In case you were wondering, I'm pretty much bluffing through most of the politics in this post.

(Hmm. Been a while since I posted here. I can blame this on a number of things, but the only one that will actually be true is that, in a rather petulant and arrogant way, I didn't really feel like posting. So there we go. The upshot is that I now have several half-formed blog posts swilling round my brain, so there may be a sudden flurry of not-very-well-written posts in the very near future. For this, I apologise.)

A few days back, everyone's favourite murderous and quite possibly insane African dictator, Robert Mugabe, decided that his mangling of Zimbabwe's economy ought really to be put to a stop before the entire country implodes. Sadly, the method that he chose to do this, rather than something sensible - opening up the country to aid, better employment practices, perhaps some token attempt at stopping the breathtaking levels of corruption - seems to have been taken straight out of a big book called "Ideas that would make Chairman Mao and Nikita Khrushchev say 'Ooh, that's not very well thought through, is it?'" (Snappy little title, that.)

What Mugabe chose to do involved a number of things, possibly the daftest of which was a complete ban on wage and price rises. No-one seems to have told Mugabe that the economy just doesn't work like that. As if that wasn't enough, the government has tried some more handy little tricks to try and halt the raging inflation, such as devaluing the currency. Given that all this does is suddenly make everyone's banknotes worthless, it can't even be called a stopgap solution. Other tactics have included forcing price cuts in certain commodities. Even if this didn't make producers run for the hills (hint: it does), the way it's been applied (quite literally changing on a minute-by-minute and shop-by-shop basis) just adds to the chaos. Oh, and of course, it doesn't help that Mugabe has promised to print more currency should government projects require it.

I find it immensely difficult to believe that anyone can be shrewd enough to remain in charge of a country, and yet be so incredibly thick that he doesn't realise he's sending that country into inevitable ruin. Of course, it's happened before - the previously-mentioned Mao and Khrushchev were masters of hare-brained schemes that never stood a snowball's chance in hell of succeeding. What puzzles me is why, in the face of so much evidence, does this kind of thing continue?

Bloody-mindedness is probably a major reason. If you can see that everything is going a bit pear-shaped, perhaps there's a tendency to dig in your heels and stubbornly proclaim that you can do it, you really can. Perhaps, too, there's a certain amount of self-delusion. Mobutu, the colourful, homicidal and definitely insane former dictator of Zaïre, certainly had this trait, refusing to believe, even when the tanks were rolling through Kinshasa, that he was finished. And there might be a certain amount of naked self-interest there too, a determination to take whatever he can before the country crumbles.

I don't know. When Mobutu fell, it was supposed to herald a new age, a time when the "big men" of Africa realised that they weren't invincible any more, that they could be toppled. It's been part of a pattern in which dictators fell (Amin and Taylor, to name but two) to be replaced by the people that could actually do something about the problems. And now...Mugabe shows no sign of disappearing any time soon. Museveni appears to be moving onto the road from saint to despot with startling rapidity. It might be part of a new, and far more depressing, pattern.

Let's just hope not.