Robert Mugabe / The Times 6.9.2019

It was not how anyone expected Robert Mugabe to relinquish the presidency of Zimbabwe after 37 years. He did not die in office. He was not ousted by a popular uprising against his long and terrible misrule. The world’s oldest head of state, a man whose cunning had enabled him to outlast and outwit all his foes, was removed by former comrades-in-arms after making the biggest political miscalculation of his life.

In 2017 Mugabe, aged 93, sacked his vice-president, Emmerson Mnangagwa, in a move designed to enable Grace, his intensely ambitious and avaricious wife, to succeed him. Mnangagwa, who had been Mugabe’s brutal chief enforcer throughout his presidency, fled the country but he was far from beaten.

Neither Mnangagwa nor the security chiefs who were his allies could countenance the widely reviled Grace Mugabe, a former secretary who was 40 years his junior and had not fought in the liberation war of the 1970s, becoming president. Armoured vehicles appeared on the streets of Harare. Mugabe was placed under house arrest. His party, Zanu-PF, voted to strip him of its leadership. The public was permitted to stage a huge demonstration to demand his resignation. Only when parliament began impeachment proceedings did he finally agree to resign, all remnants of his dignity by that stage shredded.

The tragedy of Robert Mugabe was thus complete. He was the guerrilla hero who defeated white minority rule but went on to ruin the newly independent country he inherited. He was the supposedly model African leader who turned into a despot, the liberator who became an oppressor, crushing opponents and rigging elections. He was the professed advocate of reconciliation and national unity who might have been another Nelson Mandela but ended up pursuing the politics of hatred and division — most notably and disastrously by seizing the white-owned farms that were the mainstay of his country’s economy.

Towards the end of his rule Zimbabwe, once the breadbasket of Africa, was unable even to feed its own people. Inflation briefly reached 500 billion per cent and unemployment 90 per cent. Nearly a quarter of the population, including most of the brightest and the best, left the country.

Ironies abounded. As Mugabe neared his tenth decade, life expectancy in Zimbabwe fell to the lowest in the world. An intellectual with seven degrees, Mugabe sent his children to prestigious private schools in Harare while the state education system that he had built up during his early years in office collapsed for want of funds. His supporters staged ostentatiously lavish celebrations of his birthday as millions of Zimbabweans survived on a single daily bowl of cornmeal porridge.

Under Mugabe’s grotesque misrule commercial farms reverted to vegetable patches, the lightbulb to the oil lamp, the tap to the well and the wheel to the foot. Only the abolition of the worthless Zimbabwean dollar, and a power-sharing agreement with the opposition Movement for Democratic Change in 2008, halted the country’s implosion.

What Mugabe thought of the desolation all around him is hard to tell. After the death of his first wife, Sally, in 1992 he had no confidants or close friends. He lived in a high-walled, heavily guarded estate in northern Harare, drove to work along roads cleared of all traffic, gave few interviews and seldom appeared in public.

He was an enigma — a frugal man who appeared to condone the corruption all around him; an African nationalist who railed against British imperialism but loved Savile Row suits, the royal family and most things British; a Roman Catholic by birth and upbringing who had a Jesuit priest as his spiritual adviser but led a thoroughly pernicious regime.

In the end Mugabe was as reviled by the international community as Mandela had been revered, and he was intensely jealous of the adulation heaped on his fellow freedom fighter. He too might have been a great statesman, but as his early promise and popularity faded the retention of power at any cost became his overriding goal.

Robert Gabriel Mugabe was born in 1924 in Kutama, a rural village about 60 miles west of Salisbury (later Harare), the capital of Southern Rhodesia, as the British colony was then known. His father was a carpenter who abandoned his wife and four surviving children after the deaths of Mugabe’s two older brothers. Mugabe was ten at the time, and the family was cast into poverty.

