She was wearing a formal blouse, pencil skirt and stiletto heels; I was wearing my usual jeans, tackies and t-shirt. She exuded confidence – she nailed that job or bursary interview, I presumed. It was dusk and I was walking up the hill toward the dining hall and she was descending the hill; her meal in a Styrofoam take-away container meant that she had come from where I was going.

Because her confident gaze was fixed straight ahead, she failed to notice the blob of margarine someone had carelessly dropped right where her pencil-thin heel was soon to land. As I looked straight ahead, her vertical, poised posture suddenly turned horizontal, so that all I could see were the soles of her airborne feet. Time froze, as it often does when an accident is about to happen. After what seemed many seconds later, her spine struck paved terra firma, bone shatteringly hard. I, a brash, inconsiderate student, laughed.

Years later I look on this incident with regret. She didn’t deserve my mockery and laughter. She was an innocent, she had not caused me any harm, she was simply walking, minding her own business and happened to slip on a globule of saturated fat that sent her earthbound. But despite my mature regrets at laughing at the misfortune of another, I recently found myself laughing at the stumble and subsequent fall of a soon-to-be 91-year-old man. This time, however, I have no regrets, and I do not think I will regret the fact that I found the incident humorous in future either.

There have been three apparent schools of thought on the nonagenarian’s fall. Those within his government’s works that denied that the incident happened, those that #ROFLed at the incident – some creating memes that almost beat Kim Kardashian’s posterior at breaking the internet – and those that deemed it disrespectful to laugh at a liberator and elderly man’s fall.

The most perturbing group is the third, who require a serious talking to. I am the first to admit, on the face of it, that there is something remarkably tasteless about laughing at an old man falling. This, however, is no ordinary old man; he is a man that has been the president of a nation for 35 years, a man that took a country Bill Clinton once described as exemplary to the rest of Southern Africa on a state visit in 1996, to its current dire position.

This third group see Mugabe as a liberator, to be canonised and deified as he is added to the esteemed annals of African freedom fighters, liberators and post-colonial rulers. They remember his ascension to the Prime Ministry and eventual Presidency of Zimbabwe. They remember the man who returned to Zimbabwe in 1979 to cheering crowds at his and others negotiating prowess at the establishment of the Lancaster House Agreement. Others see him as a voice of opposition to the repressive Western Powers, a lonely but courageous voice, standing up against capitalism and foreign influences. The last African liberator still fighting colonial powers, a demigod you daren’t laugh at.

What I see in Robert Mugabe and his government cannot be described as anything but lunacy. The lunacy is no more brilliantly given life than through the utterances of Information Minister Jonathan Moyo, who issued a denial at the fact that Mugabe was brought to his knees after giving a speech in Harare on the 4^th February. Moyo’s denial comes in the wake of video footage and a series of photographs documenting Mugabe’s stagger, but the Information Minister still persisted in telling the government mouthpiece, The Herald, that: ‘’Nobody has shown any evidence of the president having fallen down because that did not happen… The hump on which the president tripped was formed by two pieces of the carpet which apparently had not been laid out properly where they joined. And to be honest with you, even Jesus, let alone you, would have also tripped in that kind of situation.”

Like Moyo, those that only saw an old man’s unfortunate trip-up or still regard Mugabe as a courageous voice of opposition, are blatantly blind to the truth. Soon after his ascension to power, scores of ‘dissidents’ in Matabeleland were murdered by his government. Under Tony Blair, the Lancaster House Agreement – the agreement entered into between Zimbabwe and the Thatcher-led government, the agreement that was supposed to determine equitable land redistribution – was reneged upon. In as much as Blair’s government horribly flouted international laws – bilateral agreements between nations are not dependent on whom the incumbent or governing party is, they apply between countries – Mugabe’s accelerated land redistribution of 2000 was not the answer.

In fact Blair’s flouting of international law was not actually the spark that set the land seizure fire alight. A February 2000 referendum for a new constitution, which would have empowered the Zimbabwean government to acquire land without compensation; despite vast support in the media; failed to pass, being defeated 55% to 45%. A few days later, the pro-Mugabe War Veterans Association organised several people, many too young to be military veterans of any sorts, to seize farms across Zimbabwe. Love or hate “the West”, but in reaction to the farm seizures, the United States government put the Zimbabwean government on a credit freeze in 2001, France and many European nations seized Mugabe’s and many of his associates personal, foreign assets and the Zimbabwean economy spiralled down an inflation drain.

Assuming that one bought into the argument that the Zimbabwean economy failed due to western tempering, how does one than justify the fact that the 12-year overdue Khampepe report found that the 2002 Zimbabwe elections were in fact not free and fair? An investigation conducted by Johannesburg High Court Judge Sisi Khampepe and then Pretoria High Court Judge Dikgang Moseneke, into the legitimacy of the 2002 Zimbabwean elections, found that the elections were bedevilled by intimidation, the murder of mostly opposition party members and amendments of citizenry laws to favour the governing party in the urban areas.

Those that feel that it is wrong to laugh at a leader like Mugabe’s fall or deny that it ever happened, are encumbered by a prevalent syndrome across the continent; a failure to recognise that some of those African leaders that played a seminal role in the liberation of their people are the very same leaders that oppress and repress their people today. Corruption, power hunger, the political oppression of the opposition and a failure to govern on behalf of the masses has become the sad norm across the continent. What Moyo’s denial illustrates is that these leaders have become so emboldened by their power that they believe that they can convince the masses that they had not seen what was laid bare for the world to see.

What Mugabe exemplifies is that leadership falls, even on the pedestals of liberators. The mechanism of democracy is what should keep these leaders upright and on the straight path, but all too often, we, the people, return these staggering fools to power. Until we, the people, understand that leadership like this may have liberated us decades ago, but are now the cause of our woes today, what is the point of liberation? DM