Mugabe of Zimbabwe told the remaining whites this weekend that they better leave soon.

Although it isn’t the first time he’s made such a statement about the estimated remaining 40,000 whites in the country, this time seemed more serious.

He made the announcement in a convocation of regional chiefs. In Zimbabwe where government doesn’t exist except as Mugabe decrees, local governance is in the hands of regional chiefs that his administration appoints.

In farming communities that were almost exclusively white 20 years ago, many savvy black Zimbabweans took the white land Mugabe allowed them to conviscate, but they continued to contract the previous white owners as managers.

It’s the only reason the country hasn’t totally and completely collapsed.

But this weekend after his proclamation at the chief’s convocation, Mugabe warned that he would “remove those” chiefs who still undertook this arrangement.

“Don’t enter into contract farming with whites. It’s a dangerous, dangerous arrangement that we don’t want,” Mugabe warned.

Britain, however – which is the homeland that most whites could return to – isn’t so accommodating, anymore.

British law allows anyone who was born there or born of British parents to claim citizenship. That includes most of the remaining Zimbabwean whites who were forced to renounce their British citizenship to remain in Zimbabwe.

That alone piques the British aplomb.

But more fairly, the British have been accommodating returning white Zimbabweans for more than two decades. There is a feeling back in London that the ones who have remained had so many opportunities to return before, that there’s no reason to be nice, now.

So the British embassy in Harare which processes returns is charging outlandish fees to do so. By deciding to use the blackmarket rate for the Zimbabwean currency, rather than the official one used for all normal business, potential returnees are being charged 15 times as much.

London’s Daily Mail said the government “defended the move, saying [it] was obliged to recover all its costs worldwide.”

What needs to be pointed out is that many of the whites who remain really have nowhere in Britain to return to. They are multi-generational Zimbabweans, whose fathers and grandfathers and great-grand fathers all retained British citizenship but who never lived there, so were technically born of British parents. Maybe Ancestry.com could find them a connection, but nothing realistic remains.

I see the problem as much with British policy as with the notion these are people who tried to play both ends of the table.

Moreover, a large number of white Zimbabweans are falling into terribly poverty. The costs of processing return citizenship, much less the costs of airline tickets and other resettlement costs, are likely beyond a large portion of them.

This means it’s unlikely many of the remaining whites will heed the old man’s call.

And that’s kind of scary, if old man Mugabe really wants to have his way.

Ever heard of a coup d’etat that’s announced in advance? Ever been to Zimbabwe?

The Great Dictator, Robert Mugabe, was once again caught on video visiting a cancer hospital in Singapore several days ago.

His visit to Singapore is not entirely secret: spokesmen for the government conceded he’s in Singapore when he didn’t show up for several important functions in Harare.

But the government denied he’s visiting the Gleneagles Cancer Treatment Hospital to treat cancer. He’s there, they say, for an eye checkup.

It’s long been rumored that the 90+ year-old president has been battling prostate cancer.

Meanwhile, back on the ranch, a political rally was held announcing a coup could take place at any time:

“By the time he comes back from his so-called medical check-up in Singapore, we would have taken power,” a widely respected opposition activist told cheering crowds at a large rally Sunday in a poor neighborhood of Harare.

Well, it’s Thursday and they haven’t taken power and if Mugabe’s still alive he’ll be back, soon.

That, you see, is what’s wrong with Zimbabwe. The opposition is so feeble that it must resort to explaining what it could do, rather than what it does.

The populace cheers what it could do, but dares not support what it does, because the one statistic as large as the fraudulent election results used by Mugabe for his current validation as president, is the number of missing activists.

Those like Job Sikhala, the labor leader turned politician who spoke above, travel about in a ring of armed guards. The government turns the occasional blind eye so long as Sikhala uses only the future perfect tense.

Responding to the widely reported rally, a Zimbabwe government official dismissed Sikhala’s remarks as “coming from a political party that is seeking relevancy.”

Touche.

Relevancy. Every time I think of Zimbabwe and Mugabe I just can’t understand how the people there have facilitated his dictatorship for so long.

Thirty years ago when Mugabe was just consolidating his power, the average Zimbabwean was far better educated, independent, entrepreneurial than the vast majority of their counterparts throughout black Africa to their north.

What happened? Why did they cave so completely?

We know some of the answers: many fled. While there was a white brain drain going on in South Africa the last ten years of apartheid, there was a black brain drain growing in Zimbabwe as the 1990s approached.

This was because the constitution forced on Mugabe by Britain and the U.S. guaranteed a white veto of any government action during the first ten years of Mugabe’s reign, from 1980 to 1990, even though whites were less than sixteenth of the population.

That was a mistake and the better off, better educated black Zimbabweans knew this. They had ten years to make their plans to depart, and tens of thousands did.

The second reason is that from the getgo South Africa has buffered Zimbabwe from international pressures to reform. This is because in the 1990s South Africa began to experience a huge flood of refugees from Zimbabwe, and they continue to do everything to stem the tide.

But even so the man who wears dark sunglasses even in the movie theater and his regime is so repressive if not retrogressive I remain highly perplexed.

So perplexed I couldn’t even be surprised if the preannounced coup happened.

Few commented on Swaziland’s serious law banning flying witches in May, but this week a Zimbabwean newspaper took up the issue as an editorial.

