On becoming Zimbabwe’s first Prime Minister in 1980, Robert Mugabe told Ian Smith, the defiant leader of white Rhodesa, “you have given me the jewel of Africa”. Mugabe took the jewel and shattered it, leaving a few splinters and shards strewn across a wasteland. Today, history came calling for the nonagenarian thug. He is apparently under house arrest as the army takes over and his wife flees.
Mugabe had an advantage over the first generation of post-colonial leaders from twenty years earlier: The mistakes were well known and he didn’t have to repeat them.
But he did anyway. And he managed to hang on longer than Nkrumah and Nyerere, Kenyatta and Kaunda and the other Afro-Marxist kleptocrats.
I wrote about the old monster (and his Chinese-made prosthetic) here. Half a decade or so back, I wrote: “It’s a good basic axiom that if you take a quart of ice-cream and a quart of dog feces and mix ’em together the result will taste more like the latter than the former. That’s the problem with the U.N.”
Absolutely right, if I do say so myself. When you make the free nations and the thug states members of the same club, the danger isn’t that they’ll meet each other half-way but that the free world winds up going three-quarters, seven-eighths of the way.
That’s how it went last Friday when the World Health Organization, ostensibly one of the least nutty operating units of the UN (compared with, say, the Human Rights Council), announced that Robert Mugabe was being appointed a WHO “Goodwill Ambassador”. Mr Mugabe’s idea of “goodwill” is to send his goons round to your farmhouse to announce he’s stealing your land – and, if you’re minded to object, kill your farm workers or wife or kid. When Zimbabwe’s nonagenarian monster goes Goodwill hunting, best not to stand in his path.
Yesterday the WHO was forced to back down. But how did it ever get as far as an official announcement? Mugabe’s greatest contribution to “world health” has been to raise the comparative life expectancy of every other country by dramatically reducing his own over his first quarter-century: