Robert Mugabe: A man whose list of failures is legion | IOL News

One wishes one could say “rest in peace”. One can only say, “may there be more peace for Zimbabwe’s people, now that Robert Gabriel Mugabe has retired permanently”. Zimbabwe’s former president has died, aged 95.

Speedy money printing presses led to unfathomable hyperinflation and the end of Zimbabwe’s sovereign currency, still the albatross around the country’s neck. When in early November 2017, at his wife Grace’s instigation, he fired his long-time lapdog Vice-President Emmerson Mnangagwa, the generals with whom he’d colluded for decades turned on him. A coup petit ensued and returned Mnangagwa from exile, soon to be elevated to the presidency and heavily indebted to his comrades.

The Zimbabwean nationalists emerged from Salisbury’s prisons late in 1974, as Portugal’s coup led to Angola and Mozambique emerging from colonialism into the Soviet orbit. The fifties generation of Zimbabwean nationalists were to participate in the Zambian and South African inspired détente exercise. This inspired much competition for Zanu’s leadership: Mugabe arrived in Lusaka after ousting Ndabaningi Sithole, Zanu’s first leader.

Soon after Mugabe’s return the young American congressman Stephen Solarz and the Deputy Head of the American embassy in Maputo, Johnnie Carson, wended their way to Quelimane. Mugabe wowed them. This was Mugabe’s strategy, embedded at an early stage: tell foreign emissaries what they wanted to hear, use young radicals until their usefulness subsided, and then get rid of them.

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