Yeltsinize Mugabe

In the late 1980s Zimbabwe was the textbook example of a functioning African state. Yet today, after two decades of rule, Robert Mugabe has become a caricature of the African despot ─ in the footsteps and tradition of Uganda’s brutal Idi Amin. With the devastated economy left after Mugabes seizure of white-owned farms, he now plans to take control of the country’s two biggest diamond mines.

To his credit Zimbabwe boasts a very high literacy rate for Africa. But paradoxically this is working against him. The young electorate called the “Born Free” because they did not grow up under white rule, have learned the ideals of democracy and socialism yet they have also witnessed their president’s descent into dictatorship and they want change.

Mugabe is determined to anoint his successor so that he can escape the almost certain criminal prosecution he will face if an opposition candidate wins. The ghosts of the 20,000 Ndebe people slaughtered in the Gukurahundi crackdown in the 1980s by the North Korean-trained Fifth Brigade, the starvation and brutality brought upon opposition supporters and their supporters in the media, the use of torture and the abuse of human rights all build a solid case against him. He knows he needs an exit strategy. And while he figures it out, the brutality and ban on opposition party and politicians within his own party is destined to bring him down. Anytime a country is hungry and broke, its leader gets busted. That is the time to sit down with that leader and grant him immunity from prosecution and let him and his family keep a portion of their plundered loot that belongs to the people. That is the deal Boris Yeltsin cut with Vladimir Putin and the Russian people when the Russian economy was in tatters. Isn’t it time Zimbabwe cut the same deal with Mugabe?

By the end of 2006, Zimbabwe had been run into the ground by Mugabe who has been running the country for twenty seven years. Exchange rates double weekly if not daily, inflation in the hyperinflation economy, reached 1,600 percent in January 2007 ─ the highest in the world estimated to reach 5,000 by the end of 2007. Doctors, nurses, teachers, electricity workers, civil servants and the military all threatened to strike and quit as they demanded pay raises of up to 1000 percent. Opposition leaders getting assaulted and seriously injured by the police for no reason is reminiscent of what happened in South Africa in the apartheid era. Calls for him to resign or retire when his term expires in March 2008, are on the rise, especially when he shocked his party stalwarts and the opposition by announcing that he was going to stand for another 6 year term that destroyed the economy. His hard core supporters are pushing him to stay in power until 2010. Is this any way to allow a country to be run and exploited, by its ageing dying exploiter? Why not grant him immunity from prosecution and have him retire quickly and quietly like Yeltsin did so millions no longer have to suffer?