Editorial: Zuma follows in Mugabe’s tracks

THE centenary celebrations at Fort Hare University on Friday came and went with a bang.

While President Jacob Zuma seemed to play second fiddle to his Zimbabwean counterpart and Fort Hare alumnus Robert Mugabe inside the main venue, current students were venting their unhappiness elsewhere on campus with violent protests and purloining from the buffet that was laid out for high-profile guests.

What else would you expect from a revolutionary university, you might ask?

The two leaders stood side-by-side, Mugabe – according to reports – garnering the lion’s share of adulation.

True to form, and never one to disappoint, he gave a typically defiant speech in which he justified his presidency-for-life as a necessary impediment to Western foes plotting a regime change.

“I am hanging on because I want to prevent regime change. It will never come,” Times Media reported Mugabe as saying.

The 92-year-old’s fierce crackdown on opposition accelerated Zimbabwe’s ruin and his general oppression of dissent has become a more enduring legacy than his revolutionary overthrow of white power.

The undeniable basket case that his country has become under his “reforms” continues to be blamed on the West, when in fact it has everything to do with a doddering megalomaniac who refuses to yield to change.

Just to be clear, the description applies to Mugabe, but easily interchangeable with Zuma.

Because it is not only Zuma’s obstinate refusal to bow out before completely derailing the country, but also his party’s lustful appetite for crushing opposition in parliament that invokes Mugabe’s rule.

Fort Hare has produced some fine torchbearers and once Mugabe could be counted among them, until, that is, he put himself before country, a path Zuma is already well and truly on.