THE last time I discussed the dire situation in the southern African country of Zimbabwe I expressed the fervent hope its army intervene and overthrow the increasingly despotic regime of Robert Mugabe. This wasn’t a call I made lightly. I am all too well aware of the tragic circumstances that have resulted for some post-colonial African peoples when military figures have stepped into that continent’s political arena. In most instances military coups - even when they have popular backing and are aimed against manifestly corrupt civilian administrations - do not benefit the people in whose name they are launched.

In fact, the installation of military strong men has usually resulted in the creation of dictatorships even more brutal than the ones they replace - dictatorships which bring more grief to the nations in question.But in the case of Zimbabwe, my wish for the military to depose Mugabe is based on the hope the armed forces remember who it is they really are sworn to protect and serve - the people of that country rather than its feckless and domineering leadership.

In recent months the situation in Zimbabwe has grown increasingly worse. The Mugabe regime has redoubled its efforts to repress its own people, to stamp out any potential pockets of resistance to its authoritarian policies. In fact, in a bitter irony, the steel-fisted actions of the Mugabe regime increasingly resemble those employed by Ian Smith’s white minority government at the height of the civil war in the then Rhodesia during the 1970s.

The most shameful moment came when Mugabe sent the military and the bulldozers into the shanty towns surrounding the country’s capital city, Harare. Teeming with tens of thousands of unemployed Zimbabweans who have lost their livelihoods in recent years as a direct result of Mugabe’s deranged economic policies, the people who huddled in these makeshift villages - these African equivalent of the “Hoovervilles” that sprung up like mushroom-growths all across the US when President Herbert Hoover ushered in the Great Depression in 1929 - literally had nowhere else to go.

And when Mugabe sent his armed goons into these shanties, he said they were simply “throwing the garbage out” - a statement that invalidates any claim he may have once had to being an African liberator during the war against the Ian Smith regime.

Today Mugabe has much more in common with that long list of post-colonial African leaders who have betrayed the great dream of African liberation and national self-determination. He deserves to spend eternity in that circle of hell which is reserved for those who are guilty of treachery along with all of the others who have oppressed the African peoples for their own gain: the slavers, the colonial rulers who absorbed great tracts of Africa into their overseas empires and those African rulers who have ignored the interests and needs of their own people and looted their countries (and allowed outside interests to loot them as well - as long as the kickbacks are big enough).

Even though it made sense to redistribute the rich Zimbabwean farming lands which were owned almost exclusively by whites who gained control of these properties during the colonial era, Mugabe’s handling of the situation was farcical from the outset — farcical and then, later, tragic.

Mugabe, it seems, was less interested in correcting the marked racial imbalance which existed when it came to ownership of Zimbabwe’s farming industry than he was in paying off debts to a small group of cronies from the civil war. And he was not interested at all in maintaining the productivity of the farms, productivity which had once earned Zimbabwe the reputation as “The Breadbasket of Africa”. For not only did Zimbabwe’s farms feed the country, the surpluses were usually so staggeringly large they formed a very large part of the country’s exports to other African countries.

A great deal of care and thought should have gone into the programme to dismantle a farming system that was the envy of the African continent. That only recklessness informed Mugabe’s land redistribution scheme is evident in the fact that 45 percent of Zimbabwe’s population is now classified as malnourished. Not only can Zimbabwe barely feed itself but there are no crop surpluses to be exported, cutting off a major source of much-needed foreign exchange for Harare.

The economic and social consequences of a programme that was never predicated on righting a legitimate historical wrong - no matter what Mugabe’s propaganda says - can be seen throughout Zimbabwe.

Today Zimbabwe, once one of the richest countries in Africa, now holds the dubious distinction of having one of the fastest shrinking economies in the world.

Having effectively destroyed a full 40 percent of its economic potential as a result of implementing the land redistribution programme, the country’s unemployment rate is now 80 percent and inflation is expected to reach a staggering 4000 percent by the end of this year. Life expectancy in Zimbabwe is now just 34 years, perhaps the lowest in the world.

Mugabe still likes to blame the outside world for the catastrophe which has befallen his country in recent years. But it is clear to any level-headed observer that it is in fact his own oppressive policies that are at the core of Zimbabwe’s suffering. A wave of economic refugees is washing up on the borders of neighbouring African countries because of these policies - some observers estimate as many as three-to-four million Zimbabweans out of a total population of just over 12 million have left their homeland since the country’s economic infrastructure began to collapse.

Yet rather than attempt to arrest Zimbabwe’s ongoing decline, rather than try to correct some of his own wrongheaded policies, Mugabe continues to harrass and oppress any potential pockets of resistance to his tyrannical rule.

In recent days Mugabe has announced that it’s open season on members of the country’s Opposition, deploying both the police and members of the armed forces to crack down on them. Opposition Leader Morgan Tsvangirl was brutally attacked along with members of his inner-circle and Mugabe has repeatedly threatened to jail all Opposition Members of Parliament on trumped up charges of “treason” if they publicly challenge his policies.

It might be tempting for some to speculate Mugabe’s reign of terror only began to manifest itself in recent times, following the failure of his land redistribution programme and the social and economic Domino Effect it created. But signs of Mugabe’s incipient megalomania have been there since the time the new nation state of Zimbabwe was declared in 1980.

At that time Mugabe was involved in another power struggle, this one with Joshua Nkomo - his ally of convenience during the war against Ian Smith. Nkomo had entered the liberation struggle long before Mugabe and headed a Zambian-based army of freedom fighters called the Zimbabwe African People’s Union (ZAPU). Initially appointed to the new Zimbabwean Cabinet by Mugabe - whose Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU) had won the first free elections in the country — in 1982 Nkomo was accused of plotting a coup.

In a public statement, Mugabe said that “ZAPU and its leader, Dr. Joshua Nkomo, are like a cobra in a house. The only way to deal effectively with a snake is to strike and destroy its head.” Consequentlly he unleashed the notorious Fifth Brigade on Nkomo’s Matabeleland homeland in the operation known as Gukurahundi in an attempt to destroy ZAPU and create a one-party state.

Trained by members of the North Korean military, the Zimbabwean military’s Fifth Brigade carried out a ruthless campaign of politically-motivated terrorism against the people who formed Nkomo’s tribal power base.

Nkomo eventually fled Zimbabwe, his ZAPU grouping was absorbed by Mugabe’s ZANU and the man once described as the father of his nation said sadly from exile in London: “... nothing in my life had prepared me for persecution at the hands of a government led by black Africans.”

The persecution of Nkomo’s Matebeland supporters was largely ignored by a world that was then more focussed on the revolutionary changes taking place in South Africa at the same time.

Now, as another Mugabe-orchestrated disaster overtakes the long-suffering people of Zimbabwe, I cannot believe that the army - or the people themselves - will not eventually take up arms against their oppressor.

And when that time comes, I hope and pray Zimbabwe’s new leadership can make a reality out of Mugabe’s crass and self-serving statement: “We pride ourselves as being top, really, on the African ladder ... We feel that we have actually been advancing rather than going backwards.”

The people of that country deserve no less.