Time for Mugabe to rest

STAFF WRITER  •  9 JUNE 2015  • Daily News (Zimbabwe)

HARARE – As President Robert Mugabe lulls himself to self-delusive deep slumber while the ship of State flounders, the nation is practically on its knees with nothing, absolutely nothing, but official stealing working in Zimbabwe.

The economy is waffling through a permanent state of fragility, unemployment is nearing dizzying heights, poverty has become commonplace, official stealing is fast becoming legit, impunity of all manners reigns uncensored, the health sector has become moribund and the educational sector has been consigned into an intractable miasma.

The country is presently suspended in a dangerous pass where a government is content reigning while all manner of vicissitudes take turns in whacking Zimbabweans from all fronts. Amid this crisis, we have a president that is sleeping his way through duty!

In Mugabe, we now have a president who is way past his best-before date, a nonagenarian that is eternally shackled by the contradictions inherent in his rule that he cuts his integrity foil in preserving his controversial reign. We have a president that seeks strength in selling deceptive pictures of integrity foisted through his African Union and Sadc chairmanship to the extent that it helps him to sustain the inherent rot in our midst.

The latest images of Mugabe at Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari’s inauguration throw a clearer light on the state of our nation once dubbed the Jewel of Africa at independence but which has today become a shameful example of how to destroy an economy. It throws more light on the melodramatic pursuit of the life presidency project and the vow to wobble the process in the do-or-die effort to keep in power a president who should be acting as an elderly statesman who had his time in office.

We have become the laughing stock of Africa. Just look at how the 91-year-old is being embarrassed at engagement after engagement. Do we deserve this? Mugabe is renowned for his headstrong manner and ruthlessness when dealing with his foes.

But the terminal economic decline we are witnessing now is really sad. True, the president has been highly-favoured by his creator because he has lived to an age where most can only dream of and that he has done so as head of State is probably a feat that has no equal.

But even his most loyal and ardent supporters must now surely admit that he is no longer fit for purpose or a true representation of his old self.