I have an aversion to people who look down on others, believing that they are, in some way, superior to them.
While humble and genuine leaders are guided, praised or insulted by their citizens for their efforts, they consider it a success in that the people have the power and freedom to challenge their leader and correct him.
Such leaders believe that the voice of the people is the ultimate and they respect that with all the glory of national interest.
This, at the lowest level, should be considered to be how a community functions and how a leader, by listening more than talking, succeeds to be a national leader whose strength and direction comes from those community representatives around him.
When a leader transitions from a people’s servant to the people’s master, the script has been lost.
Something is wrong when people, who liberated their country and chose a leader on their own volition, suddenly start to run and hide from the same person they chose to lead them.
Many people outside Zimbabwe do not understand why Zimbabwe is now more or less of a pariah state than an acceptable self-governing country. Outsiders do not seem to grasp why Zimbabweans are fighting over Mugabe.
But whenever there is a conflict when one group supports and the other group opposes the presence of a long-ruling leader, it means something went terribly wrong, especially in Zimbabwe where the closest we got to free and fair elections ever held are the elections that brought Robert Mugabe to power in 1980.
There is no longer any pretense that Mugabe is now both mentally and physically incapacitated. His frequent, spur of the moment trips to his doctors in the ‘Far East’ have drained national coffers to treasonous levels.
There is no longer any doubt that presidential and family appeasement of political cronies have all but destroyed Zimbabwe.
Our country continues to slide downwards yet some Africans who have problems in their own countries find it prudent to support Mugabe for doing to us what they oppose being done to them by their own leaders.
SADC disturbs my conscience and is top of the least of the evil that I teach my children to be wary of.
The African Union is a disgrace that has achieved nothing of note except, like SADC, to give noisy support to African leaders who abuse their citizens.
I am reminded of author John Steinbeck who said that ‘power does not corrupt. Fear corrupts… perhaps the fear of a loss of power’.
Most leaders get carried away in pursuit of more power and commit many crimes, abuse their citizens, treat national coffers as their personal bank accounts and even kill political opponents.
When the time comes for them to step down, they cannot step down but hold on to power and upgrade their subjugation of the people as a defense for themselves.
As Steinbeck intimated, the fear of loss of power becomes the guiding principle to holding on to power at all costs.
Mugabe’s crimes are too numerous to itemize. He will never know the extent of the damage he caused not only to the country but to the people of Zimbabwe.
He broke all the rules that many criminals serving long sentences never did.
He killed thousands of people and stood trial for none of them.
He still wears the Gukurahundi Massacre as a badge of honour and insults the nation by ignoring rampant corruption which has all but brought the country to a standstill.
Most of his ministers and party officials have serious corruption cases to answer but they are protected by Mugabe who apparently fears that if they are prosecuted, they might involve his name and cause the world to understand just how much he himself has stolen.
The Zimbabwe Anti-Corruption Commission has been investigating the infamous Jonathan Moyo, Mugabe’s Minister for Higher and Tertiary Education, for “alleged fraud involving over half a million dollars” and a few days ago, they went to arrest him while Mugabe was in Lesotho for that country’s independence celebrations but the arrest was blocked by an Acting President who was, of course, acting on Mugabe’s behalf.
Mugabe suspects that a faction jostling to succeed him within his ruling party was involved so he stopped the arrest of a corrupt minister.
At the same time, nine of Mugabe’s cabinet ministers and parliamentarians failed to account for about $8 million of their Constituency Development Fund allocations with the Parliamentary Committee noting with concern that the officials “acted irresponsibly by failing to account for public funds given that, as elected representatives of the people, they should be exemplary when it comes to accountability in the use of public resources”.
None of them will be jailed, let alone prosecuted.
In the same week, Mugabe appointed his son-in-law to the post of Air Zimbabwe’s Chief Operating Officer, joining a multitude of Mugabe’s relatives appointed to important jobs in and outside government.
Still in the same week, Transparency International Zimbabwe published a report that says Zimbabwe is losing “at least $1 billion annually to corruption, with police and local government officials among the worst offenders”, adding that “local councils, the vehicle inspection department that issues driving licenses and the education department were among the most corrupt institutions”.
But one of the most sickening things to emerge this same past week has to do with Mugabe sending Zimbabwe Defence Forces commandos and military intelligence servicemen to Equatorial Guinea “to protect President Robert Mugabe’s counterpart, Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo”.
A nasty despot like Mugabe, Nguema appointed his son to the country’s vice presidency three months ago and, just like in Zimbabwe, there are growing rumblings in the West African nation.
We are running out of time as abductions by Mugabe loyalists are on the increase again.
We are running hungry with 80% unemployment.
We cannot run the country on the backs of tomato vendors whose informal sector has become the largest employer.
We cannot afford to send the president, his wife and entourages to Malaysia every other week.
So, yes, Mr. Khama, for reasons to do with the people of Zimbabwe, Robert Mugabe must step down if our country is to survive.
