Politics - Mugabe is a symbol of what African leaders really want: Immortality

By Patience Akumu

Source: African Arguments

"When African leaders flaunt Mugabe and say they want to get rid of the ICC, what they are really saying is: Can you just let us go back to the time when we were absolute kings and we lived forever and were reincarnated through our children and children’s children?"

It is easy to dismiss the stalwart, albeit slumping, figure of 90-year-old Zimbabwean president, Robert Mugabe, as a reminder of all that has gone wrong with the African continent; failed economies, dictatorships and the resigned inertia of the African people. But to the African Union, which recently elected him as its chair, Mugabe is a symbol of everything that could have gone right with the continent but never did.

The presidents who support Mugabe see, in him, every African nationalist who ever lived. With Mugabe in the picture, they can still maintain a connection to the dream of the united Africa that Kwame Nkrumah, Julius Nyerere, Ahmed Sekou Toure, Gamal Abdel Nasser, Mumar Gaddafi and others of this generation promulgated. By keeping Mugabe looming somewhere in the picture, they still occasionally get a whiff of the Africa they want.

When aging African leaders gather in Addis they can almost hear the chanting and marching of their younger selves; singing and dancing to nationalist songs. Down with the British. Down with the French. Down with Colonialism!

The Mugabe phenomenon is a temporary reprieve from the reality of the daily grind for Africa’s presidents. When they sit at the African Union and talk of economic reform and the continent’s vast wealth and infinite resources, the hungry, malnourished children cease to exist. The rowdy unemployed youth they left behind in the dust of their motorcades and the wailing women giving birth in hospital corridors are temporarily forgotten. Read more...