From the Los Angeles Times

Zimbabwe's Ahab

Robert Mugabe, poised to steal another election, has led his nation to ruin.

By Peter Godwin

March 25, 2008

Once it was Africa's shining city on a hill, a beacon of prosperity and economic growth in the gloom of a continent shrouded by poverty. Emerging in 1980 from a seven-year civil war against white settler rule, the newly independent nation of Zimbabwe embraced racial reconciliation and invited the country's whites (one in 20 of the population) to remain and contribute to the new nation.

I was one of those who gladly dismissed Rhodesia and became Zimbabwean. Upon the firm economic infrastructure he had inherited, Robert Mugabe, our first black leader, built a health and educational system that was the envy of Africa. Zimbabwe became the continent's most literate country, with its highest per capita income. Zimbabwe easily fed itself and had plenty left over to export to its famine-prone neighbors.

I remember crisscrossing the continent then as Africa correspondent for a British newspaper, and each time I returned to the newly renamed capital of Harare (previously it had been Salisbury), I was reminded that in comparison to what surrounded it, Zimbabwe was like Switzerland. The roads were well maintained, the elevators worked, electricity was constant, you could drink the water, the steaks were world-renowned. The Zimbabwe dollar was at near parity with its American namesake.

Fast forward to today, and the country is unrecognizable.

Zimbabwe now has the fastest-shrinking peacetime economy in the world. This week, one U.S. dollar (even in its newly enfeebled state) will fetch you 55 million Zimbabwe dollars on the street. Hyperinflation there has soared well above 100,000% -- way past what it was in the Weimar Republic, when Germans loaded up wheelbarrows with money to go grocery shopping. Zimbabweans must carry huge wads of cash around in shopping bags, and by the time they reach the checkout desk at the shortage-racked supermarkets, the prices have already gone up.

Commercial agriculture -- the backbone of the economy -- lies shattered. All but a few of the country's 5,000 large-scale farmers, most of whom were white, have been run off their properties by government-backed squatters and militia. From being a food exporter, Zimbabwe would now starve without U.N. famine relief. And even with it, half the population is malnourished. Education and healthcare have collapsed. Ravaged by AIDS, life expectancy has plummeted from around 60 years old to about 35, the world's lowest. Zimbabwe has more orphans per capita than almost any other country on the planet. Water is undrinkable, power infrequent, roads potholed, fuel scarce, corruption endemic.

My own parents, an engineer and a doctor and better off than most, still lost everything as I watched from my new home in New York, frequently returning to check on them and try to persuade them to leave. But they insisted on staying. By the time my father died in 2004, their pensions, life insurance and stocks were worthless.

Why? It comes down to one man: Robert Mugabe, now in his 28th year in power and still refusing to go. Like Sampson, he would rather pull the temple down around him, would rather destroy Zimbabwe than leave office. The damage he has wrought will take generations to repair.

The country's free-fall into failed statehood began in earnest in 2000. That was when the electorate tired of him and his increasingly imperious one-party rule and voted down his attempt to do away with term limits so that he could continue as president. Mugabe, the onetime guerrilla leader who now saw himself as liberator of the country, reacted with astonishing venom. He turned on the newly emboldened black opposition, harassing, imprisoning and torturing their supporters. And those white commercial farmers he'd invited to remain in 1980 he threw off the land, distributing their farms among his cronies, which helped precipitate the economic catastrophe because few of them had the inclination or technical know-how to farm.

Mugabe became an African Ahab, Melville's "monomaniacal commander," marinating in a toxic brew of hate and denial as he plunged his ship of state down into the dark vortex, railing all the while from the quarterdeck against the great white whale. He blamed Zimbabwe's plunge on the largely symbolic sanctions imposed by the West. And he refused to negotiate with his own, overwhelmingly black, opposition, dismissing them as lackeys of Britain, the former colonial power.

Why do Zimbabweans continue to put up with Mugabe? In large numbers, they don't. Since 2000, most have tried to vote against him in presidential elections, but these were blatantly rigged. Now, as many as 70% of those between 18 and 60 have left the country to live and work elsewhere. It's an exodus on a par with the flood of Irish immigrants into America after the potato famine. And it's also the key to how the shattered Zimbabwe state survives -- remittances from its diaspora. People like me sending hard currency back to family and friends. By doing so, we inadvertently assist Mugabe to survive too.

Now a sprightly 84 years old, Mugabe has recently moved into a $26-million palace, with 25 bedroom suites, furnished with Sun King flourishes. He rules as a dictator through a network of army officers.

It is on them that he will rely once more to mastermind the presidential election Saturday. It is an election in name only, with no hope of being "free and fair." Mugabe has already rejected various constitutional reforms backed by South Africa. Electoral rolls are a joke, stuffed with fictitious voters. Police officers are to be allowed into voting booths "to assist illiterate voters." And votes are to be counted not at individual polling stations but at a single "national command center" staffed by senior army officers, which is where the rigging will likely take place.

Mugabe has banned most independent observers, instead inviting teams from China, Russia, Iran and Angola -- nations with no modern history of free and fair democracy. And finally, the more than 4 million in the Zimbabwe diaspora are not allowed postal votes.

None of this bodes well for Mugabe's two main opponents. Morgan Tsvangirai, of the Movement for Democratic Change, is a veteran of several rigged poll defeats and seems unlikely to fare any better this time, despite the enthusiastic crowds he draws to his rallies. Mugabe's other threat is Simba Makoni, a member of Mugabe's own politburo until he was expelled recently for daring to compete for the presidency.

The only real hope is that the men responsible for carrying out the rigging -- Mugabe's secret police, his senior government apparatchiks and the army leadership -- may have lost faith in their longtime leader. Perhaps they will refuse to fiddle the vote, especially because Makoni, the former Cabinet minister, is running as a "reformist" candidate, presenting the prospect of change with continuity.

It is a very slim prospect.

Peter Godwin is the author of "When a Crocodile Eats the Sun -- A Memoir of Africa," which describes the collapse of Zimbabwe and the disintegration of his family there.