Often, politicians are either liars or bullshitter. Mugabe is worse than a hybrid liar and bullshitter.

“But the fact about himself that the liar hides is that he is attempting to lead us away from a correct apprehension of reality; we are not to know that he wants us to believe something he supposes to be false,” wrote the philosopher Harry Frankfurt.

“The fact about himself that the bullshitter hides, on the other hand, is that the truth-values of his statements are of no central interest to him; what we are not to understand is that his intention is neither to report the truth nor to conceal it. This does not mean that his speech is anarchically impulsive, but that the motive guiding and controlling it is unconcerned with how the things about which he speaks truly are.”

This is really deep!

Some of us live in a country, Zimbabwe, where the racist white colonial regime deliberately kept the black majority poor economically and, worst of all, intellectually starved. Nothing raised the whites’ fear and anger more than a black person who showed any sign of thinking for him or herself. If you are white you would automatically be appointed into a senior position supervising the blacks, for example, regardless of whether any of the blacks was better qualified and or has more experience.
As a black person one was call a “Boy” or “Girl” regardless how old one happened to be. The names had nothing to do with one’s physical age but rather everything to do with one’s mental age. Blacks, as the name suggested by their name, never developed the mental capacity of an adult and so remained a minor.

Minors cannot be trusted to make important decision on their own because they cannot be trusted to think through the consequences of such decision. Of course, it was simply unthinkable to give blacks a vote!

In white ruled Rhodesia, Ian Smith instituted an education system geared to produce “half-educated” blacks to meet the country’s growing demand for semi-skilled and skilled labour. Half-educated in that one was expected to have the book-knowledge to understand the instructions from the white-boss but was frowned upon if you showed any initiative or questioned anything – anything to show you are thinking!

However, it was in the control of the print and electronic media serving the black population that the white colonial regime’s showed its satanic intention to stifle debate and freedom of expression and thus deny the blacks the opportunity to be truly enlightened and to think for themselves.

Sadly, after independence Mugabe inherited the white colonial regime’s oppressive system lock, stock and barrel. Ever since Zimbabwe attained her independence in 1980 Zanu PF has always had a Ministry of Information who primary task was to spoon feed the government controlled print and electronic media with what the government want the people to know as contrast to what telling them the facts.

It is no exaggeration to say the Zimbabwean people are some of the brainwashed people on earth.
It is easy to see why Zanu PF has gotten away with the lie that the country’s economic mess was caused by sanctions imposed by the west. It was nonsense of course given that the country has been losing as much as $15 billion, by Mugabe’s own admission, through corruption. No country can sustain that level of wastage and prosper much less a country like Zimbabwe whose GDP is $14 billion! The people had no choice but to believe whatever the regime told them because they were denied the opportunity of an alternative narrative.

A healthy and functioning democracy is only possible when you have an electorate that is smart enough to know the facts; how else otherwise will they tell the difference between a candidate who is telling what can be done from the one promising them the moon on a silver platter but always deliver hell-on-earth.

In real advance democracy, the electorate must be even smarter to distinguish Harry Frankfurt’s liar from the bullshitter. Tsvangirai and Mugabe are neither liar nor bullshitter is the strict sense Frankfurt meant those terms because, more often than not, the two gentlemen are themselves ignorant of the facts. Tsvangirai has built his political career on promising to deliver democratic change and yet he has never ever explained what democratic change he would institute even in one area. He really has no idea. None!

Before Mugabe took over power from Ian Smith Zimbabwe was the bread basket of the region; today the nation is failing to produce enough to feed its own people. We live in the age where man’s ingenuity has turned deserts in blooming orchards and yet we are starving in a country, which by all account, is the Garden of Eden. There is the damning testimonial to Mugabe’s breath-taking incompetency – which is worse than a hybrid liar and bullshitter!

Zimbabwe has blundered from pillar to post in a nose-dive to oblivion largely because the majority of our people have been deliberately kept blind of the truth, reality and the facts by a self-serving and oppressive ruling elite. The bad situation was turned into a total disaster when pre-independence oppressive ruling elite who had common sense was replaced by the corrupt and incompetent post-independence lot!


Unless we learn to embrace knowledge and encourage the people to think for themselves and not starve them of information and stifle open and meaningful debate all dreams of Zimbabwe as a free, democratic and prosperous nation will remain just that – a dream!