Don’t laugh.

Swazis believe in witches, and the misaligned hill of a country, surrounded by South Africa and still ruled by a monarch, has been neglected by the world and this is the result. Zimbabwe, on the other hand, has had almost as much global attention as climate change, so what’s going on?

First, the facts. Swaziland has one airport, Manzini, at its capital, and until the end of apartheid it was something like an Indian reservation is in the U.S. With unregulated casinos and call-girls, the morally strapped South African used Swazi as an erotic escape.

With the collapse of apartheid in the mid 1990s together with many of its morally constrictive laws, Swazi’s popularity descended rapidly. One could argue it started to reverse itself altogether and revert to the precolonial period.

Recently, South Africa bailed out Swaziland the same way the U.S. bailed out Chase. The country is riddled with scandal and corruption and ruled by a highfalutin king who may, in fact, never be on earth any more than the witches that apparently beset his sovereign land.

The May law goes much further than just banning witches from flying higher than 150 meters above the ground. It also bans toy helicopters and kites. This because a wicked activist protesting the king’s behavior, Hunter Shongwe, was caught with a toy helicopter that had a video camera on it. Drone.

Zimbabwe, on the other hand, has so many awful problems of its own, why would it descend into the unprovable abstract? Exactly. An “editorial” in Zimbabwe is capable of getting its writer hanged or tortured, and there’s just so many things you can say pleasantly about one of Africa’s most ruthless dictators of all time.

So Zimbabwe Standard editorial writer, Leo Igwe, produced this earth shattering opinion that “we should disabuse ourselves of belief in flying witches” and castigated neighbor Swaziland for ”embarrassing” itself.

“Embracing superstitions should call into question a people’s mental state and cause others to question their claim to rationality. Making superstitious claims should reinforce the idea that some human beings are backward, trapped in the pre-modern age and still down the ladder of human civilization, in an unenlightened state.”

Talk about the pot calling the kettle black.

Forgive me, but this got me thinking. You can’t prove there aren’t witches. Well, actually, you sort of can. By aeons of no proof of a flying witch, it’s reasonable to deduce that there aren’t any.

Similarly, by repeated attempts from the American Right to suggest the economy grows by trickle-down economics and then it doesn’t, you can also surmise it won’t work if tried, again.

But Swazis clinging to their superstitions because they haven’t been definitively disproved, and Republicans believing they will create jobs by strangling the government, are ideas grasped by poorly educated folks with an imagination as big as a pea.

And yet it continues. So much so that the Zimbabwes in the world, like the Peter Kings in the Republican Party, decry such foolery to deflect attention from their own short comings.

Witches won’t crash. Economies crash.

Zimbabwe tyrant Robert Mugabe is near death in Singapore; but what will follow?

Mugabe has been “near death” before, but the reports today are substantial despite an official Zimbabwean government statement castigating foreign journalists for writing “hogwash.”

An important cabinet meeting in Harare last week was surprisingly cut off, his private jet flew to Singapore with literally all his family accompanying him. Sources in Iran, one of his lone allies, yesterday claimed he had turned over power to his equally iniquitous defense minister, Emmerson Mnangagwa.

And yesterday London’s Daily Mail reported from a variety of sources that he was “close to death.”

The web of immorality and culpability for the most torturous human rights abuses, and the bankrupting of a once outstanding African society is a complex and messy one in Zimbabwe. Mugabe’s death will not necessarily mean anything at all changes.

At least not at once. As many as a thousand officials live as millionaires under his protection and that of his close advisers. They are not likely to give this up for power in a country despised by most of the world. Mnangagwa is the likely spider to replace Mugabe over this matrix. And to the extent he can keep the money flowing down the right threads, Zimbabwe will remain an awful place.

As many as a dozen of the thousands of Zimbabwean officials on the take are also likely to be indicted by The World Court in The Hague for crimes against humanity, including of special note his anointed successor, Mnangagwa, who for years controlled the country’s intelligence services.

This inner circle of evil men will likely concede their internal bickering for a government that will be strong and lasting enough to protect them all. A sort of rally round the torture chamber, boys.

So don’t buy your tickets to VicFalls just yet. But all that being said, the “Evil Queen is Dead” syndrome can’t be discounted. This week in a bold move not seen for several years, protestors in Harare dared to stage a demonstration, and spokesmen for opposition movements began to appear on the world media.

Note: the opposition spokesman who appears in the above video carries a similar name to the anointed successor but is not the same person.

Ultimately the day will come when the old man’s regime falls completely. I do wonder what will fill the vacuum. Morgan Tsvangirai, a once fiery and charismatic opposition leader who escaped being crushed to death by agreeing to a fake position of “Prime Minister” in the current government has been totally coopted.

Possibly he could regain some of the old spirit and shepherd the country into a new era, but the few sane Zimbabweans left capable of rectifying this miserable country will no longer accept him as a long-term leader.

Opposition – little as it is right now – is coalescing around the idea of a new constitution, as nascent rebellions are wont to do. But even that seems wimpy, given that Mugabe’s constitution isn’t really so bad. It’s just that he doesn’t follow it… at will.

So “The Evil King” might be dying. But there’s no white king backstage, and the aftermath does not look as rosy as Oz.