What's the Coup?

People are sick to the back teeth with their (un)elected "leaders" pushing them around, or so it seems, though the army assertion of dominance looks rather bleak too. The last two months have witnessed as many nations (if one got permission to call itself so) break free from the rule they have endured, one for decades, the other for centuries! Catalonia's vote for independence from Spain met with violence from the Spanish national police, and now many of the dissenting politicians from the region sit in prison as Mariano Rajoy hopes for validation in elections held there next month. Meanwhile, in Zimbabwe...

Yesterday, reports flooded in of tanks riding into the nation's capital, Harare, since then, the army has imprisoned the President, Robert Mugabe, in his palace. Mugabe is currently the oldest head of state in the world, aged 93 (adding weight to the adage: "the good die young"), although still going strong, thoughts inevitably turned to his mortality recently, and he began seeking a successor. Robert's eyes settled on his wife, Grace (whereabouts presently unknown), perhaps this idea of a successor - much like a monarch handing down his throne - prompted the army to take action and detain their President? Maybe it had something to do with the President's myopic dismissal of a long-time right-hand man only nine days ago?

Mugabe rose to power in 1980, following a 15-year-long civil war with the white minority government that had declared independence from Britain as Rhodesia in 1965. As a teacher throughout Africa and the son of Zezeru Clan members of the Shona Tribe, born in 1924, he had grandparents that lived before British colonisation, add to this some Marxist indoctrination, and Robert grew primed for rebellion. Since 1980 and Zimbabwe's birth, Mugabe's ZANU-PF party has ruled without question, but his weird blend of love/loathing for the British and its past brought nothing but harm to the country. Starting with the seizure of farms from white farmers and allowing their utter destruction as opposed to nationalising them or any other useful method - ways not preferable to the yields produced by their original owners anyway. Following this stifling of the nation's food production came the choking of any rights, dissenters got quickly killed, LGBT rights are non-existent, and the economy has tanked worse than the rumours of Great Depression Germany that abound. Corn production shrank from 250,000 tons to 60,000 between 2000 and 2016, maize fell from 2 million tons to 500,000, with beef exports dropping from 605,000 to 244,000, coffee production also got wiped out through the seizure of white farms.

With nominal GDP at a little over $17 billion a year, Zimbabwean's purchasing power parity equals that of their forebears in 1953, 300 white-owned farms now exist when 4,500 once inhabited the country - those farms protected by remoteness and bribing the government. Now tourism also is on its knees after poaching, and deforestation ravaged Zimbabwe's natural beauty and the hyperinflation of the Zimbabwean Dollar, reaching 11.2 million percent in 2008, resulted in a $100 billion bill printed and the US Dollar substituted in place of their worthless notes. Recent protests over the economy have rocked the nation, and it's little wonder that uprisings have taken so long, but the sacking of his deputy, Emmerson Mnangagwa and turning more favour towards his unpopular wife Grace Mugabe to succeed him, seems like the straw that broke the camel's back.

The only foreign leader to have contact with Robert Mugabe is South Africa's Jacob Zuma who says the President is under house arrest. Major General SB Moyo took to state TV to declare a coup, ordering all soldiers to cancel leave and return to barracks, saying: "To both our people and the world beyond our borders, we wish to make it abundantly clear that this is not a military takeover of government. As soon as we accomplish our mission we expect the situation to return to normalcy." So what made the troops snap? What makes anyone make a stand? The answer is authoritarian regimes ignoring their populace and serving themselves, consolidating power and eroding identity and opportunity. Despite the reasons for populism and other such dissatisfaction, people want something better than the drip fed garbage spilling from the mouths of politicians. Unfortunately, where Zimbabwe is concerned, the only section of the population with the ability to overthrow the tired regime was the military on behalf of a former Mugabe ally Vice-President, so a dangerous precedent now establishes itself in the southern African nation. If Zimbabwe has merely swapped one set of chains for a new one (one backed by guns) is something that will only become known in the near future.

#news, #politics, #uk, #zimbabwe

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