Mugabe’s mother raised him as a strict Catholic, taking him to Mass daily and twice on Sunday. He won a scholarship to St Francis Xavier College, a leading boys’ school whose headmaster, an Irish priest named Father Jerome O’Hea, spotted his potential and nurtured him. In a foretaste of the cunning that Mugabe displayed in his subsequent political career, his younger brother once described how he was a loner who would make traps out of sticks and grass, put seeds inside them, and patiently wait, reading a book, until birds were caught in them.

Mugabe won a second scholarship to the University of Fort Hare in South Africa, which is where his interest in African nationalism was awakened. He graduated in 1951, and after several years of teaching joined a teacher training college in Ghana at a time when that country was at the forefront of the liberation movement. It was there that he met a fellow teacher called Sally Hayfron who became his wife. They married in 1961.

Mugabe returned to Southern Rhodesia in 1960 and became involved in nationalist politics. Intelligent and educated, he rose fast to become secretary-general of the Zimbabwe African National Union (Zanu), which had broken away from the Zimbabwe African People’s Union (Zapu). Zanu was predominantly Maoist and Shona; Zapu Marxist and Ndebele. The two parties fought on the streets of the black townships and in 1964 their leaders, Mugabe included, were arrested after Ian Smith’s white minority government banned them.

Mugabe spent the next decade in prison, and when Nhamodzenyika, Mugabe’s three-year-old son, died suddenly of encephalitis in Ghana in 1966 Smith refused to let him attend the funeral.

Outside the prison Smith’s regime had unilaterally declared Rhodesia’s independence from Britain rather than share power with the country’s black majority, and the country was engulfed in civil war. Inside, Mugabe earned academic degrees through correspondence courses with the University of London, and taught his fellow Zanu detainees. Unhappy with Zanu’s ostensible leader, Ndabaningi Sitole, those detainees chose Mugabe to replace him.

After his release in 1974 Mugabe unsuccessfully sought the endorsement of other independent African states. Facing re-arrest, he escaped to neighbouring Mozambique, where he eventually won the support of President Machel and his Frelimo Party. Mugabe used that relatively safe base to prosecute the liberation war by launching guerrilla operations inside Rhodesia. Mugabe was not a fighter by training or temperament, but he commanded a force of ruthless guerrillas who carried the battle to Smith’s regime.

By the late 1970s international sanctions and the war had all but exhausted Rhodesia’s economy. In 1979 a reluctant Mugabe was persuaded to attend a conference convened by the British government at Lancaster House in London. It produced the agreement that led to the end of white minority rule and newly independent Zimbabwe’s first democratic elections the next year. When he returned to Harare Mugabe was greeted by a huge and ecstatic throng of black Rhodesians.

The election campaign was conducted in an atmosphere of intimidation, but Mugabe won a decisive victory over Zapu that reflected the numerical superiority of his Shona people over Joshua Nkomo’s Ndebele tribe.

Most whites regarded Mugabe as a communist militant who threatened their future in the land where they and their forebears had built thriving farms and businesses. Many left, but the majority who stayed were — at least initially — surprised by Zimbabwe’s first black prime minister.

Elsewhere post-colonial Africa was beset by military coups, conflicts and misrule, but Mugabe promised reconciliation, not revenge. He urged whites to help him to rebuild the country after 15 years of war and sanctions. “If yesterday I fought you as an enemy, today you have become a friend,” he declared in a speech on the eve of independence. “If yesterday you hated me, today you cannot avoid the love that binds you to me and me to you.”

He sought Britain’s help to create a national army from the guerrilla fighters and their former opponents in the Rhodesian armed forces. He magnanimously allowed Smith, who had imprisoned him for a decade and barred him from his son’s funeral, to remain in the country and invited him to his home. He offered government posts to Nkomo and his Zapu party. He made Denis Norman, then head of the Commercial Farmers’ Union, the agriculture minister, to reassure Zimbabwe’s 4,500 white farmers.

