The good that men do is often interred with their bones, but the good that certain elections do seems close to magical. Whatever the final outcome of Zimbabwe’s cliffhanger, the fact that Robert Mugabe may either be decisively routed or even almost routed is a marvel of our time — one that he himself had no way of knowing when he said, confidently casting his vote, that “if you lose an election and are rejected by the people, it is time to leave politics”.Well, about time. Mugabe is the classic “when good leaders go bad” case — from the glory years when he waged a people’s war against the white minority rulers of erstwhile Rhodesia, a Mandela-like symbol of his people’s aspirations, to a power-crazed despot who has run his once-thriving country to the ground. Even official data now put the inflation rate at more than 100,000 per cent. Anyone who can make it out of Zimbabwe does, as Mugabe crushed internal opposition and imputed dark colonialist motives to any international voice that disapproved. He also justified the economic devastation he brought to Zimbabwe as a plucky refusal to run by any “capitalist” script. His cynical appropriation of this language is a travesty of all the genuine struggles for self-determination waged by the colonised countries (including Zimbabwe) and the daily suffering of the poor. But unfortunately, the world community failed to call him on his lie. Now, it looks like the people of Zimbabwe might finally wrest their well-being back.So, this electoral challenge by the Movement for Democratic Change is a grand tectonic shift for Zimbabwe and Africa (which has so far shielded Mugabe’s megalomania and bought into his third world solidarity rhetoric). Zimbabwe’s institutions have been twisted before they even got a chance to form. Mugabe bludgeoned the newborn nation’s media into submission, forcibly seized land, rigged election rules and entrenched police torture. The question is, even if a peaceful transition can be effected and Morgan Tsvangirai does get to form the next government, how long will it take for this traumatised country to clamber back to normalcy?
