Happy Birthday, Cde President

Zimbabwe’s President Robert Gabriel Mugabe on this day turns 90.

He is a a man who has divided opinion straight down the middle. There are those who live in the priviledge of the West or pander to its ideals of Africa and then the rest of the developing world.

You see, one of the most pivotal things of Mugabe’s legacy is encapsulated in this statement:

We pride ourselves as being top, really, on the African ladder… We feel that we have actually been advancing rather than going backwards.

While many who have had access to do so will say that Zimbabwe is worse of than the 80s or even Rhodesia, while, in terms of the economy, it may seem so on face value, at the core of everything, it is not so.

Zimbabwe has moved light years ahead of what it was before in terms of its mind state. At no time in our modern history were so many people involved in the shaping of the country in whatever form they could. At no point did a generation have the opportunity to be actors in the creation of a Zimbabwe.

Where we are is captured again quite candidly in another Mugabe quote:

There are things one must do for oneself.

That, friends, is his crowning glory. The fact that the Zimbabwean walks down the path of invention and self-determination. Are we where we should be? Of course not. But we now stand in good stead to build on what has been set, if we embrace this legacy. It is up to us to move it all forward.

As for how to get to his age, this is what the president said: