An Open Letter to Robert Mugabe

If you close your eyes and imagine what the mood in the country would be like on the news of your death you may or may not be surprised to learn about all-day, all- night exuberant celebrations and riotous festivities and yes, pungwes that will most likely take place along the length and breadth of this country.

Your ears would almost be deafened by the unending horn blasts from all those cars.
Or, try what Idi Amin Dada, Uganda’s former dictator, did one time. He spread rumours that he had died. His security chiefs took him on a helicopter ride and he personally witnessed the ecstatic jubilation that spread around Uganda.

Lest you think this is an unjustified accusation coming from a disgruntled Zimbabwean living outside Zimbabwe your very own security chiefs have advised you that you are the most hated man in Zimbabwe today.

They have also told you that if the leadership of the opposition movement was organized and united Zimbabweans are ready, willing and able to storm the State House and hang you upside down by a meat hook like what Italians did to your fellow dictator, Benito Mussolini, in 1945.

Maybe that explains why you have moved from the State House to your multimillion-dollar ultra luxurious mansion that you built on the backs of the struggling masses. And maybe that also explains why you are now busy militarily fortifying your mansion. You are a fast learner! You are probably more aware than any of us the degree and extent of resentment, contempt and hatred that is leveled against you. But all those underground bunkers and all those missile defenses and radar will not save you or guarantee you a permanent peace of mind.

You are now 83 years old and way in the sunset of your life. In African tradition people of your age are regarded with great respect as sources of wisdom who should teach younger generations the virtues of life. My grandparents were honorable and well respected. When they died hundreds of people gathered to pay their respects.
In contrast, when you die thousands of people will come to your graveside not to pay respect but to make sure it’s you being lowered into the grave so they can pour contempt and ridicule. They will do this notwithstanding the tradition of not speaking ill about the dead. You will definitely be an exception to that tradition. Take my word for it. Zimbabweans are circling like vultures waiting for the day they will hear the news.

I do not harbor any wish for death for you. I would hope you live long enough to be brought, like Liberia’s Charles Taylor, to trial at The Hague for crimes against humanity. I would, however, prefer you were tried in Kezi at the VERY same spot where on one fateful day back in 1983 your Fifth Brigade soldiers gathered villagers and told them they were “serious about hunting dissidents.” And to prove their point they lined up scores of civilians and massacred them in cold blood.

This was one of the thousands of acts of genocide committed under your watch and which resulted in the murder of over 20,000 innocent civilians. At that spot in Kezi I would hope that each of the surviving relatives of the innocent civilians you butchered will come and stare at you in the face and tell you what they think of you. And, after you are found guilty, I would hope you are saved from the people’s rage and the gallows so you can serve the rest of your miserable life in Chikurubi maximum prison.

While in Chikurubi you will be compelled to listen AGAIN to video recordings of testimonies from every Zimbabwean who was affected by your Fascist dictatorship.
The walls around your solitary confinement in Chikurubi prison should contain a complete record of how you brought death, misery, destruction and a Stone Age existence to millions of Zimbabweans.

When God at His time should decide to take your life I would hope you are buried with all your sins so they can be your documented record in the other world.
In 1980 Zimbabweans gave you an overwhelming vote of confidence when they voted you in office. Millions converged at the airport to meet you from exile. Their expectation was that you would bring them out of the settler colonialism of Ian Smith where they had no political rights.

You betrayed this hope and trust when you started behaving like Ian Smith immediately after independence. You did not dismantle the colonial laws that oppressed blacks. You used them to your advantage. Whatever economic gains Zimbabwe made in the first ten years of its so-called independence they were a smokescreen for your real motives. These were spelt out by the late Edison Zvobgo when he said your single ambition in life was to stay in power indefinitely and at all costs.
Incidentally, Zvobgo may have been in your political party but he spoke very contemptuously about you.

I remember one day he said people were mischievously misled into thinking you were very educated by the virtue of all those degrees you gained through distance education. He said you boasted about having more degrees than a thermometer. The reality, according to Zvobgo, was, as he put it, “A B.A .plus a B.A. plus B.A. is still a B.A.”

Zvobgo also ridiculed the so-called ZANUPF women’s league who wore dresses emblazoned with your picture and became a characteristic circus and spectacle at the airport to welcome you from your endless trips abroad. Congratulations, you probably beat the late Kamuzu Banda of Malawi’s record on this! Zvobgo used to openly scorn those women whom he said were other people’s wives yet they had unashamedly Mugabe’s picture almost tattooed on their butts and other parts of their bodies!

