Democracy & Governance

The economic crisis

An epitaph

If the following reads like an epitaph, this indeed is what it is.  The end of Robert Mugabe’s political life at the age of 93 is like an end of his life.

Discussions about Robert Mugabe’s excesses as a classic “African dictator” are incomplete without comparisons with Uganda’s Idi Amin.

Introduction

Despite the unprecedented overdrive of its diplomatic pressure on African heads of regime during the recent African Union assembly in Egypt, Britain failed abysmally to persuade the summit to condemn Zimbabwe’s June 2008 rigged elections (“Brown makes Zimbabwe cash promise”, BBC News

Long-roiling factional conflict within Zimbabwe’s ruling ZANU-PF political party exploded last week in a military coup that quickly seized control of the government and state media.

The bitter menu that was never served

Whether he is allowed to retire honourably or not, President Robert Mugabe's image as an intelligent African leader who led a heroic struggle that defeated Ian Smith and his white racists (who had vowed never to give up power to the African majority in “a thousand years”) has been totally destroy

In 2009, while on a working trip to Harare, I remember ordering breakfast that cost me trillions of then Zimbabwe dollars ($100 was worth many trillions of Zim dollars!), witnessing mothers delivering babies in a rural clinic that had neither water nor electricity, looking at a pile of decomposin