Mugabe Star Rally in Pictures

Zimbabwe has produced many politicians who could shout, scheme or survive. It has produced very few who could genuinely think. Among those few, two names inevitably surface: Robert Gabriel Mugabe and Jonathan Nathaniel Moyo.

In the quiet release of declassified British government files, history has once again intruded into the present. The documents reveal that at the height of Zimbabwe’s political and economic crisis in the early 2000s, the United Kingdom seriously debated a range of options for removing Robert Mugabe from power, including, however briefly, the military option.

Tendai Ruben Mbofana’s defence of Nelson Mandela on Nehanda Radio reads like an attempt to enshroud the past in bubble wrap.

Can it get any weirder? I honestly did not know whether to laugh or cry when I read today’s Nehanda Radio op-ed accusing Nelson Mandela of “selling out” South Africa’s black majority.

Where Mugabe relied on charisma, revolutionary legitimacy and a dense web of patronage networks that often competed with one another, Mnangagwa has relied on quiet institutional capture, incremental coercion and the strategic alliance of the state with the security sector.