Mnangagwa, who at seventy-five falls into Mugabe’s definition ofĪ “youth,” and enjoys the nickname the Crocodile, was long presumed toīe Mugabe’s heir apparent. Their days as comrades in the bush war and the massacres thatįollowed. Mnangagwa, who had been a loyal deputy for nearly fifty years, since On November 6th, Mugabe fired and expelled his Vice-President, Emmerson Message in his address to the Youth League last week. It seemed that no one could stop her-and that was Mugabe’s deeper Not only Imelda Marcos but Lady Macbeth appear Gandhian by comparison, Marked, at every step, by tales of corruption and incompetence that made Shopaholic wife, Grace, who is fifty-two, to succeed him, maneuvering her into ever more Inner circles intensified, Mugabe groomed his widely despised

In recent years, as the court intrigue that had always consumed his In South Africa and other neighboring states shrugged. One crisis they had created with another, while his aiders and abettors Implemented any political program that amounted to more than replacing Has been decades since Mugabe and his ruling ZANU-P.F. Nation as he drifted ever deeper into disconnection and dysfunction. Kill opposition politicians, and steal elections, in the two-thousands Īnd continued his rule over a hungry, captive Sent armed mobs to drive white farmers off their land, beat and Of minorities in Matebeleland, in the nineteen-eighties ruined theĮconomy through ineptitude and corruption, in the nineties Sentiment, and they helped prop him up when he unleashed genocidal massacres Too many of his fellow African-independence leaders have shared this Of that struggle, and he evidently believed that this status gave himĪbsolute legitimacy to enjoy absolute power forever. White-supremacist regime of Ian Smith’s Rhodesia. That had marked the long, hard liberation struggle against the Made a mockery of the rhetoric of national self-determination and uplift Land, gutted the economy, drastically diminished life expectancy, and Zimbabweans, these declarations had the ring of eternal damnation: hisĭecades of bloody, predatory misrule had devastated their once thriving Mugabe, the world’s oldest and longest-reigning head of state, alwaysĬlaimed that he would live to be a hundred and would die in office. You need to use proper routes.” Lest there be anyĬonfusion about the meaning of his extended metaphor, he told his audience plainly what he was talking about: the path to Threatening his challengers with violent destruction, and he did notĭisappoint. He has never seemed to relish anything as much as They had better not think that there is a shortcut.

Those for whom the sun is rising, he said, “have a long way to go,” and Go gently into the night, he moved swiftly to correct the impression. Sound as if he were preparing, after his thirty-seven-year dominion, to His opening remarks, “but to youths, it is just rising.” If that made it “To us, the sun is setting,” the ninety-three-year-old said in The Youth League of his party, ZANU-P.F., at its national assembly, in A week ago, Zimbabwe’s superannuated tyrant, Robert Mugabe, addressed

Tyrant unleashed dominion shard