Gay talk hands Robert Mugabe,Yoweri Kaguta Museveni new lease of life

By Henry Munene

On Friday last week, Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe turned 90. Comrade Bob, who The Guardian recently termed a ‘living caricature of despotism’, was President even before I was born. Now in his seventh term, this veritable anthill of the savannah has an uncanny knack for buying longevity in power.

A joke doing the rounds on social media has it that when he was recently asked whether it was time to say bye to Zimbabweans, he quipped: “Where are they (the Zimbabweans) going?”

And when asked whether 34 years at the helm was not a very long time in power, he retorted, with an upturned nose: “Have you posed the same question to Queen Elizabeth?”

This decidedly witty ‘international pariah’ who presides over a virtually comatose economy, is one of the living longest serving presidents in Africa, coming after Equatorial Guinea’s Teodoro Obiang Nguema, and Angola’s Jose Eduardo dos Santos. Following Comrade Bob is Uganda President Yoweri Kaguta Museveni.

Mugabe and Museveni, as keen observers have pointed out, have leveraged the power of incumbency to stifle opposition.

Mugabe almost lost power to Morgan Tsvangirai in the first round of the 2008 elections. In the disputed polls, Tsvangirai garnered 47.8 per cent of the votes against Mugabe’s 43.2 per cent, according to the official results, but, according to Tsvangirai, the results were cooked in the one month between actual voting and announcement. 

With 200 people dead, Tsvangirai changed his mind about participating in the second round, paving way for the creation of a grand coalition, where he served as prime minister. After the close shave, many expected Tsvangirai to finally trounce Mugabe in August last year, but the latter romped back to power with a whopping 61 per cent win! 

In the February 2006 elections, Museveni’s vice-like stranglehold on power also seemed on the verge of buckling under an incessant onslaught from one Warren Kizza Besigye Kifefe, commonly known as Kizza Besigye. Well, the Supreme Court voted 4-3 in favour of Museveni. Many expected the tables to turn in 2011, but Museveni, whitewashed Besigye even more emphatically.

So it was that by September last year, Mugabe and Museveni were firmly ensconced in power. And questions were re-emerging on the two men’s long stay in power.

Then came the Kenyan cases at the International Criminal Court in The Hague. Mugabe and Museveni joined the ‘anti-imperialist’ chorus against the West, ostensibly to express solidarity with African leaders with cases at the ICC; so much that the question of longevity was overshadowed.

And now, just when Museveni and Mugabe’s stay in power was about to come to the fore, again, came the question of gay and lesbian rights. It is easily the hottest socio-political potato right now.

Soon M7 was back in the news when he ignored a warning from US President Barack Obama and signed a Bill that comes with a life sentence for gay sex and same-sex marriage. Museveni had earlier kept the Bill on hold, reportedly pending scientific evidence to convince him that someone could actually be born gay.

The move, which saw Ugandan and even Kenyan supporters chanting pro-M7 slogans in the streets, seems to have momentarily handed Museveni some political lifeline, as it aptly masks the age-old question of whether he should run for office yet again.       

Mugabe, on his part, capitalised on the anti-gay attitude of many of his citizens when, during his inauguration, he described gays in singularly unpalatable terms.

But with so many problems plaguing our countries – such as people eating puppies as leaders argue over who is more senior – anti-gay laws are not a priority. There is also the futility of seeking to legislate on matters that people undertake behind closed doors.

So, as the West uses carrot-and-stick tactics to make gays look cool among people with a largely different cultural view, there is no doubt that in the short-term, they may just hand Mugabe and Museveni a new lease of life.