Give Mugabe a break...

My first sight of the above picture of President Robert Mugabe made me take a second look: What had they done to the man?

Well, it was not a cartoon. It was a genuine photograph of a man sitting down and sort of sleeping his head off.

He was more than sleeping - he was in "Slumberland".

You could fire a shotgun in the air next to his ear, but I doubt if it would have opened any of his eyes or shake a nerve.

Much has happened to the country and to Mugabe himself for ordinary people not to wonder what had happened to him.

What has changed him?


Okay, he is an old man - by the time they are 91 most men have gone to the Happy Hunting Grounds.

But is this enough to reduce him to a such a sight?

The story told us he was attending a ceremony during which the newly-elected president of the Nigerian republic was being inaugurated.

Was this ceremony so boring it would send a man - even at 91 - to sleep? No, I decided.

That was not it. This man was very tired, bored and very old. He had absolutely no interest whatsoever in what was happening around him.

He looked determined to sleep until kingdom come.

As a human being, I felt deeply sorry for him.

This man was the president of my country.

On other occasions, he exuded the aura of power, the respect of a man of power, of the world, of love for his people and even for strangers, as long as they had no rifles pointed at him like Ian Smith's Selous Scouts.

What had happened to him? What had his people done to him?

What had we journalists done to him, apart from criticising him?

Were there other events, preceding this one, which had caused him to change so drastically - his young wife and his party perhaps?

Had they called him names that had made him lose all hope in life?

Frankly, as a journalist who has known Robert Mugabe since he returned to his country in 1960, I was shocked.

Had he been overwhelmed by these recent challenges facing his party?

The likelihood of that being the cause of his state of mind was worth considering. Had he reached the end of the line?

Let them do what they wanted to do. He had no more interest in whatever they were planning. He was out of it. FINITO.

I have warned about the tragedy of Habib Bourguiba, the Tunisian leader who ended up in a mental house because he had lost all sense of direction.

An incident of relevant poignancy had him asking one Cabinet minister during a meeting: "Who are you? What are doing here?"

I admit the exact scenario was disputed by his supporters.

His enemies had cooked up the story - they claimed. But at the end of the day, they could not let the countryman be left in the hands a man like that.

No-one I know has spoken of such incidents in Mugabe's Cabinet, although he and some of his colleagues have exchanged what amount to obscenities.

But the man being photographed in slumber in a foreign country would not be identified as Robert Gabriel Mugabe, at his most normal.

Something dangerous had happened to him.

We need to know what - NOW.