"Grave Concern"

Ongoing events in Zimbabwe have earned the grave concern of close onlookers, the African Union chief executive having expressed such concern. Studied understatement to be certain. It is outside of Africa where Robert Mugabe and his militias, his police and his ardent supporters are harshly condemned. Zambia's president feelingly states "Elections held in such an environment will not only be undemocratic but will also bring embarrassment to the SADC region and the entire continent of Africa."

Well, yes. Most certainly. After all, there was ample opportunity in the last three months for the Southern African Development Community and the African Union - let alone such regional luminaries as South Africa's Thabo Mbeki (we won't even mention Nelson Mandela and Biship Desmond Tutu) to have acted decisively and without equivocation, in demanding that Robert Mugabe step down from his unsupportable position. But then, why should he, when they would not, when they hesitated to criticize, much less blame the U.K.-knighted champion of independence against colonial rule?

Much, however, has happened since that era of achieving independence. The champion of his people turned into president-for-life, anointed by God Almighty and answerable to no one. President Mugabe has had much success in putting down one 'illegal and undemocratic' insurrection after another, in the process demonstrating his proclivity for mass murder. Clearly enjoying the reputation he attained after sending his militant thugs through Matabeleland to burn villages and murder tens of thousands.

That successfully quelled that particular and inconvenient situation. He moved on to magnanimously share out prime agricultural land to his thuggish supporters by encouraging them to march on White-owned farms, sometimes brutalizing the black farm workers along with threatening and occasionally murdering the White farmers and ousting their families. Taking Zimbabwe from its primary position as regional breadbasket and exporter of food, to poverty, massive inflation and starvation.

Then he set about cleaning up the resulting poor migrants from the countryside, the squatters and street sellers, the slum dwellers who produced such a bad odour in the more refined quarters of the capital. Those unspeakably close and nasty slums must be cleared away. Their presence being so unseemly. So hundreds of thousands of street sellers and squatters were unceremoniously ousted and dumped into the countryside to fend helplessly for themselves. Adding to the already impoverished and famished millions dwelling there.

And wasn't he shocked out of his cool when Morgan Tsvangerai bettered him in the popular vote, and the Movement for Democratic Change won handily against the ZANU-PF. Ever regal and defiant, he would never surrender, for what God has achieved, no man, no political movement could ever rent asunder. He dispatched his loyal troops and his rag-tag political supporters into the countryside where his opposition had their strength, and battered and beat them, setting fire to their homes.

The police force and the military would never permit their elderly and much-respected figurehead to stand down, so the theatre of fraudulent democratic protocols was presented up front and centre, while the leaders of the opposition were repeatedly arrested, threatened, beaten. Discreetly tortured, murdered. And then attention turned to the most vulnerable assets of those leaders; their wives, their children. Vicious brutality of a more inventively atrocious nature was demonstrated, and the horror of the situation had its desired effect.

To avoid further bloodshed and additional homelessness among an already beleaguered population, Morgan Tsvangerai determined there was nothing further to be gained at this time by a continuation of the advance of his position and that of his party. He succumbed, as any humane individual would do, to the threats and the blackmail against Zimbabweans. Now it is God's turn.

Where humankind has been unable or incapable of delivering the people of Zimbabwe out of their misery, the God that Robert Mugabe claimed gave him oversight of the country in perpetuity must take issue. There are, of course, other emissaries who might have intervened, somewhat akin to prophets in their own land who garnered the respect and admiration of the entire world for their resistance to Apartheid in South Africa, for example, but they too have been loathe to step forward.

In the absence of their powerful words of condemnation against the tyrant of Zimbabwe, God will just simply have to pull his divine authority into play. We're waiting.