Teflon Bob, the Don of the Republic

By Fungayi Mukosera

The British have had their Teflon Tony (Blair), the Gambino mafia crowned their own Teflon Don but I think it is time now we crown ours; Teflon Bob, the Don of the Republic. 

When other presidents like Yahya Jammeh of Gambia, Joseph Kabila of DRC and Prime Ministers like Tom Thabane right now dreading to be away from their offices for long, Mugabe finds it sensible to extend his holidays away.

In fact he has been up in the air more often than he has been on Zimbabwean soil ever since he came from his prolonged vacation in Singapore.

For the Zambian presidential inauguration, he never bothered to wait for the pronouncement of the victor; he just took to the sky and went to Zambia.

This is a mind-blowing display of political prowess for a president presiding over a torn apart revolutionary party, a temper fluid neglected population and an economy in abject doldrums.

It just goes on to explain how he has well mastered the Stalinist ideology of in total harnessing of power, not only from the potential antagonists but from the people en masse. Stalin like many other dictators believed not in keeping peace through provision but through consolidating power and making sure that the last head up was his.

Niccolo Machiavelli in his book, The Prince wrote, ‘men ought to be indulged or utterly destroyed, for if you merely offend them they take vengeance but if you injure them greatly they are unable to retaliate, so that the injury done to a man ought to be such that vengeance cannot be feared.’

This is typical of what Mugabe has done, not just to the ‘gamatox cabal’ but to the generality of Zimbabwe. We have been utterly destroyed so bad that we have gone beyond the mental state of finding the right words to describe our problem of the day.

In fact, we are turning against ourselves and apportion blame amongst fellow ordinary countrymen for not doing what in any normal situation they could not do but the elect in power.

Last year this time Mugabe flew into a Tokwe Mukosi flood crisis, besides declaring the place a disaster area in absentia, he never visited the place or mentioned it when he came back. We never questioned much; in fact, we blamed each other and civil society groups for not doing enough to the flood victims.

Up to now, the victims of the floods have gone from being victims of the elements to being victim of state prosecutional injustices and negligence. It just shows that the ‘Don’ of the Dzimbahwe has downloaded well the Machiavellian ‘utter destruction’ panacea to maintain a firm grip on us and paralyse with no room left for vengeance.

With a shrinking and free falling industry and economy, most people have now given up on pointing to the right man in charge of policy to asking the question and it alone that ‘what should we do as ordinary Zimbabweans to revive the ailing economy’.

Good as the question sounds but it will not mean anything in a despotic country where one flourishes only when you have danced to the tune of the ‘Don’.

As far as i see it, Zimbabwe’s hopes have gone far beyond reforms and policy clarification but the absence of Mugabe. His love of power and obeisance has gone far beyond the consideration of those that he purports to be leading.

He has became unto himself a Pan Africanist without the people and the place. The millions that he spends in Asia and even the kind of fire sale he is conducting with our mineral resources to China shows that only his skin and tone still remain African but his heart and mind are no longer with the people.