Zvobgo was apocalyptically right when he said you have a schizophrenic obsession in clinging to power even when you know very well that you have lost the respect, let alone political support, of the majority of Zimbabweans. He derisively called you the madman from Ngomahuru – that hospital for mental patients in Masvingo! He said you had been given a baton in a relay race to pass it on to the next person. Instead, you fled with that baton into the mountains where you are still running wildly today!

The fact that Zimbabwe is being ruled by a madman from Ngomahuru accurately explains the crisis situation in the country today.

Today, everything that can possibly go wrong in Zimbabwe has happened. Zimbabwe is not at war yet it has all the symptoms of a war ravaged country.

You thirst for blood, to quote a statement from one of your fanatical supporters Joyce Chiwengwa in reference to another occasion in her turbulent life of unearned luxury, has been a permanent feature of your despotic rule. You mobilized unemployed youths and trained them into a militia of thugs numbering 50000 – more than the size of the army! Then you set them off to kill, torture, rape, abduct members of the opposition movement. The past six years have been pure hell on earth for Zimbabweans. Human rights organizations have documented over 400 members of the opposition movement who were killed, hundreds of women raped some of whom have now contracted the deadly HIV/AIDS disease. Your militia thugs also gang -raped women and we have the riveting testimony about this.

Your disastrous seizure of commercial farms, ostensibly to give blacks what you called the stolen land, ended up replacing half a million blacks. It is amazing that you realized that land had been stolen and needed to be retrieved 20 years after you had been in power and just when you also discovered you were about to lose the 2000 elections! And now you have discovered that the same blacks, except your cronies and relatives, you gave back the stolen land do not deserve it.

As if that was not enough you launched the so called Operation Murambatsvina which left millions of already destitute Zimbabweans homeless. You were an odd sort of Robin Hood. You robbed from the rich but you did not give to the poor because you also robbed from the poor!

The results of your disastrous policies are everywhere around you. You only need to roll down the windows in your bulletproof imported Mercedes Benz to see how thousands of Zimbabweans are toiling and scavenging just to survive from one day to the next.

Zimbabwe’s economy, which ironically was vibrant during the settler colonial regime despite the imposition of sanctions, now lies in tatters. It has been in recession for the seventh year in a row and has contracted by 40 percent. No other country in the SADC region has experienced this phenomenal free fall in its economy. Eight out of ten Zimbabweans are unemployed. Inflation which stands at over 1,000 percent is the highest in the world. Just to show how high the inflation is , if we exclude Zimbabwe, the range of inflation rates in the developing countries is between 5 and 100 percent!

Corruption is now endemic and pandemic. You have created out of state resources and the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe a gravy train for your cronies who are living a life of unbridled luxury in a country where the vast majority are starving and homeless. And now the pigs in the feeding trough are stumbling on each other as the trough runs empty. In your desperation to refill this trough you are gallivanting around the world selling Zimbabwean resources to the highest bidder.

This has got to be a scandal of monumental proportions. It is more than a justification for your dismissal from office. Yet you have rigged all elections because you knew very well that you would lose miserably. You have also manipulated efforts to seek redress through the courts because the judiciary system is now stuffed with your cronies.

You have turned down, like a spoilt child, all genuine efforts at mediating the crisis of governance that you have precipitated. You have, in what can be termed as act of a madman from Ngomahuru, turned down efforts to give food and shelter to victims of your disastrous policies. Do you remember saying Zimbabweans do not need outside food otherwise they will choke? What can be more insane than this cruel hoax of a statement made in a country where all indications are that over two million Zimbabweans are in urgent need of food aid? Even your militia thugs and rank and file soldiers upon whom, by your very admission, you rely to stay in power have been reduced to beggars and scavengers.

If there was any chance at all that you are still capable of listening to reason and sense this letter would demand that you step down immediately as you have neither a constitutional nor legitimate right to rule Zimbabwe. This would pave way for a transitional government made up of representatives of the opposition movements in the country and under the protection of the United Nations peace keeping forces who will facilitate a democratic transition to free and fair and internationally supervised elections, democratic rule, the rule of law and economic recovery.
The crisis in Zimbabwe is 90 percent a direct result of your misguided policies and insatiable and ruthless determination to stay in power indefinitely. You will be fully responsible and will be held fully accountable for BOTH the causes and the consequences of acts of civil disobedience by the Zimbabweans who are clearly fed up with you.

At the age of 83, you should seek , even at this late hour, spiritual and mental counselling . You are coming to the end of your life. There is no redemption for your soul. The future generations and including your own offspring will spit and curse at your grave. You have brought shame and disrepute not only to yourself but all those who once trusted you and gave you the mandate to rule the country.
God may forgive you. But Zimbabweans cannot forgive you because the blood and the spirits of thousands of innocent civilians that you butchered in cold blood and thousands others whom you tortured demand justice.

Yours sincerely,

Stan

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