Last November, Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe, then the world’s oldest head of state at 93 and one of the longest serving too, was forced out of power. The President was overthrown in an internal coup engineered by his disgraced former vice-president Emmerson Mnangagwa (aka ‘the Crocodile’) and the grandees of his own ZANU-PF party.
Mnangagwa, a 75-year-old Methodist, is a veteran of Zimbabwean politics and a long-time ally of his former boss. The military and the Chinese government seem to have been on-side with the coup, perhaps seeing the writing on the wall for the unpopular old man. And Mugabe’s fall was greeted by widespread enthusiasm on the streets of Harare by citizens desperate for relief from corruption and dictatorship.
