Robert Mugabe with the mustache that proves he has no genuine friends

On Friday I mentioned the Twitter feed of ZANU-PF, which Robert Mugabe has put to such purposes as apologizing to Zimbabweans killed by his motorcade. The collision of Mugabe and social networking makes for a complicated mix of the horrifying and the frivolous, like when a clown drives drunk. As Morgan Tsvangirai will tell you, Mugabe is a brutal dictator. At 90, he is the last of the generation that shook off colonial rule in Africa. He is terrible at actually running his country, however, and Zimbabwe has spent the last ten years in the grip of a stunning economic crisis that has featured, along with the famines, several consecutive years of multi-hundred-percent inflation. ZANU-PF is killing Zimbabwe, both in spirit and in traffic, which makes their Twitter feed problematically hilarious.

It’s a little cluttered right now, due to this:

The opportunity to “stand a chance” of tea with Mugabe has unleashed a flood of praise fulsome in both senses of the word. Most of it is about how wonderful ZANU-PF is. Some of it is about whether Mugabe is about to die, a Castro-style rumor than ZANU-PF is constantly denying—sometimes in ways that seem deliberately absurd:

The shaky understanding of medicine expressed in that last sentiment may explain why “Cde Mugabe is in Singapore 4minor check up” and “can only meet one twit” when he gets back. His wife is similarly indisposed, not because she is sick but because she has gone to Dubai for a hat sale.

The repeatedly used abbreviation Cde stands for comrade, by the way. It’s a convention that makes the international hat sale a little sticky, since Zimbabwe’s per capita income is about $480 a year. That number is pretty much meaningless, however, as estimates of Zimbabwean inflation in recent years have yielded such numbers as a six with 107 zeroes after it. The phenomenon is an object of international study to which ZANU-PF has responded with either defiant mendacity or dark humor:

MDC is the Movement for Democratic Change, led by the aforementioned Tsvangirai. He is rumored to have won the 2008 elections against Mugabe by a narrow margin, after which Mugabe called a closed-door recount that discovered the president had actually won fair and square. Zimbabwean elections are real things to the extent that ZANU-PF allows them to be. In a tweet that has since been deleted, the party says that elections will “probably” be held this year, maybe in November. Mugabe would rather they were held right away, but MDC wants time to campaign and ensure fair balloting—a consideration ZANU-PF Twitter ascribes to a desire to “delay their loss.”

Make no mistake: Mugabe is a strongman, and his gestures at democratic rule are gestures only. That being said, he sits atop a country of 13 million people with 80% unemployment. His government is resource-poor, and a popular uprising could occur at any time; therefore, he must leaven his fear with a decent dose of love. The need to give the Zimbabwean people something in exchange for ruling them has been cited as an explanation for Mugabe’s land-reform programs, which have forcibly redistributed much of Zimbabwe’s arable land—previously owned by whites in disproportionate numbers—to black Africans. It also probably explains ZANU-PF’s plan for “indigenisation,” neatly encapsulated here:

It is difficult to tell when ZANU-PF is being serious. The problem befits the Twitter outreach of a ruling party in a fake democracy where only a very small portion of the populace has access to the internet. Why does Robert Mugabe need a Twitter account? He does not need votes, exactly, and the kind of Zimbabweans who are likely to support him—poor, less educated and traditional in their views—are hard to reach via the internet. We are therefore forced to consider the possibility that ZANU-PF uses Twitter primarily to speak to people outside of the country.

Certainly their recent call for praise has gotten a significant response from foreigners, and certainly that response has been characterized by dry humor. Herein lies the ethical danger in ZANU-PF’s Twitter feed. It is produced by one of the most destructive regimes in Africa, and it encourages us to think of that regime as unintentionally hilarious. On Twitter, ZANU-PF is funny in its ineptitude. In actual Zimbabwe, the party is less funny ha-ha and more funny nationwide famine.

Is it possible that Mugabe is using Twitter to make the international community think of his regime as kooky and ironic like the Iron Sheik, instead of immoral and murderous like a regular sheik? We don’t really have a way of knowing, which makes ZANU-PF’s Twitter feed a garden of hideous delights. Probably, it should not be funny. Possibly, reading it inures us to a real and lasting humanitarian crisis. Definitely, I cannot look away.

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