Robert Mugabe's lavish birthday celebrations puts the broken legacy he has left for Zimbabwe in spotlight

By Hopewell Rugoho-Chin'ono: ITV News Africa Producer

As Zimbabwe’s president Robert Mugabe celebrated his 91st birthday with a feast fit for a medieval King, it is fair to say that for the average Zimbabwean, it is an opportune moment to reflect on the state of affairs in this Southern African country.

A country which was once dubbed the bread basket of Africa for its proficient ability to feed its people and those beyond its borders, not just in Africa, but the fruit and vegetable fridges of Tescos and the meat stalls at London’s Smithfield meat market.

The emergency of a once credible opposition on the turn of the century which saw Robert Mugabe throw his toys out of the pram resulted on the bedrock of Zimbabwe’s economy, agriculture, being destroyed by an ill thought out land reform program which Mugabe this week, in a State television interview to celebrate his birthday, admitted to being a failure.

However, so many things are proving to be a failure for Mugabe’s regime and invariably for the country as a whole.

I was one of the journalists working in Africa and covering Zimbabwe who thought that Mugabe’s seventh term in office would be based on righting the wrongs of his past rule in order to salvage what was left of his broken legacy.

One such area that I thought would be different during Mugabe’s last term in office considering his age was his regime’s engagement with the media.

After spending an unhappy and tumultuous eight-year marriage with the fourth estate which resulted in detentions, deportations and banning of journalists and bombings of newspaper printing presses and property.

The logical thing that most of us in the media thought would happen was for Mugabe to let the media do its work unhindered considering that the once robust opposition is now fragmented.

Few in the media thought that there would be any need to go back to the dark days where being a journalist would be criminalised with harassment and deportations.

These acts were partly as a result of the draconian Access to Information and Protection of Privacy Act (AIPPA) which was enacted in 2002 in order to control the operations of the media after the Mugabe regime accused the press of being an extension of the so-called regime change agenda.

AIPPA, a law that was once described by one of ZANU PF’s founders and Mugabe’s liberation war partner Edson Zvobgo as "the most serious assault on our constitutional liberties since independence" is back with a ridiculous vengeance.

The man who is credited with formulating this act is Professor Jonathan Moyo, once Mugabe’s leading critic who found himself serving the man he once reviled as his Information Minister in 2000.

I personally fell foul to this act twice in 2004 and 2008 after the regime accused me of working with and for Western media, an act synonymous with treachery according to the regime’s uncritical gatekeepers.

Jonathan Moyo had been thrown out of government in 2004, allegedly for conspiring against Robert Mugabe resulting in him spending a four-year spell in the political wilderness where he retained his coveted crown as Mugabe’s chief critic of choice for sound bite hunters.

Most foreign correspondents that interacted with Jonathan Moyo during his time out of government were convinced that, were he to get a second opportunity to serve as Mugabe’s information minister, the days of the ministry being used as the regime’s instrument of choice to denying journalists the right to practicing their craft would be over.

This was not just based on some wild and misplaced confidence in the man who once criminalised journalism; this was based on the Moyo’s promises he made at any given opportunity he got to interact with the media when he was out of government.

Robert Mugabe won a disputed landslide election in 2013 and as if to show journalists that this time Mugabe intended the Information portfolio to be used responsibly, he reappointed his veteran critic, Jonathan Moyo.

Moyo made an early effort of interacting with the media cordially and continued on his promises to be civil until an incident happened on February 4 when Robert Mugabe missed a step and fell to the ground at Harare International Airport.

The media was instructed by the dreaded secret service to delete all the images of the incident from their cameras.

Unbeknown to the secret service, propaganda and technology are not Siamese twins.

Regardless of the unhelpful instruction to the media to delete the images of the President falling down, the pictures appeared immediately after the incident on news websites and international television.

The regime realised that technology and power without responsibility are not friends.

After Mugabe’s ZANU PF party announcement that the President would hold a £1 million birthday party in the picturesque tourist resort of Victoria Falls on February 28, the international media applied for permission to cover the event as required by AIPPA.

Still seething with anger from the publication and broadcasting of Mugabe’s falling incident pictures, the regime has failed to even respond to the foreign media applications to cover Mugabe’s birthday bash.

Celebrations that are taking place at a time when the average Zimbabwean has no access to clean running water, hospitals are empty of basic medicines, businesses are closing down in record numbers every month, schools having no text books, roads are potholed, 90% of the populace is unemployed, corruption is rife within the state, banks are shutting down and the once beautiful and clean cities are of Zimbabwe decaying.

Such is the state of affairs in Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe as he celebrates his birthday with a selected political party faithful feasting on elephants, antelopes, impalas, buffalos and crocodile meat captured from a local animal sanctuary.

It is back to the cruel past in Mugabe’s Zimbabwe, and the future is bleak as the man once seen as his country’s hero celebrates his 91st birthday coupled with 35 years of an uninterrupted intolerant rule.