IF Morgan Tsvangirai emerges as the ultimate victor, he will take over a country in ruins, its people brutalised and often starving, with once-magnificent roads, schools, hospitals now potholed, bereft of everything they need to function and without the skilled staff who used to man them.

The country has large debts, no reserves, a worthless currency and hyperinflation. Businesses, shops and factories have closed everywhere.

When you drove from Bulawayo to Harare in the 1990s, you passed an endless series of beautiful, well-managed and highly productive farms. Now only weeds grow.

Many doubt that Tsvangirai will be equal to the task ahead. A former trade unionist without much education, he has a reputation as a poor administrator. The group that split away from his Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) in 2006 - which included many of the party’s intellectuals - spoke bitterly of abuses, including torture, carried out by members of its youth movement. They claimed these had been tolerated, if not encouraged, by members of Tsvangirai’s overpowerful “kitchen cabinet”.

When I asked Tsvangirai how he justified his position, he simply said that any leader needed close advisers he could rely upon, and that in a deeply stressed society like Zimbabwe’s, abnormal and regrettable things could sometimes happen.

Roy Bennett, a white farmer jailed and beaten by Mugabe’s supporters, told me at that point that he was throwing in his lot with Tsvangirai despite feeling furious with the kitchen cabinet and wanting them out. The point was, he said, that Tsvangirai, through his huge courage, stamina and determination, had established himself in the eyes of the electorate as the one man who could stand up to the president and ultimately defeat him.

When I first met Tsvangirai in 1998, he had just survived an assassination attempt (Mugabe’s thugs had tried to throw him out of a sixth-floor window) and presided over a trade union movement whose symbol was the hammer and sickle.

Now he shakes his head over “some of the things I used to say in those days” - he had been a true Zanu-PF believer at independence - and has evolved into a liberal democratic leader who quotes the Bible and talks a great deal about being God-fearing.

He says Zimbabweans must face the fact that the present mess is entirely the work of their own leadership, not outsiders, and that, “We need a change of heart”.

“We have had educated men lead us astray with hearts that were cold, cruel and hard. We need a change in how we do things, how we see ourselves and how we work. A change from arrogant leadership to one of humility,” he said.

Now 56, he has considerable warmth, is a devoted father to eight children and likes a joke. Even those Zimbabweans who doubt his calibre respect him for his bravery.

Tsvangirai talks of appealing to donors to set up an economic stabilisation and restoration fund, working above all to restore infrastructure and reestablish small businesses. An even more urgent necessity would be food and medical aid for the starving.

He emphasises that while he would set up a truth and reconciliation commission to examine the period of horror that lies behind, a new government would have to forgive and forget, avoid taking revenge and get on with rebuilding the country. That said, vast fortunes have been stolen and such a government would want to recover those wherever possible.

Tsvangirai also talks of “real land reform”, which means auditing the land, compensating those whose farms have been stolen and concentrating on creating a productive agriculture again.

Herein lies the rub. Tsvangirai hardly wants to be known as the African who gave the land back to the whites, yet Zimbabwe’s economy cannot be rebuilt without a thriving agriculture and few Africans have made the land bloom in the way the white farmers did.

Tsvangirai might not want revenge but is in no doubt that many heads would have to roll in the army, the police and state-owned organisations. He talks wistfully of how Zimbabwe used to have “one of the most respected professional armies in Africa” and a police force as reputable as the Mounties in Canada.

However, at every level these institutions have been politicised and abused. They need to be reestablished as independent, professional and nonpartisan. This would include the judiciary, which has been corrupted by Mugabe.

Zimbabwe has considerable mineral resources, a potentially rich agriculture and huge tourist potential. The first constraint on redevelopment would be a lack of human skills, however. About a third of the population has fled and one of Tsvangirai’s most important tasks would be to persuade this diaspora to return.

He has a huge following among Zimbabweans in South Africa, Britain and Australia and if he finally evicts Mugabe from power he will enjoy an enormous fund of goodwill and gratitude, not only among Zimbabweans but throughout the Commonwealth - which he will happily rejoin. In the end, that following is likely to be Tsvangirai’s greatest single asset.

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