When other newly appointed ministers appeared at the first cabinet meeting wearing camouflage fatigues, Mao jackets and Hawaiian shirts, Mugabe upbraided them. “If you wish to remain as ministers I expect you to dress as ministers,” he said.

Years later, when Margaret Thatcher was deposed as Tory leader, he rebuked them again for cheering. “Who organised our independence?” he asked. “Let me tell you — if it hadn’t been for Mrs Thatcher none of you would be sitting here today. I’m sorry she’s gone. I didn’t agree with many of her policies but I respected her.” He also formed a surprising friendship with Lord Soames, the last governor of Rhodesia, and astonished the peer’s family by flying to Britain for his funeral in 1987.

In those first years Mugabe built schools and clinics for black Zimbabweans who had never had them before. The literacy rate soared. Child mortality fell. Agricultural production boomed not only on white-owned farms but also on poor communal lands.

He rose before dawn, worked punishing hours and eschewed alcohol and tobacco. He appeared to be one of Africa’s most progressive leaders, and by 1982 Zimbabwe was said to be receiving more foreign aid per capita than any other developing country. But the outside world did not see — or chose not to see — what the man in whom it had invested so much hope was doing to the Ndebele people of Matabeleland in southwest Zimbabwe.

Two years after independence Mugabe dismissed Nkomo, his old rival, from his government, accusing him of plotting a coup. He then sent an army unit called the Fifth Brigade, trained by North Korea and consisting exclusively of former Zanu guerrillas, into Nkomo’s Ndebele heartland.

Operation Gukurahundi — Shona for “the early rain that washes away the chaff” — massacred entire villages. As many as 20,000 civilians were killed in what amounted to ethnic cleansing. Many others were raped and tortured. Thousands more were arrested under emergency laws inherited from the old Rhodesia.

Many observers say that was the real Mugabe, ruthless and brutal, and that the political moderation of his early years in office was a façade. Years later he boasted of having “a degree in violence”.

Mugabe’s relations with the white community began to sour after Zimbabwe’s second election in 1985, when white voters overwhelmingly backed candidates from Smith’s party, the Conservative Alliance of Zimbabwe. Mugabe saw that as a personal rebuff and sacked Norman, one of his two white ministers.

In 1987 Mugabe changed the constitution to make himself president, not prime minister, and abolished the quota of 20 parliamentary seats reserved for whites. Zanu also absorbed Zapu, renaming itself Zanu-PF and effectively turning Zimbabwe into a one-party state.

In 1992 Mugabe’s wife, Sally, died of kidney failure. She was generally regarded as a calming and moderating influence on her husband, and some observers believe that his slide towards tyranny began with her death. More than a decade later he was still making private early-morning visits to lay flowers on her grave at Heroes’ Acre on the edge of Harare.

Four years later Mugabe married Grace Marufu, the polar opposite of Sally, in a lavish ceremony attended by 12,000 guests in Kutama. She was a former secretary with whom he had had an affair and two children before Sally’s death. She became notorious for her extravagant lifestyle and shopping sprees in foreign capitals.

As Mugabe’s popularity waned in the 1990s, and his insecurity grew, he became increasingly unable or unwilling to rein in his supporters. Self-styled veterans of the liberation war were agitating for land and money. The younger generation was growing restive as their elders hogged the top jobs. Mugabe was motivated more by power than money, but did nothing to stop the growing corruption within Zanu-PF. He perhaps saw it as a means of keeping potential troublemakers on board.

In 1997 he jettisoned any pretence of fiscal responsibility by awarding huge pension benefits to the war veterans. When a regional Zanu-PF chairman protested and called on Mugabe to resign he was abruptly stripped of his position. Soon after that Mugabe sent troops to the war-torn Democratic Republic of Congo, ostensibly to help Laurent Kabila’s struggling regime in Kinshasa. His henchmen used the intervention to plunder the diamonds and other mineral resources in the east of the country.

