The dictators’ syndromes that afflict Mugabe

Written by MARY REVESAI

Monday, 09 November 2009 18:28

In an essay featured on a website that deals with the various syndromes afflicting the world’s dictators, Alemayehu Mariam, professor of political science at California State University, tackles the one known as “the grammar of dictators”.

He describes how ruthless despots have difficulty dealing with reality and thus create their own “convenient world of illusions.”
Writes Alemayehu: “Dictators see a world around them that is not pretty, so they manufacture their own. Where there is widespread famine, they see ‘pockets of severe malnutrition” and where they are confronted with overwhelming evidence of bombed out villages in the form of satellite photos, they claim there is not a shred of evidence”.
Big man syndrome
The political scientist says dictators insist there is not a shred of evidence of human rights abuses where documented facts show thousands of citizens have been swept off the street and jailed without evidence of criminal wrong doing. Other contributors to the website tackle topics such as the “narcissism syndrome” in which the afflicted authoritarians believe they are the centre of the universe and everything revolves around them The “Being there syndrome” the “Pinochet syndrome” the “Big man syndrome” and the “Aging African dictator syndrome”. Other maladies featured include the syndromes of corruption, power, wealth and democracy.
The Big man syndrome is said to afflict mainly “African dictators who will do anything to extend their prolonged political existence.” Zimbabwean president Robert Mugabe is identified by name along with Libya’s Muammar Gadaffi, Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak and the late Omar Bongo of Gabon as belonging to this category. This quartet has clocked a combined 139 years as heads of state in their countries.
“Despite their pomposity and protracted absolute rule, African dictators could not deliver economic development and stability,” says another writer, Abdi Guled. He laments the fact that Africa has been failed by “ruthless eccentric leaders with an insatiable passion for self-gratification, and with an orgy of self-enrichment.”
A Zimbabwean would be hard pressed not to say “all of the above” when faced with a multiple choice question to identify the conditions that seem to spark Mugabe’s warped, intransigent, cold-hearted, incomprehensible and callous actions and pronouncements. All these traits confirm an undeniable truth, that dictators rule by fear.
The guilty fleeing
Mugabe has done many things that induce incredulity but which, from his point of view, are supposed to show bravado. Anyone who has listened to the Zimbabwean leader’s convoluted and uncompromising rhetoric knows, however, that something is amiss, that it is simply a case of the guilty fleeing when no one is pursuing them, to paraphrase the Bible.
This has been demonstrated most vividly through Mugabe’s self-deceiving belief that he can hide the truth about his repressive and tyrannical governance by muzzling the local media and banning foreign news organisations from reporting from Zimbabwe.
He is livid that those Zimbabweans who have been prevented from operating radio stations or publishing newspapers from within the country have been able to do so from countries with more civilised systems of government. Most importantly this isolationist paranoia has given rise to a penchant for deportations in a bid to keep “nosey do-gooders” who feel compassion for the suffering populace out of the country.
As an unmistakable sign of a dictator’s fear, Mugabe does not just want certain people barred from entering or expelled from the country – he wants them denounced, mocked and humiliated. United Nations torture expert, Manfred Nowak, who was deported more than a week ago, is the latest victim but by no means the last. He intended to undertake a weeklong fact-finding mission but was deported to South Africa after being detained at the airport.
It was claimed the government could not host him because it was receiving a delegation of Southern Africa Development Community (SADC) foreign ministers. But that is the lamest excuse that could be given as this did not then justify the shabby and heavy-handed manner in which the UN envoy was treated. Moreover, if being otherwise engaged was the real reason the government could not fit in Nowak’s schedule, he should have been allowed to meet other stakeholders.
The Pinochet Syndrome
Lately Mugabe seems to have displayed unusual symptoms of the Pinochet Syndrome named after former Chilean strongman Augusto Pinochet. This syndrome involves attempts to gain impunity for atrocities perpetrated during a term of office by using poor health or old age as excuses. This did not spare Pinochet from prosecution for human rights abuses perpetrated by the military junta he headed after Allende’s overthrow in 1974.
It seems that despite being 85-years-old, Mugabe does not use age or health to draw attention away from his culpability for the horrors that have happened in Zimbabwe under his marathon rule. He prefers to use the sort of bravado he displayed recently when threatening to sue Western governments that have imposed targeted sanctions on him and his inner circle for plotting to bring down his government.
What government is he referring to? Surely not the government of national unity now in place. Or was this outburst the clearest confirmation yet that Mugabe still regards Zanu (PF) as the sole ruling party despites its defeat in last year’s parliamentary poles and his own failure to win a fresh mandate in the last presidential election?

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