Analysis: Rumours of Mugabe’s death almost always greatly exaggerated

The west may get excited about rumours that Robert Mugabe is on his deathbed, but most Zimbabweans don’t. The president arrived in Harare yesterday morning looking fit and sprightly, quashing claims the 88-year-old was seriously ill in hospital in Singapore.

“As you can see, the man is as fit as a fiddle,” information minister Webster Shamu told reporters, some of whom had been camped out at the airport for nearly 24 hours.

Zimbabweans are used to their aged leader miraculously returning from the dead. If every rumour is to be believed, he does it around once every two months. The media frenzy surrounding Mugabe’s health never fails to anger his ZANU-PF party – and it also annoys Zimbabweans. “To tell the truth we’re bored with all the Mugabe on his deathbed rumours,” online pressure group Kubatana said in a statement.

The latest one started outside Zimbabwe on a slow news day. The Zimbabwe Mail, a hitherto little-known news site manned by Zimbabweans in the diaspora, ran a story late on Monday quoting an unnamed senior ZANU-PF official who claimed Mugabe was “battling for his life in Singapore.” Family members had flown to be at his bedside, the site said.

Despite the source, the story was picked up by several international news outlets and took on a life of its own on Twitter. Local journalists were forced to backpedal once again. The official line was that the president and his wife Grace were taking an Easter holiday while sorting out their daughter Bona’s registration for post-graduate studies in Singapore. Eventually Newsday, a respected daily newspaper, found an official willing to say the president had sought treatment for a build-up of pressure in the eye.

Mugabe’s eye problems are well documented: recent Wikileaks documents show he had consulted doctors in Madrid in 2002. The president is understood to have undergone a cataract operation and possible post-op treatment last year in the Far East. Many suspect eye problems are used as a cover for his cancer therapy: on this trip, it appears they may not have been.

The regime sees the west’s anticipation of Mugabe’s demise as evidence of an imperialist plot. Even his enemies don’t want him dead. Families of the victims of the Gukurahundi massacres in rural Matabeleland in the 1980s want him to face justice for crimes against humanity. Others simply want him to live long enough to be humiliated in free and fair elections. Celebrating death is “unAfrican”, as state ZBC radio primly reminded listeners yesterday. That is why when the president does die, his opponents in the Movement for Democratic Change will be the first not only to offer their condolences, but also to sing his praises and sound as if they mean them.

The fear is that ZANU-PF will now clamp down further on the free press – even though they weren’t the originators of the story. Andrew Moyse, head of the Media Monitoring Project Zimbabwe, said yesterday he was sure “it will provide them with the pretext to resort to the laws that restrict and suffocate independent media.”