Good thing comrade Robert Mugabe kicked Morgan Tsvangirai in the teeth

The people of Zimbabwe can drive one up the wall.

First, they allowed Robert Mugabe, alias Comrade Bob, to sit on them. Even when he ran their economy to the ground, the most they could do was scamper into the belly of South African mines where xenophobic attacks lay in wait.

This, instead of cooking up a nice, little uprising and sending the old fire spitting guerrilla and intellectual to exile in a cozy banana republic.

But what shocks me most about the people of Zimbabwe is that the only person they could fling at Comrade Bob was Morgan Tsvangirai.

I have nothing against the former Prime Minister. But I come from a land where when you are a freedom fighter, you don’t flee into exile when a few hired goons slap you around. You stand up and fight like a man — or a woman if you are Professor Wangari Maathai or Narc leader Martha Karua.

Tsvangirai, however, would take off at the slightest beating and Bob predictably kept pummeling him like a bully works on a sissy in the schoolyard.

I could accept that. After all I have never had the honor of being beaten up since my old man clobbered me senseless for experimenting with water in the petrol tank of his old lawn mower.

Still, I must register strong disappointment in the manner Tsvangirai handled a most delicate matter. First, as we Africans say, he broke the leg of a vivacious lass called Lorcadia Karimathsenga, daughter of Mzee Tembo; knocked her up big time. Twins, the medics ruled.

And as is the custom, elders were not amused so they fined him – fat cows. Rumor has it that he forked out the equivalent of Ksh 900,000, in US dollars (no self-respecting father-in-law would touch the Zim dollar, which perpetually wrestles with marasmus).

Tsvangirai then announced he would do the honourable thing; marry Lorcadia, become a man and quit the senior bachelor’s club, where Botswana leader Ian Khama, in his 60s and allegedly still searching (half-heartedly I suspect) for a slim African virgin, appears set to become a life member.

But barely two weeks later, Tsvangirai did the usual — he ran into exile! People, the freedom fighter, just like he used to abandon his followers, abandoned Lorcadia and scattered to the hills, trade union tail curled between his legs.

I would have understood if he had given concrete reasons. Like his clan vetoed the union because Lorcadia’s family has a history of witchcraft and night running. Or that — and this is critical — she neither knew how to cook or welcome visitors.

But you know what he said? That he was a spectator; that State agents had taken over the courtship; that things were moving too fast; that Lorcadia was being used to finish him politically and so forth. In short, and as usual, Tsvangirai blamed Comrade Bob, the husband of Grace Marufu.

Wasn’t this fellow supposed to be a Prime Minister with his own bodyguards? Wasn’t he once a fire spitting trade unionist? Wasn’t he a whole opposition party leader on whose shoulders the hopes of Mugabe’s imperialist enemies lay?

My lordships, in the case of the people vs Morgan Tsvangirai, my humble submission is that the man was a weakling and a fraud.

If he could not fight for his woman, if he could let a couple of sleuths prevent him from chewing and digesting holy matrimony, then he had no business purporting or aspiring to be a national leader.