HAITI's beleaguered president, Jean-Betrand Aristide, is the defrocked former Catholic priest who has two things in common with Robert Mugabe.

They are both Catholics and have conducted their politics with such a breath-taking lack of propriety they have raised eyebrows, if not hackles, among many Catholics, including the Vatican.

Neither man has suffered the ultimate Church sanction for their misconduct: excommunication.

In Zimbabwe, Mugabe's supporters will be indignant at the very notion of their man being placed in the same Sin League with the Haitian leader, once revered by his people as their Messiah.

At some long-forgotten time in the distant past, Mugabe himself once stood on that same pedestal, the halo floating around his head like a perennial benediction of his Goodness.

Today, both men may not be a disgrace to World Catholicism, but would certainly not be mentioned as fine examples of the faith.

Haiti is the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere. It became independent from the French 200 years ago.

But there must be many Haitians, except the offspring and other relatives of the two Duvaliers - Papa and Baby Doc - who dearly wish their voodoo-infested island had remained under French tutelage.

Mugabe's supporters would be feigning amnesia if they felt outrage at the comparison: his eventual marriage to Grace Marufu was so controversial it divided, not just the Catholics, but Zimbabweans in general.

The extremists called for his excommunication, but their campaign is said to have been fairly neutralised by the late Archbishop Patrick Chakaipa, a close friend of the president and a conservative cleric in such ticklish matters.

So, while Mugabe and Aristide might not inhabit the same Catholic Book of Infamy, they will be remembered for their unconventional - to say the least - conduct of matters affecting Humankind.

Still, they have a mutual admirer in Thabo Mbeki. His controversial attendance at celebrations marking Haiti's independence divided South Africans, some of whom nicknamed Aristide 'the Mugabe of the Caribbean'.

If anyone in Shake Shake building believes this is a distinction to crow about, then we should all hold all-night prayer meetings and fast for weeks for their redemption.

Mugabe may be a hero to Coltrane Chimurenga and the group of Rastafarians who visited the country recently to demonstrate their support. But the rest of the world is not excited at his alleged heroism of violently dispossessing white farmers of their properties, then handing them to his Zanu PF loyalists, some of whom believe farming consists largely of a huge farmhouse and a bottlestore.

Certainly, his peers in the Commonwealth, by and large, felt he had not repented enough to have the suspension of his country lifted, at their meeting in Abuja, Nigeria, last month.

Apart from that, under his tutelage, a country once called The Bread Basket of Southern Africa has been reduced almost to the same status as Haiti.

It's important for foreigners and Zimbabweans alike to appreciate that had a land reform programme been implemented which focused on maintaining the country's remarkable agricultural productivity, the present crisis would have been averted.

But because Mugabe's political stock had plummeted to humiliating levels, the programme was politicised.

In the aftermath of the violence-infested 2000 parliamentary election and the 2002 presidential election, Zimbabwe's political and economic future has now assumed a bleakness of Haitian proportions.

Why Mugabe would escape culpability for this disaster is difficult to understand. It's like not blaming him and Zanu PF for the crisis in the financial sector.

Mugabe is the captain of the ship. Everybody under him reports to him and receives instructions from him - unless he has abdicated those responsibilities in favour of a dubious division of labour regime.

At the end of the day, he carries the can.

His supporters claim Mugabe has been treated unfairly by domestic and foreign critics. They claim he is justified to allow his hatchet man, Jonathan Moyo, to terrorise the domestic and foreign media.

They argue he should be left alone, as if he was a deity. They argue, moreover, that, by African standards, he has not done too badly. Some point to the performance of other African leaders, such as King Mswati III of Swaziland who will shortly spend millions of US dollars on building palaces for his 15 or so wives while his people remain in near-Haitian poverty.

Mswati has no time for a thorough-going debate on democracy - for his country or for any other country. As far he is concerned, democracy is not for Africans.

So, on that basis Mswati could be judged to be worse than Mugabe.

Wrong: Mugabe is not a monarch. He was elected into office and had to campaign vigorously for the people to vote for him. They voted for him, in the earnest belief that he would listen to their grievances and take steps to tackle them.

He would ensure that the next time he asked them to vote for him, they would do so without hesitation - and would not have to be bashed on the head or threatened with murder by a bunch of kids high on mbanje or something even more dangerously hallucinogenic.

His supporters will even argue that it is unfair to blame Mugabe for the political violence that has become our political landscape. They will say his 'we have many degrees in violence' speech was just political rhetoric.

But he and Aristide are bound to suffer the same fate - the same people who once idolised them will end up cursing them.

The Catholics will certainly wish they had been excommunicated a long time ago.