And the people so loved their dear president they elected his corpse

Grace Marufu Mugabe, first lady of the Republic of Zimbabwe. She is something else.

The first lady took time off her busy schedule (do-nothing big people always have busy schedules, you know) recently to deliver an important message to Zimbabweans.

According to the BBC, Ms Mugabe told a rally: “One day when God decides that Mugabe dies, we will have his corpse appear as a candidate on the ballot paper.”

Okay, but what do Zimbabwean electoral laws say about who (and/or what) can stand for president? Or the laws will simply be changed, damn them.

The first lady went on: “You will see people voting for Mugabe as a corpse. I am seriously telling you - just to show people how people love their president.”

I am seriously telling you that Zimbabweans and those interested in the wellbeing of Zimbabwe shall long remember this supremely condescending statement.

While acknowledging her beloved husband Robert Mugabe is mortal — he turned 93 the other day — the first lady is also saying he will live on. The bubble Ms Mugabe lives in allows her to engage in delusional doublethink. This is what it looks like when power, or the perception of it, gets to a person’s head.

This conceited woman is playing a bizarre trick on Zimbabweans. Basically she’s saying there is nothing Zimbabweans can do to wrest the presidency from Mugabe Inc. In any case, the ruling Zanu-PF conference of December 2016 declared president Mugabe the party’s sole candidate in the 2018 elections.

And just before his birthday, Mr Mugabe echoed his wife, although without using deranged language. He said the people (always the people nudging the reluctant hero) want him to stand again in 2018.

They “want me to stand for elections everywhere in the party ... The majority of the people feel that there is no replacement, successor who to them is acceptable, as acceptable as I am”.
More conceit.

Anyway, Mr Mugabe aside. This is about him, but more about his 51-year-old wife. She sees herself as the embodiment of Mugabeism especially once the man is a corpse.

She is saying the presidency is permanently ring-fenced for Robert Mugabe and Robert Mugabe Corpse. This shopaholic first lady has a morbid sensibility, which could easily transform into necrophilia.

In reality, if Mr Mugabe’s corpse triumphed at the polls next year, it would not govern. The dead are truly dead.

The closest thing to Mugabe’s corpse, the next of kin, is Ms Mugabe. It would follow then that Ms Mugabe actually takes the presidency.
The first lady is taking Zimbabweans for granted. The recent #ThisFlag anti-Mugabe protests do not seem to have discouraged her.

In the same corpse speech, the first lady said that anyone who was with her husband in the armed struggle for independence should forget about replacing him. If Mr Mugabe and his corpse must leave, so should the veterans and “we take over” — the we being those like Grace Mugabe who were not part of those who came out of fighting to take power at independence in 1980.

That is her more charitable way of ruling out competitors such as vice president Emmerson Mnangagwa, 70.

It is obvious Ms Mugabe looks at herself as the natural leader — by virtue of sharing the bed with H.E. the president — of that post-1980 group.

With her binge-spending ways at the expense of the taxpayer, Ms Mugabe may be a post-1980 Zimbabwean, but she is still very much a part of the current ruling elite that is running down Zimbabwe. (The veterans group, which has since dropped Mr Mugabe as patron, is seeking to “take stock of the progress of the revolution in the face of growing adversity and clear signs that we might have lost the way along the way”.)

She is not the person to lead a new generation. She’s part of the old, discredited gang.

I don’t know where Uganda is headed, but God forbid.

Mr Tabaire is the co-founder and director of programmes at African Centre for Media Excellence in Kampala.
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Twitter:@btabaire