In 1999, with much of the country hungry for change, various civic groups combined to form the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), led by a trade union official named Morgan Tsvangirai. The next year the MDC helped to defeat a constitutional referendum that would have allowed Mugabe two more terms as president, granted government and military officials immunity from prosecution, and legalised the confiscation of white-owned land for distribution to poor black farmers without compensation.

The vote shocked Mugabe and proved a watershed moment. It represented Zanu-PF’s first electoral defeat and came only four months before parliamentary elections. Mugabe’s response came days later when hundreds of war veterans invaded white-owned farms.

The veterans, their ranks swollen by gangs of unemployed youths, overran the farms in an orgy of often drunken violence and retribution. Farmers and their families were terrorised, savagely beaten and on occasion killed in the mayhem. Many farms were seized by Mugabe cronies and Zanu-PF bigwigs who had no idea how to run them. Others were stripped of their vehicles and machinery and abandoned. Very little land was redistributed to the poor, and the real losers were not so much the white farmers, who mostly had the resources and skills to start afresh, but the hundreds of thousands of black farm workers whose livelihoods were destroyed.

The land issue had festered since independence, at which time whites owned 70 per cent of the best farming land. Under the Lancaster House agreement the British government agreed to fund a “willing seller, willing buyer” scheme that compensated white farmers who voluntarily gave up their property, but it had proved ineffective. Then, in 1997, Tony Blair’s incoming Labour government incensed Mugabe by announcing that it was going to stop funding for the scheme.

Unleashing the war veterans served Mugabe’s purposes in several ways. It placated Zanu-PF’s increasingly disgruntled power base. It punished white farmers for supporting the MDC, and it destroyed a reservoir of a million potential MDC voters among farm workers. However, it was an economic catastrophe.

Agricultural production plummeted. Soon, instead of exporting grain to the rest of southern Africa, two thirds of Zimbabweans were relying on international food aid for survival. While prime farm land returned to nature, people in Harare were growing vegetables on scraps of land beside the roads in a desperate attempt to fend off hunger. Diseases such as kwashiorkor, the product of severe malnutrition, appeared for the first time in Zimbabwe.

As an economy based on agriculture collapsed the government responded by printing more money. The result was an inflation rate that reached 500 billion per cent — a record exceeded only by that of Hungary after the Second World War. At its peak, prices were doubling every 24 hours. Savings were wiped out. Factories and businesses closed. Unemployment approached 90 per cent, and those still in work were earning less than their bus fares.

The only beneficiaries were Zanu-PF officials who bought foreign currencies at the official exchange rate and sold them at the vastly higher unofficial rate. At one point Gideon Gono, the governor of the Reserve Bank, issued a bank note worth 100 trillion Zimbabwean dollars. Weeks later he slashed 12 zeros off the national currency in an attempt to retrieve it from the realms of the fantastical.

By the late 2000s the country was a failed state in all but name. Its economy was contracting faster than any in the world. Its GDP had fallen to the level of 1953, coal production to that of 1946 and gold production to that of 1907. Roughly three million Zimbabweans — nearly a quarter of the population — had emigrated, and there were more working outside the country than in it.

Tens of thousands of teachers, doctors and nurses joined the exodus or went unpaid, and countless schools and hospitals closed for lack of funds. Supermarket shelves were empty. Electricity and water supplies were spasmodic at best. HIV was rampant, and life expectancy plunged to 37 years for males and 34 for women — the lowest in the world. Paupers’ burials became commonplace.

Mugabe blamed sanctions imposed by the United States, the European Union, Britain and others; in fact they targeted only him and his cronies. He responded with greater repression, although many Zimbabweans were too fearful, downtrodden and preoccupied with day-to-day survival to rise up. In 2005 he launched Operation Murambatsvina (Shona for “clean up filth”), which destroyed the homes and livelihoods of 700,000 slum dwellers in areas of Harare and other cities that backed the MDC.

He withheld food aid from MDC strongholds. The judiciary and independent media were neutered. Prominent opponents were murdered or silenced. Tsvangirai survived an assassination attempt, was arrested and severely beaten on several occasions, and was tried, but acquitted, of treason. Pius Ncube, the Archbishop of Bulawayo and Mugabe’s most outspoken critic, was forced to resign after being caught with a mistress in a sting operation.

Mugabe had been re-elected president in 1990, 1996 and 2002 amid widespread claims of vote-rigging, fraud and intimidation, but the repression reached its climax during the elections of 2008. The MDC gained a parliamentary majority, and Tsvangirai was widely believed to have won the first round of the presidential vote, but the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission suppressed the result for five weeks. It finally announced that Tsvangirai had won with 47.9 per cent of the vote, a little short of the 50 per cent threshold required to avoid a second round.

Mugabe unleashed a campaign of terror. His thugs ran amok — killing, beating and torturing MDC supporters across the country. At least 200 deaths were recorded, although the real figure was probably far higher. Tsvangirai finally withdrew his candidacy to end the carnage. Mugabe was “re-elected”, and the Electoral Commission claimed he had won 85.5 per cent of the vote.

Mugabe was sworn in within hours of his sham victory. No African heads of state attended the ceremony. Britain stripped him of the honorary knighthood that the Queen conferred on him in 1994. The scale of the violence unsettled even Thabo Mbeki, the South African president who had long protected Mugabe from international pressure, and Mugabe was finally forced into a power-sharing agreement with the MDC under which Tsvangirai became prime minister.

Mugabe had survived for decades as leader of Zanu-PF through political cunning, earning himself the nickname of the “old crocodile”. He had rented the loyalty of his lieutenants by allowing them to plunder the country. He had endlessly played potential successors off against each other. That same cunning was evident in the formation of the new unity government. The MDC was allotted several ministries but Mugabe kept control of the security forces. His 28-year monopoly on power had been cracked but far from destroyed. Zimbabwe’s generals were conspicuously absent from Tsvangirai’s inauguration in February 2009.

The new government abandoned the worthless Zimbabwean dollar and legalised the South African rand, the US dollar and even sterling — the currency of Zimbabwe’s former colonial masters. Under Tendai Biti, the MDC finance minister, a measure of fiscal responsibility returned. The economy stabilised. Rudimentary public services were gradually restored and food re-appeared in the shops.

However, the arrangement gave Mugabe time to regroup, and in 2013 he was elected to a seventh term. Zanu-PF regained a majority in the parliament and the power-sharing government was disbanded. Once again there were allegations of widespread vote-rigging, but little of the blatant brutality of 2008 and Tsvangirai had lost much of his former appeal. And the world’s attention had moved elsewhere.

Undaunted by the disastrous consequences of the farm seizures, Mugabe proceeded to press for the “indigenisation” of foreign- and white-owned businesses. In March 2014, even as the economy was unravelling once again, he staged a lavish wedding for his daughter that was attended by thousands of guests and for which Harare’s cash-strapped city council spent £500,000 on resurfacing the roads leading to his estate.

By that time he was beginning to fail physically, and a vicious battle to succeed him had begun between an old-guard faction loyal to Mnangagwa and Grace Mugabe’s “young Turks”. By siding with his wife three years later Mugabe triggered his own downfall.

Had Mugabe resigned after ten years he might have been regarded as a great leader, the slaughter in Matabeleland notwithstanding. He will instead be remembered for the violent and calamitous misrule that caused his country so much suffering. He assiduously maintained the façade of democracy, but in reality he was more like a traditional African tribal chief who would brook no opposition. He betrayed his mindset in late 2008, when international pressure on him to cede power was at its most intense. “Zimbabwe is mine,” he declared defiantly.

Robert Gabriel Mugabe, president of Zimbabwe, was born on February 21, 1924. He died on September 6, 2019, aged 95