Mugabe the comedian

Robert Mugabe says he's going to stay in power for another 20 years. The thing is, you can't really be sure he's joking:

A crushing election victory has tightened President Robert Mugabe's grip on power in Zimbabwe but the main opposition party is demanding a rerun of a poll they insist was rigged.

Mr Mugabe, 81, was in triumphant mood, joking that he would remain in office for another 20 years. He told reporters he would retire "when I am a century old".

While the election officer was declaring that the ruling Zanu-PF party had won overwhelmingly, most Zimbabweans were resigning themselves to continued food shortages, high unemployment, and soaring inflation.
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The Archbishop of Bulawayo, Pius Ncube, had called for peaceful demonstrations, but Mr Mugabe made it clear he would not allow the MDC to hold even peaceful marches. "They are not peaceful people. Law and order instruments will be used to prevent any mass action that is likely to lead to lawlessness in the country," he said.

The Washington Post's Sebastian Mallaby chides South African President Thebo Mbeki for allowing Mugabe to wreck his country:

For the past few years, he's been promising a pan-African Renaissance, a new era in which Africans would take charge of their own problems. Mbeki led the creation of the grandly titled New Partnership for Africa's Development, which commits members to the rule of law and other principles of good government; he's the driving force behind the peer-review mechanism that's supposed to police compliance with those pledges. The New Partnership's principles are quoted frequently by Africa sympathizers who advocate more foreign assistance, and they've boosted Mbeki's profile marvelously. Mbeki has become a fixture at the rich countries' annual Group of Eight summits. He has been treated by George Bush and Tony Blair as a player. He has felt emboldened to advance South Africa as a candidate for a permanent seat on the U.N. Security Council.

But do Mbeki's New Partnership principles mean anything? In the run-up to Zimbabwe's election, when the regime's thugs were denying food to suspected opposition sympathizers, Mbeki actually undercut the international pressure for a fair contest. He expressed a serene confidence that the election would be free and fair. He allowed his labor minister, who was serving as the head of the South African observer mission in Zimbabwe, to dismiss the regime's critics as "a problem and a nuisance." He quarreled with the Bush administration's description of Zimbabwe as an outpost of repression. He did everything, in other words, to signal that mass fraud would be acceptable.

And so Zimbabwe's thugs obliged him. Before the election, they arranged for ballot boxes made out of see-through plastic and a voter's roll stuffed with fictitious names. When polling day came, about a tenth of the voters were turned away from election stations for mysterious reasons. One constituency, in which 14,812 people voted according to election officials, was announced the next day to have awarded more than 15,000 votes to the president's nephew. In this way, the regime won a famous victory -- and with it the power to change whatever's left of Zimbabwe's constitution.
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Zimbabwe isn't the only place where Mbeki has been disappointing. On New Year's Day he visited Sudan and addressed that country's government. If ever there was an opportunity for some peer-to-peer truth-telling, surely this was it: Sudan's Arab leaders are engaged in the systematic killing of ethnic Africans in the western province of Darfur. But Mbeki spoke understandingly of "the challenges facing the government," and reserved his toughest comments for the easy scapegoat of imperialism. "When these eminent representatives of British colonialism were not in Sudan, they were in South Africa, and vice versa, doing terrible things wherever they went," he lectured.

The European colonizers did some horrible things in Africa, but perhaps the worst was giving Africa's homegrown tyrants - or even "democrats" like Mbeki - a convenient excuse for their own incompetence and corruption. God help Africa.

Posted by damian at April 4, 2005 08:08 AM