With Robert Mugabe and his party winning another election victory in Zimbabwe despite concerns about the odd irregularity (£) here or there, where might you go to find someone with a good word for the old thug? You don’t need more than one guess.
Yes, Apologia Central is your place, and on this occasion Roy Agyemang is your man.
For Agyemang, Mugabe is the leader who has ‘giv[en] back the African his dignity well beyond symbols of nominal independence’. Agyemang refers to Zimbabwe’s leader as ‘ostensibly… imperiling human rights’ but wisely holds back from making a judgement about that ‘ostensibly’. Instead he gives us a leader of this stamp:
I have seen Mugabe fight for his political life before, in the controversial and contested 2008 elections. Then his back was against the wall… Yet he hung on, just.
And:
Today Mugabe is back in the election trenches in a radically different political environment. Blair, Gordon Brown and George W Bush, his foremost opponents are gone.
It never fails to amaze (but also amuse) me, this trope of the wily dictator who has outlasted political leaders of democratic countries. Indeed it sometimes happens, but that’s because leaders of the latter type submit themselves to genuine democratic processes of election and potential removal – a point that should be in their favour. And yet you get this barely disguised tinge of admiration for the one clinging to power at whatever cost in violence and corruption. There’s speaking truth to power and there’s also cringing indulgence towards it.