Robert Mugabe: The Will to Power and Crisis of the Paradigm of War

Abstract

Over the years, people, black and white, high and low, have struggled to makes sense of Robert Gabriel Mugabe, leader of the ruling ZANU-PF party and current president of Zimbabwe. Some people view him as great nationalist revolutionary, a great liberator, and father of the nation while others think of him as a tyrant, a dictator, and the undertaker of the nation (Norman 2008; Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2009b: 1141). Mugabe has now embraced the politics of resentment and is constantly on a warpath, with his real and imagined enemies threatened with violence and elimination. He identifies the source of his country’s problems as his enemies’ making and the solution to them as the violent elimination of such enemies. The language of enemies, war, guns, violence, and elimination has dominated his political life spurning decades now. This chapter thus argues that Zimbabwe is entangled in an unprecedented economic and political crisis because of perpetuation of a vicious paradigm of war by Mugabe and his ZANU-PF party, which claims to be the alpha and omega of the political leadership of the country through its declaration that it alone has primal legitimacy deriving not from elections, but from active participation in the epic anticolonial struggle (Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2014).