Robert Mugabe: Zimbabwe's ex

We were all wrong: when asked what he thinks of his counterpart Robert Mugabe, Richard von Weizsäcker answered without hesitation: "He is a smart, prudent politician who seeks to balance." In March 1988, this was on the verge of the first state visit of a German Federal President in Zimbabwe. I too was one of Mugabe's admirers back then.

That year, President Robert Mugabe was still a respected statesman. He had led his country to independence in 1980 after the liberation struggle against the British colonial regime. His policy of reconciliation between blacks and whites has been admired throughout the world. He was regarded as a democratic hope of the continent - finally showed once that it is different in Africa.

At the state banquet, I met him for the first time personally, he seemed tidy and explained with an ambiguous smile: "We are on track - everything is going according to plan." It was unimaginable at the time that this man would mutate into a nasty despot who would ruin his country.

Martin Athens / picture alliance

Robert Mugabe and Federal President von Weizsäcker (1988)

For at first Zimbabwe flourished under his leadership, a peaceful nation, economically successful, a role model for Africa. It was only in the 1990s that the uneasiness of Mugabe's autocratic style of government grew. When I met him a second time in 1996, he responded rather harshly to my comment that his critics would call him a dictator. "Young man, you read too many British newspapers," Mugabe replied.

Mugabe has dissidents persecuted, tortured and murdered

Four years later, when the opposition first challenges its one-party regime, it strips the Democrat's mask. He cuts civil rights, gradually eliminates the independent judiciary and the free press, allows dissenters to be persecuted, tortured, eliminated.

It is an irony of history that former freedom fighter Mugabe is turning to his predecessor, Ian Smith, and is even resorting to the draconian emergency laws that the last Prime Minister of Rhodesia used against "black terrorists".

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As so often in Africa - and not only in Africa! - Mugabe wants only one more thing: to remain in power forever and ever. Even if his land is destroyed. The one-party regime is plundering the resources of Zimbabwe, Mugabe, and the corrupt party leaders to lead a life of sanctity.

When the state is bankrupt, the president calls on the people to take the colonial-robbed land. 4,000 white farmers are expropriated and driven out, the supply of staple food collapses, and hunger returns to Zimbabwe's former granary.

Despite this unprecedented decline, Mugabe is still revered by the continent's power elites because, in their eyes, he is defying the white imperialists.

Guilt is always the others

From the perspective of the potentate, others are always to blame for the decline of Zimbabwe, the British, the World Bank, the sanctions of the West. He is obsessed with the idea that dark outside powers want to overthrow him and re-colonize his country. The stubborn old man gradually loses all connection to reality, observers say he suffers from Caesar madness, the disease of power.

Behind the scenes, his wife Grace Mugabe has long since pulled the strings, a luxury-minded matron who is mocked by the people as "Gucci-Grace" and compared to Lady Macbeth. But the collapse is unstoppable, there is an internal party revolt, in December 2017, the old dictator is disempowered by the military.

Since then he sits bitterly in his villa on the edge of the capital Harare. He is seriously ill and lapses, always flying back to Singapore to be treated by the best doctors. There, far from his country of need, he died last night at the age of 95.

But the tragedy of his country is not over. Because the new president continues exactly where Robert Mugabe left off. Emmerson Mnangagwa is one of his political sons, a unitary apparatchik who has been instrumental in the plundering of the once prosperous country over the years.

The successor had promised a new beginning - and yet continues the self-destruction work. Zimbabwe is already driving towards the next hyperinflation, an estimated 90 percent of the population is out of work, in some regions people are starving, millions have fled to neighboring countries.

But in these hours after the death of the dictator, many Zimbabweans are breathing. And many celebrate that the former luminary, who has brought so much suffering and violence over their country, has finally gone to the ancestors.