Comrade Bob: my part in his victory......

I must take some of the blame. I was one of Lord Soames’ team in 1980 that supervised the only election that Mugabe ever won.

 

His election manifesto was very simple – vote for me or the war continues.

 

That was a very real threat in January 1980. His ‘freedom fighters’ were gathered by the thousands in various assembly points. They were armed to the teeth with some pretty heavy metal – large calibre machine guns, anti-aircraft weapons, SAMs, anti-tank mines. Although there was supposedly a cease-fire, the reality was a low-intensity conflict.

 

Travel on a dirt road was hazardous because of IEDs; I mostly used light aircraft or a helicopter, and flying was at low level or above 18,000 ft to avoid incoming. I came back from one trip into the bush to find the rural police station’s cells stacked with the bodies of ‘terrs’ who had attempted to ambush the supply  convoy.

 

The aftermath was surprising. It was anticipated that Comrade Bob would take the country down the Chinese path; they had been his main supporters and arms suppliers.

 

Instead the country became relatively peaceful, unless you lived in Matabeleland. There, thousands of ‘dissidents’ were slaughtered by the appalling North Korean-trained 5^th Brigade.

 

Otherwise, the country became prosperous with booming agriculture, mining and tourism. I was last in Zimbabwe in 1994, and all seemed well. Comrade Bob had morphed into ‘Good old Bob’.

 

So what went so wrong so quickly.

 

First, his wife, the sensible Sally, died, and he married the kleptomaniac Grace who makes Imelda Marcos seem like a small-time shop-lifter.

 

Then the ‘veterans’ started to demand their share of the spoils.

 

So the theft of white-owned farms began, slowly at first but gathering momentum so that today few commercial farmers are left.

 

The impact was to reduce Zimbabwe’s GDP by no less than 40%. Large discoveries of  diamonds might have been an economic saviour, but the Mugabe gang helped themselves to the loot. No surprise, then, that the elites grew fat and the people began to starve in a country that only a few years earlier had been major food exporter even during UN sanctions against Smith.

 

Mugabe turned a bread-basket into a basket case.

 

The currency became worthless. I once saw a photo of a sign outside a public toilet in Harare that said ‘No cardboard, no mealie-cobs, no Zimbabwe dollars’.

 

Things have got better since the appointment of a very able MDC Minister of Finance and the adoption of th USD as the official currency.

 

But I have little optimism for the future.

 

At 89, Comrade Bob must be time-limited (but remember that Hastings Banda was touching his century when he went to meet his ancestors).

 

‘Democracy’ stands almost no chance. There are some very nasty people behind Mugabe, and I predict an extended power struggle and a good many ‘car crashes’, the weapon of choice against ‘dissidents’.

 

But there is one issue that puzzles me.

 

The President of Kenya is the subject of an ICJ arrest warrant for inciting deadly violence during a previous election.

 

Why, then, is the ICJ not interested in the countless killings that can be laid at the door of ‘good old Bob’, or for the genocide against the white population that has been killed, intimidated, robbed, expelled from their homes and driven out of their country? Are these not ‘crimes against humanity’?

 

At the end of the election mission in 1980, the Election Commissioner, Sir John Boynton, congratulated us.

 

‘You have done a fine job’ he said, ‘but you got a bloody awful result!’.