RETURN ON THE FORMER PRESIDENT OF ZIMBABWE

ROBERT MUGABE

"It is with great sadness that I announce the death of Zimbabwe's founding father and former President Robert Mugabe," said Emmerson Mnangagwa, the country's current president.

Why during his reign of thirty-seven years, until his fall in 2017, did this man go from being a liberating hero to being a ruthless despot ?

Robert Mugabe, ousted in 2017, was the last of the giants of his generation - after Nelson Mendela or Tanzanian president Julius Nyerere - to be alive. But it is alone and isolated that he died, far from his African land, in a hospital room in Singapore.

From hero of independence to despot

For the one who was the liberator of his colonized country then called Rhodesia, white and segregationist, also embodies the tyrant who led and shaped his country with an iron fist during his reign of thirty-seven years and precipitated the economic ruin of his country: "the leader of Zimbabwe has turned the former breadbasket of southern Africa into a land of violence and misery."

This hero of independence proclaimed in 1980 had made a bet, in the name of the unity of the people, of the policy of reconciliation. "You were my enemies yesterday, you are now my friends," assured the former guerrilla leader, even giving key ministerial positions to whites and allowing even their leader, Ian Smith, to stay. in the country.

In a short time the country then knows a better economic being. Seduced by Marxism, Africa's oldest leader discovers politics at the University of Fort Hare that he applies with the construction of schools, health centers and new housing for the black majority.

But that is without counting with its implacable political repression against the opponents, the authoritarian drift, the electoral frauds and especially its violent agrarian reform which precipitates the ruin of the economy. In 1985, liquidity is lacking, 90% of Zimbabweans are unemployed, civil servants are no longer paid. The country is sinking into misery, corruption and instability.

A pariah on the international scene obsessed with power

The one who up to then embodied the success of Africa for Westerners, then joined the ranks of pariahs banned from the international scene.

The president of Zimbabwe, released by the army, his party, Zanu-PF, and the street, is pushed to resign on November 21, 2017. He is then 93 years old.

"Mugabe has remained in power by (...) crushing his opponents, violating justice, trampling on the right to property, cracking down on the independent press and rigging elections," says his biographer Martin Meredith.

In December 2016, he had been elected presidential candidate of 2018 by his party. He had promised to wish his "100 years" to power, but he died before.