Long-ago dream turns into nightmare

“COME HOME, therefore.”

Robert Mugabe’s calm plea, uttered nearly three decades ago, energized the crowd at Howard University’s student center. Loud, boisterous cheers responded to Zimbabwe’s new leader on that fall day in 1980. I was among the hundreds of students listening to Mugabe in what, as I recall, was an impromptu detour to campus during his visit with U.S. officials in Washington, D.C.

Come home to the Motherland, he urged. Come help us build a new nation in southern Africa.

It was powerful stuff, spoken by the former guerrilla leader and former political prisoner. Mugabe had fought a war against white supremacist rule in the one-time British colony of Rhodesia. His spare words that day suggested promise, hope and equality for the people of his rechristened country.

So what went wrong? Some 28 years later, many inside and outside the nation revile him. President Mugabe is trying to cling to power amid upheaval, and opponents accuse him of stealing a recent election. Certainly, he did a lot for his country in its independent infancy. He expanded access to public education and supported the growth of commercial farms.

“It was a promising start,” Patrick Mbajekwe, an assistant professor of history at Norfolk State University who covers African affairs, told me Thursday evening. “He was seen as a revolutionary and a visionary. He was well-respected.”

But there’s no question that the leader called “the Old Man” should have left the stage many years ago. The democracy began to degenerate, Mbajekwe said. “It was corrupt,” he added. “The leadership is no longer there.”

Now 84, his country in turmoil, Mugabe is often compared with past African leaders assailed as nothing more than thugs and autocrats. He crushed political opponents. A campaign begun in 2000 to seize white-owned farms and redistribute them to black peasants led to violence and trouble in the agricultural economy.

Millions have fled Zimbabwe, many of them to neighboring South Africa. Zimbabwe now suffers from astronomical rates of inflation and 80 percent unemployment. The HIV/AIDS rate among adults is estimated at 18 percent of the population. Opponents of the government face violence at the hands of Mugabe’s “enforcers.”

International observers and diplomats believe Mugabe’s political opponent, Movement for Democratic Change leader Morgan Tsvangirai, got more than 50 percent of the vote in the March 29 election. Officials in Mugabe’s regime delayed release of final vote tallies for more than a month and detained journalists and members of the country’s electoral commission. The MDC claims that dozens of opposition supporters have been killed.

Tsvangirai was finally declared the winner, but with not enough votes to avoid a runoff. On Friday, that vote was set for June 27. To my way of thinking, given the history, Mugabe won’t cede his position easily.

It’s all very sad. Mugabe has morphed from guerrilla fighter, to inspirational leader, to president, to thug. As long he continues to rule, many Zimbabweans won’t be coming home.

Roger Chesley is associate editor of The Pilot’s editorial page. Reach him at (757) 446-2329 or at roger.chesley@pilotonline.com.