Kleptocracy and tyranny are nothing new but Robert Mugabe has been practicing these for almost 4 decades on a scale that is impressive.  He has received numerous honorary degrees and has even been Knighted {subsequently withdrawn}.  This 10 part treatment of his tactics should throw light on how tyrants achieve their ends.

Mugabe (93 years old), it is reported, checks in to a clinic on an almost monthly basis in Singapore and it is to be hoped that it is from there that the newswires will allow the world to refer to him as the late Robert Mugabe.  His 50 year old wife and former secretary is almost certain of becoming the next president and so the future for the country looks uncertain.

Let us start.

Chapter One: Kill the goose that lays the golden egg

True to form, where colonists entice tribal leaders to sign over vast tracts of fertile land to the pioneers, Sir Cecil Rhodes was able to garner huge land holdings, land which was the envy of all of Africa owing to its fertility.   For his trouble, the country that he founded was, in 1895, named Rhodesia. Rhodes believed that the Anglo-Saxon race was destined to greatness.

 

 

Ian Smith, who considered himself an apostle of Rhodes, was the prime minister of Rhodesia in the 60s and 70s and ensured that the 200 000 whites in his country prospered at the expense of the four million blacks and oft-repeated thatblack majority rule would occur ‘never in a thousand years’. Smith declared UDI (Unilateral Declaration of Independence) from Britain in 1965 promising, ‘A whiter, brighter Rhodesia’, and managed to hold on to power until 1980 when a bloody civil war, which cost almost 50 000 lives, brought Robert Mugabe to power and the country changed its name to Zimbabwe.

 

The economy built and supported by white farmers and businessmen kept the country going for a spell and Mugabe who had called Zimbabwe, ‘The Jewel of Africa’, was able to build roads, 4 airports and a rigorous and inclusive educational system. The whites called him, ‘Good Old Bob’.

Whites started to buy land and invest in the country since they believed in his moderate rhetoric.

Power started to get to him and except for the white minority and a small, yet elite, group around him, there was discontent in the nation and a constitutional amendment that would have increased his power substantially did not go his way in a referendum in the late-90s.. That is when he started to write and execute upon his, ’10 step manual of national destruction’.

 

Chapter One: Kill the goose that lays the golden egg

He played the race and land card. ‘If white settlers took land from us without paying, we can, in a similar manner, take it from them,’ Mugabe stated. For good measure he added, ‘Don’t trust a white man, even a dead white man’.

A land grab of monumental proportions took place and, obviously, title to the land annexed was conveyed to Mugabe or his cronies.  Armed thugs would arrive at the farms and start building settlements in the middle of lush crops.   White farmers were kidnapped, or butchered or allowed to speed off in their pick-ups with just the clothes they were wearing.

The country known as the breadbasket of Africa became, in a space of a mere decade the basket case of Africa.   Maize (corn) production fell from 2 million tonnes per year to 700 000 in 2014, wheat from 300 000 tonnes to 27 000 and tobacco, a major foreign exchange earner representing almost 40% of f/x earnings dropped from 400 000 tonnes to just 27 000 tonnes. Livestock was used for food rather than husbandry and the few cattle that remain wander around the fields and have foot and mouth disease thus ensuring livestock rearing is an impossibility for the next century. Irrigation piping, farm machinery and everything else needed to run farms has been sold for scrap.

Zimbabwe now depends on food aid from FAO and the World Food Programme and its inflation has been recorded at stratospheric heights such that the salary picked up in the morning was worth only 0.1% of that amount by evening.

The number referring to September 2008’s inflation is 500 Billion %

Tyrants, paranoid about their diminishing support, focus their attention on a resented but economically vibrant and vital ethnic minority in hopes that there will be a marked turnaround in their ratings. Stalin obliterated the wealthy kulak farming class, Idi Amin ‘cleansed’ Uganda of the affluent commercial class represented by Indians and Hitler identified the Jews as the root cause of Germany’s ills and set about his ‘final solution’.

There was a spike in Mugabe’s popularity but the economic damage was extensive and long-lasting and he expended great effort to mask it. How he does it is the second chapter in his manual, ‘Hide the Truth’.

Berlusconi cannot hold a candle to Mugabe.