A letter to Zimbabwe

With a recovery plan attached

WHAT DOES a country do with a used dictator? That’s the question facing Zimbabwe, and here’s an answer in the form of a 12-step recovery program:

  1. Stop treating the country’s president as some kind of Washington or Lincoln instead of the 93-year-old rogue he is.

  2. Call things by their right names. A dictator is a dictator is a dictator, and calling him anything else is delusionary.

  3. Stop the cycle of violence. Robert Mugabe has never been an earnest pacifist like Gandhi; wherever he’s gone, violence has been sure to follow. Why continue this self-defeating pattern to no purpose except to make the dark continent darker?

  4. Deprive this superannuated killer of the publicity he thrives on. Take away his audience. His now empty bravado has almost played out; let it end and leave him speaking to a gullible audience of only one: his wretched self.

  5. Forget the rhetoric of revolution and speak instead of the beauty of peace, and so assure it in a new age of amity. To quote a great American general and oft underestimated statesman by the name of U.S. Grant: Let us have peace.

  6. Cut off the old dictator’s political oxygen, his press conferences, grand pronunciamentos and all such inflated twaddle. Let him suffer the fate of far more talented dictators who were left to twist in the wind on some largely deserted isle far away from the main. The way Napoleon Bonaparte was exiled first to Elba and, when that isle proved insufficient to hold him, to St. Helena in the South Atlantic.

  7. Send the tyrant off with a trunkful of fancy dress uniforms so he can preen and shout all by himself. Let him walk the beach for an hour a day in splendid isolation. Make him an example that other little Caesars will not rush to follow. Perhaps some day, if fortune smiles, he can be joined by the Putins and Xis of this troubled world, each sentenced to his own separate bungalow surrounded by barbed wire and armed guards, to assure their isolation.

  8. The country that Robert Mugabe ran like his family business needs to send out notices announcing that it is under new and better management. And if the old participants in the family business are falling out with each other, so much the better for free men and women. The forces of freedom can only prosper when tyrants are divided in opposing them.

  9. Invite the world to come and do trouble-free business in a newly freed Zimbabwe. The more, the merrier. Lest we forget, Zimbabwe is a mineral-rich domain, and the world’s investors have been waiting too long for it to join the community of stable nations.

  10. Be true to your own tribal and national traditions. And if none come to mind at the moment, just invent some. Just as each state of our own American union has a distinctive history and character.

  11. Enough photographs of Zimbabwe’s elite in their military garb. How about politicians who look like politicians and not colonels planning a coup?

  12. Keep truckin’ away, Zimbabweans, for democracy is hard work that requires a lot of due diligence, mutual respect and lasting vigilance. Getting rid of the dictator(s) may be the easy part. Maintaining whatever they’ve left of freedom will be the greater challenge. Remember that free men and women around the globe are rooting for your success. Onward and upward, Zimbabweans—for there’s scarcely any other way to go after Robert Mugabe’s much too long reign of error.

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