structured, they won’t vote for him during elections but they don’t blame him for the cataclysmic fall of the country.
“Why not vote for him then?’
“Because he has been there whilst the country burnt. And he is old, he should just go and rest”.
In that thinking where does Tsvangirai or Mujuru or even Biti stand then?
The picture that Mugabe is the nation’s frail granny, prone to silly things but ultimately well-meant, has lost the opposition a volatile mass to use in an offensive against Mugabe.
Whereas North Africa had some fiery revolutions that toppled long staying dictators like Gaddaffi due to the foundation of an involved population, Zimbabwe has undergone even worse circumstances and still remained peaceful due to cynical attitudes.
They care less and less each day. As 2018 draws near Mugabe remains the most viable candidate for ZANU PF as nature, more than his policies and actions has mellowed his picture.
The population has largely become an indifferent and cynical bunch of leave-us-alone people seized with eking out a living without the burdensome task of fighting the weak looking granny.
As the economy grows worse each day they are devising new strategies to beat the odds of starvation and poverty whilst talking of politics as an afterthought and waiting for granny to tell another tale.
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