KEY POINTS:
In the mad, mad world that is Robert Mugabe's Zimbabwe, the Lotto ticket buyer's dream of becoming an instant millionaire is an everyday reality.
With inflation at 8000 per cent and US$1 now worth one million Zimbabwe dollars, the local currency is good for nothing except starting a
fire. Who could afford to hire the convoy of trucks needed to transport the mountain of cash it would take to fund a regulation trip to the supermarket? Not that there's anything on the supermarket shelves or any staff to serve you since police arrested about 10,000 businesspeople and confiscated their stock for failing to enforce price controls.
Like many a revolutionary saviour turned tin-pot dictator, Mugabe promised a people's paradise but delivered hell on earth. The land once known as "the breadbasket of Africa" is now racked by famine. Even wildlife in game reserves is being slaughtered for food. In 20 years, life expectancy has fallen from 62 years to 38.
It wasn't always thus. The transition from white-ruled Rhodesia to black-ruled Zimbabwe in 1980 was greeted with near-universal approval and optimism, but perhaps we should have heeded the prophetic lines Shakespeare gave Julius Caesar - "Let me have men about me that are fat. Yond Cassius has a lean and hungry look; he thinks too much: such men are dangerous" - when Mugabe superseded fellow revolutionary and rival, the beefy Joshua Nkomo.
It didn't take Mugabe long to demonstrate that he wasn't a Nelson Mandela, a healing figure blessed with a saintly capacity for forgiveness and reconciliation and untouched by the paranoia and totalitarian urges which often infect leaders who cut their teeth in revolutionary struggle.
He brought in North Korean military advisers to train the Fifth Brigade, a unit made up entirely of veterans of his ZANU Party's military wing which operated outside the army's command structure, answerable only to Mugabe himself.
In 1982 the Fifth Brigade pounced on Matabeleland, Nkomo's power base: 20,000 people were butchered and the potential opposition smashed. Nkomo fled the country.
His 1984 autobiography contained this plaintive and bewildered line which pretty well summarises post-colonial Zimbabwe:
"Nothing in my life had prepared me for persecution at the hands of a Government led by black Africans."
Since then Mugabe has seldom deviated from a course that has transformed the breadbasket into a basket-case and secured his place in Africa's chamber of horrors alongside other gangster-megalomaniacs such as Amin, Mobutu, and Bokassa.
International opinion, especially in the Third World, has struggled to come to terms with Mugabe, perhaps because people find it hard to separate the individual from the cause or to accept that the euphoria which greeted the end of white rule was premature.
Nkomo notwithstanding, it's easy to assume that for a black African corrupt and tyrannical rule by one of his kind would be easier to bear than being treated as second-class by the white master. The danger with this type of rationalisation is that it can classify black-on-black tyranny as a lesser evil or give rise to the troubling proposition that because of historical and cultural factors, notably tribalism, democracy as we understand it doesn't work in Africa.
So are the usual accompaniments of one-party states - suppression of opposition, denial of human rights, corruption, incompetence - part and parcel of "the African way"? And what is the cultural context of state terror?
"They're entitled to do things their way" trips off the tongue but ignores the fact that they - in the sense of the citizenry whose Western counterparts get to choose and dump their leaders - don't have much say in the matter. This is as fatuous as critics of the Iraq war who insisted it was up to the Iraqi people to depose Saddam Hussein.
"My country right or wrong", the catch-cry of the American right during the Cold War, had a left-wing echo in "No enemies on the left." These slogans led both sets of believers down a moral and intellectual cul-de-sac, encouraging them to view matters of fact and questions of right and wrong through the distorting lenses of patriotism and ideological solidarity.
To think and act on the basis of my race or religion or skin colour right or wrong carries the same risk: that of having to defend the indefensible.
