On the day after he came to power in April 1980, Robert Mugabe summoned his old adversary Ian Smith, the former minority white ruler of the breakaway colony of Rhodesia, to his office.

‘Good old Smithy', as he was affectionately called by his privileged white supporters, was greeted with a warm handshake and a broad smile. The cordiality uneased him somewhat: after all, Mugabe had promised his liberated people he would publicly hang Smith in Harare's Union Square.

Instead Mugabe told Smith that he was conscious of what he had inherited from his old adversaries — a jewel of a country, with superb infrastructure, and an efficient modern economy.

And he promised to keep it that way. If Ian Smith had ever doubted the wisdom of unilaterally breaking away from Britain, almost 20 years earlier, it was that day. He told his wife Janet over dinner that evening, that perhaps he had been wrong all along about a black government being incapable of running his beloved Rhodesia. That maybe, just maybe, the Jesuit-educated Robert Gabriel Mugabe was capable of ‘responsible government'.

As he wrote, in his autobiography: ‘Here was this chap and he was speaking like a sophisticated, balanced, sensible man. And I thought: if he practises what he preaches, then it will be fine. And it was fine ? for five or six |months ... ’

But, as we now know, Mugabe was not, is not, the sophisticated, balanced, sensible chap Ian Smith had briefly hoped for.

During the first majority election in 1980, Mugabe's lieutenants were out in the rural areas beating just about anybody who campaigned in what he regarded as his territory.

Even as he was seeing Ian Smith out of government buildings that day in April 1980, Mugabe was plotting the destruction of another group of political enemies — the Matabele people in southern Zimbabwe, those who held allegiance to his former Patriotic Front comrade-in-arms Joshua Nkomo.

Up to 20,000 people were annihilated by Mugabe's Korean-trained special forces, in a campaign of torture and murder — bodies tossed down disused mine shafts and hacked to pieces in dip-tanks — that has yet to be fully exposed.

And it has been excruciatingly downhill ever since. Mugabe has shown himself to be the type of African leader that ‘good old Smithy' had long campaigned against throughout the years of Unilateral Declaration of Independence.

Yet Robert Mugabe was wined and dined by Western leaders and honoured and conferred with numerous doctorates. The UN awarded him for the country's food production while New African, the UK-based magazine, voted him Best African in 1990.

The fact is that Mugabe then was more useful to the West clean than exposed as a tyrant. There was the Cold War, which had to be won at all cost, and, with the Soviets and the Chinese looking increasingly to Africa, it made sense to keep the Zimbabwean leader onside — and ignore that he had dirtied his book.

Today, the Cold War over, the world still stands largely idly by as Mugabe shows himself to be the embodiment of corrupt, violent, amoral African dictatorship, just like Idi Amin who scorched Uganda or Mobutu Sese Seko whose regime in Zaire was brutal and dysfunctional. Whatever the wrongs of minority rule — and its immoral consequences — the former Zimbabwe/Rhodesia was a hugely successful emerging African country despite economic sanctions imposed against it, because it dared to go it alone. And, although the minority whites were its main beneficiaries, there was increasing prosperity among the black population under Smith's rule.

Blacks had better access to housing, health and education. And they seldom, if ever, went hungry — unlike today where the UN food agency announced yesterday that emergency food for four million Zimbabweans on the brink of starvation could run out entirely by January. Today also, civil liberties and political freedom, as assessed by the Freedom House organisation, have gone well below those recorded in the 1970s under white minority rule.

When I went there in 1977 as a young journalist to cover the last three years of the ‘Bush War', that eventually ended with Robert Mugabe rolling down Salisbury's main street in his armoured tank, I fell in love with what was a paradise of sorts. Geographically, it is one of the most beautiful countries on earth. And it is sad to think it could still be the ‘breadbasket’ of southern Africa, were it not for the twisted thinking of Robert Mugabe.

Renewed talks aimed a brokering a deal between Mugabe and the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) this week are faltering. Zimbabwe is a failed state with a non-functioning economy, a once-flourishing agricultural sector in tatters and a people on the verge of starvation, on a scale that some aid observers claim this week could match the harrowing experiences of Ethiopia or the Sudan. Life expectancy, according to the UN development programme index, is now one of the lowest in the world.

At independence, 6,000 white commercial farmers owned 39% of the land. By 1990 only 8% of this commercial land was owned by blacks, most of them Mugabe’s political cronies. Today, little has changed. The land lies idle, untoiled. The supermarket shelves are empty, the people are hungry. The £20bn made available by Britain to compensate white farmers has mysteriously vanished — probably into one of Mugabe’s foreign bank accounts.

So much for liberation.

The first 20 years of Mugabe's reign saw a slow decline, so slow the rest of the world, keen to keep this ‘chappie' onside, hardly noticed what was happening — and those who did chose, as they still do, to ignore it. The calamitous collapse of what was once the jewel of southern Africa has been achieved, sadly, in little under a decade. A remarkable feat for Robert Mugabe and his ‘war vets', considering it took more than a century for Ian Smith's forefathers to carve a modern, functioning society out of the raw African bushveld.

In his autobiography, Smith, who died a year ago this month aged 88, talked about the loneliness of having to go it alone, to break from the former colonial power because he, unlike Britain, did not believe the majority blacks were yet ready to be the architects of their own destiny. Not ready to be blown along, unaided and alone, by Harold Macmillan's Wind of Change.

He believed, to his last breath, that ‘fair-minded' whites had been betrayed by just about everybody he could think of — the Tories, Labour, the Afrikaaners, the Organisation of African Unity, the UN.

No surprise then, that he called his biography The Great Betrayal.

Any potential peace deal this week centres on the key sticking point of control of the home affairs ministry, which is responsible for the police.

“We are expecting the equitable distribution of key ministries,” MDC spokesman Nelson Chamisa said. “The people are suffering and we should start acting to make sure we alleviate the problems facing the people.”

Some would argue that the situation is beyond repair, as long as Mugabe is intent on hanging on to power at all costs.