Having been born on 10^th September 1960, for me, subsequent birthdays generally come with a tradition of good tidings. Yet the month (September) has had its share of historical misfortunes – for instance 9/11, when Al Qaeda struck the Twin Towers, plunging North America into mourning and September 2008, the month that vicious hurricanes repeatedly struck the Gulf of Mexico and floods caused havoc in Asia. It is also the same month that bombs have exploded in Iraq, Somalia, India and Pakistan, not to mention a train disaster in Los Angeles and air crashes in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Russia.

September is a month that has seen Jacob Zuma absolved of any fraud crimes, the month that a Nigerian fraudster busted my e-mail and contaminated my database. I could be wrong, but it is about the same time Sarah Palin was declared running mate for Republican presidential hopeful John McPain, sorry, McCain,  and about that time when OPEC leaders got together to conspire against falling world crude oil prices. As American investment bank Lehman Brothers collapses in earth-shattering rubble of mortgage debts, good tidings keep coming at me!

September 15  will go down in history as the day Robert Mugabe conceded that his tenure as president of Zimbabwe has been a monumental disaster. It is a Monday that he, for want of a better term, signed away his ‘birthright’ over the destiny of this impoverished Southern African country to fiery Movement for Democratic Change [MDC] political activists Morgan Tsvangirayi and Arthur Mutambara. I say conceded because he had remained stuck  sheepishly on his demands to run both the State and Government, but Mbeki’s shrewd ‘quiet diplomacy’ eventually paid dividends by bringing the sulking dictator to the signing table. And I was there, at the front row, taking pictures.

Mugabe once again chose this grand stage to expose his crude ignorance of universally accepted good governance: “Democracy is a difficult proposition for Africans,” he claimed, “because opposition parties always work clandestinely for regime change, at times employing violence as a means of usurping power...” Never in the history of mankind has an outgoing dictator got it so fundamentally wrong! Yes, opposition IS for regime change. How else can one justify being in opposition politics if their mission is not to change the government?

Perhaps Mugabe wanted to say that democracy in Africa is the only sensible proposition whose rationale is defeated by ruling party nationalists who refuse to yield power even after having lost free and fair elections. Apart from the fact that ‘African Democracy’ cannot compel them to actually hand over the keys, incumbent presidents employ massive state resources to buy votes, kill and maim innocent citizens  just to remain in power. Those are the cold hard facts that he chose to ignore. At least he admitted that MDC would learn by ‘avoiding the mistakes we committed’ in their quest for good governance.

For we Zimbabweans, celebrating this September would be a gigantic act of misguided enthusiasm, since agreements are worth half the paper they are signed on. September 15  has not ushered in a really ‘new’ government, but a coalition of the willing, a potpourri of ideological contradictions. We liberals are for small government, and what we needed was Government of National Unbundling [GNU]!

September 15 has handed us novel galactic arrangements purely because Robert Mugabe has refused to accept defeat. Three ‘presidents’, three ‘prime ministers’, thirty-one cabinet ministers, two hundred something members of parliament, sixty something senators and fifteen deputies can choke the life out of any country – one, for that matter, at the end of the economic tether. Presidential hopeful Simba Makoni, though stranded in political isolation, is right that our GNU offers no value proposition to beleaguered Zimbabweans.

While what is left is for Civic  Society to mount a formidable front of supervision, my hope is that come 10/11/2009, I will be singing a more melodious birthday tune.