The TWAG Quote of the Week: President Mugabe on the Madhuku Strategy of Survival

Viewers, please do not adjust your sets. The fuzziness in this transmission is due to a technical fault at Pockets Hill. Any inconvenience caused is sincerely and deeply regretted, but not so sincerely or so deeply that we at ZBC are bothered to actually do anything other than issue this entirely meaningless apology.

Chenjerai Hove and Jonathan Shapiro aka Zapiro were among the members of a panel in Göteborg called "My Dictator and I." I was thoroughly amused by the title. In that great university of life, I have chosen to minor in dictator studies: I study dictators for fun. It is my mission to get to the bottom of what it is that makes our dictators so special to us even as they wreak havoc in our lives. After much study, I have distilled the appeal of the dictator to one quality: an essential cartoonishness, a zaniness fed by excess, a zaniness that very often springs from insanity.

Take our African Napoleon, Emperor Bokassa. His fondness for Berluti shoes. His title, Emperor of Central Africa. His declaration of himself as the 13th apostle of Jesus Christ. His more than 15 wives and busloads of children. Then there is the brotherly Leader -- my own Muammar, with his clothes and his Bedouin tent and his female bodyguards. And there is Jammeh of Gambia, placing healing hands on those with AIDS. I once spent an afternoon reading his website ... it was a fascinating glimpse into the mind of a deeply disturbed man who, by the way, just happens to run a country full of real people. Then there is Abacha taking debauchery and excess to such levels that his very death was coloured by talks of exotic Indian prostitutes. And of course, the last king of Scotland, Idi Amin Dada and his pet crocodiles.

From that perspective, the urbane and erudite President Mugabe is a deep disappointment. There is nothing essentially cartoonish about the man. Instead, you get a deep and fine intelligence and wit and boy, does he bring the funny. There was a report in the Guardian which began with the line"President Mugabe is not known for his sense of humour". Not known to the writer perhaps, but it is hard to listen to one of his speeches without cracking up.

No matter what your politics may be, the man is a riot.

He provides this week's TWAG Quote of the Week, this is an oldie, but it is so good that it is likely to win our end of year TWAG Quote of the Year. Here he is, having great fun with NCA Chairman Lovemore Madhuku. It may all be lost on you if you do not speak Shona. If you do, I am sure you will join me in this small moment of levity with my dictator and I.