The Robert Mugabe era is over. After ruling Zimbabwe for nearly 40 years, the army presented him with an ultimatum: resign or face impeachment. Mugabe chose to resign.
Update, 21 November – Zimbabwe's president Robert Mugabe has resigned. His decision was announced by parliament speaker Jacob Mudenda, who read Mugabe's letter to the assembly amid applause from members of parliament. Jubilation erupted in the streets of the capital, Harare, where crowds of people began to celebrate. The dictator, in power for 37 years, was cornered by the army, which seized power on 16 November.
At 93, and after 37 years of relentless dictatorship, Zimbabwe's president Robert Mugabe appeared to have accepted a peaceful exit — against all expectations — following lengthy negotiations (brief, if measured against his years in power) with the military, which has effectively held power since 16 November. In exchange, the military reportedly granted full immunity to him and his wife Grace, according to sources inside the American television network CNN.
After all, more than Robert Mugabe's departure per se, the army's objective was to remove those around him who might have taken his place improperly. Starting with his wife Grace, 52, regarded as a shrewd political operator — so much so that, according to Sky News, she had already left the country to seek refuge in Namibia. It was reportedly she who persuaded her husband to dismiss vice president Emmerson Mnangagwa, officially triggering the political crisis in Zimbabwe, while the party co-founded by Mugabe himself in 1963, Zanu-PF (the Zimbabwe African National Union – Patriotic Front), has since reinstated Mnangagwa by electing him its new leader.
Should the president's resignation be confirmed, he would need to send a letter to the speaker of the Zimbabwean parliament, who would then be required to formalise the request within 24 hours, as provided for by the constitution. For now, however, Mnangagwa has stated that he will not return home "until he is certain he is safe, given the treatment and manner" in which he was dealt with after being dismissed. "Mugabe always said that if the people no longer wanted him, he would leave power. Now he must accept the will of the people and resign," the former vice president concluded.
An ignominious end for Mugabe, who came to power as a hero, a patriot and a father of the nation, only to transform himself into a dictator obsessed with power. Before independence, achieved in 1979, the Republic of Zimbabwe, in south-eastern Africa, was called Rhodesia and was a state governed by a white minority, led in particular by a man named Ian Douglas Smith, who had himself decided to break away from the British motherland in 1965, creating a racist nation in which apartheid held sway — a system of racial segregation imposed by the white minority upon the black population.
At that point, with the United Kingdom out of the picture, Rhodesia had become a state even worse than South Africa from a human rights standpoint. During the civil war, even London had taken the side of the black majority. Robert Mugabe, then leading the independence movement, together with other leaders of the Patriotic Front (PF), had succeeded in negotiating a transition without further bloodshed, towards a transitional government under Methodist bishop Abel Tendekayi Muzorewa, who would then go on to lose the 1980 elections to Mugabe himself.
That moment marked the beginning of the end of Mugabe's star. A revolution quickly turned into an authoritarian and violent regime — seven consecutive terms in office that led the United Kingdom, the United States and the European Union to impose sanctions. In 2008, trade unionist Morgan Tsvangirai attempted to oppose him through democratic means and won the elections, but Mugabe refused to accept defeat before attempting a government of national unity.
The rest is current affairs. The hope is that neighbouring countries, little inclined to tolerate military coups that could destabilise the region, may be able to contain any potential fallout from this epoch-making change of government and help ensure a peaceful transition.
