The Legacy of Robert Mugabe and the Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front - A One-Party State facilitating Dictatorship and Disregard for Human Rights
The Legacy of Robert Mugabe and the Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front - A One-Party State facilitating Dictatorship and Disregard for Human Rights

Author: Dr. Mark O'Doherty

Publisher: Lulu.com

Published: 2017-08-13

Total Pages: 146

ISBN-13: 136577368X

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The UN has warned that Zimbabwe is facing its worst hunger crisis in a decade with half of the population - 7.7 million people - being food insecure; due to an economic meltdown and unprecendented malnutrition; according to the WFP. Also, widespread corruption has contributed to a rise in sexual bribery in Zimbabwe; with an unprecedented number of women reporting being forced to exchange sex for employment or business favours. More than 57% of women surveyed by 'Transparency International Zimbabwe' (TIZ), said they had been forced to offer sexual favours in exchange for jobs, medical care and even when seeking placements at schools for their children. The report, entitled Gender and Corruption, found women were increasingly vulnerable to sexual abuse amid the deteriorating Zimbabwean economy. Hence it is very important that economic stability, rule-of-law and human rights are restored in Zimbabwe - with the assistance of the international community - so that peace and prosperity can be manifested in Zimbabwe.

A Predictable Tragedy
A Predictable Tragedy

Author: Daniel Compagnon

Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press

Published: 2010-11-05

Total Pages: 368

ISBN-13: 9780812242676

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When the southern African country of Rhodesia was reborn as Zimbabwe in 1980, democracy advocates celebrated the defeat of a white supremacist regime and the end of colonial rule. Zimbabwean crowds cheered their new prime minister, freedom fighter Robert Mugabe, with little idea of the misery he would bring them. Under his leadership for the next 30 years, Zimbabwe slid from self-sufficiency into poverty and astronomical inflation. The government once praised for its magnanimity and ethnic tolerance was denounced by leaders like South African Nobel Prize-winner Desmond Tutu. Millions of refugees fled the country. How did the heroic Mugabe become a hated autocrat, and why were so many outside of Zimbabwe blind to his bloody misdeeds for so long? In A Predictable Tragedy: Robert Mugabe and the Collapse of Zimbabwe Daniel Compagnon reveals that while the conditions and perceptions of Zimbabwe had changed, its leader had not. From the beginning of his political career, Mugabe was a cold tactician with no regard for human rights. Through eyewitness accounts and unflinching analysis, Compagnon describes how Mugabe and the Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF) built a one-party state under an ideological cloak of anti-imperialism. To maintain absolute authority, Mugabe undermined one-time ally Joshua Nkomo, terrorized dissenters, stoked the fires of tribalism, covered up the massacre of thousands in Matabeleland, and siphoned off public money to his minions—all well before the late 1990s, when his attempts at radical land redistribution finally drew negative international attention. A Predictable Tragedy vividly captures the neopatrimonial and authoritarian nature of Mugabe's rule that shattered Zimbabwe's early promises of democracy and offers lessons critical to understanding Africa's predicament and its prospects for the future.

Robert Mugabe and the Will to Power in an African Postcolony
Robert Mugabe and the Will to Power in an African Postcolony

Author: William J. Mpofu

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2021-03-04

Total Pages: 410

ISBN-13: 3030478793

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This book is a philosopher’s view into the chaotic postcolony of Zimbabwe, delving into Robert Mugabe’s Will to Power. The Will to Power refers to a spirited desire for power and overwhelming fear of powerlessness that Mugabe artfully concealed behind performances of invincibility. Nietzsche’s philosophical concept of the Will to Power is interpreted and expanded in this book to explain how a tyrant is produced and enabled, and how he performs his tyranny. Achille Mbembe’s novel concept of the African postcolony is mobilised to locate Zimbabwe under Mugabe as a domain of the madness of power. The book describes Mugabe’s development from a vulnerable youth who was intoxicated with delusions of divine commission to a monstrous tyrant of the postcolony who mistook himself for a political messiah. This account exposes how post-political euphoria about independence from colonialism and the heroism of one leader can easily lead to the degeneration of leadership. However, this book is as much about bad leadership as it is about bad followership. Away from Eurocentric stereotypes where tyranny is isolated to African despots, this book shows how Mugabe is part of an extended family of tyrants of the world. He fought settler colonialism but failed to avoid being infected by it, and eventually became a native coloniser to his own people. The book concludes that Zimbabwe faces not only a simple struggle for democracy and human rights, but a Himalayan struggle for liberation from genocidal native colonialism that endures even after Robert Mugabe’s dethronement and death.

Robert Mugabe
Robert Mugabe

Author: Sue Onslow

Publisher: Ohio University Press

Published: 2018-03-05

Total Pages: 167

ISBN-13: 082144638X

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Zimbabwe’s President Robert Mugabe sharply divides opinion and embodies the contradictions of his country’s history and political culture. As a symbol of African liberation and a stalwart opponent of white rule, he was respected and revered by many. This heroic status contrasted sharply, in the eyes of his rivals and victims, with repeated cycles of gross human rights violations. Mugabe presided over the destruction of a vibrant society, capital flight, and mass emigration precipitated by the policies of his government, resulting in his demonic image in Western media. This timely biography addresses the coup, led by some of Mugabe’s closest associates, that forced his resignation after thirty-seven years in power. Sue Onslow and Martin Plaut explain Mugabe’s formative experiences as a child and young man; his role as an admired Afro-nationalist leader in the struggle against white settler rule; and his evolution into a political manipulator and survivalist. They also address the emergence of political opposition to his leadership and the uneasy period of coalition government. Ultimately, they reveal the complexity of the man who stamped his personality on Zimbabwe’s first four decades of independence.

Zimbabwe
Zimbabwe

Author: United States Department of State

Publisher: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform

Published: 2014-10-20

Total Pages: 60

ISBN-13: 9781502880239

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Zimbabwe is constitutionally a republic. It has been dominated by President Robert Mugabe, his Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF) party, and its authoritarian security sector since independence in 1980. Presidential and parliamentary elections held on July 31 were free of the widespread violence of the 2008 elections, but the process was neither fair nor credible. A unilateral declaration of the election date by the hastily convened and politically compromised Constitutional Court, formed after the country adopted a new constitution in March; a heavily biased state media; limitations on international observers; failure to provide a publicly useful voters' register; and a chaotic separate voting process for the security sector contributed to a deeply flawed process. Two of the three partners in the 2009 coalition government opposed the election date, citing the lack of previously agreed to reforms in the Southern African Development Community (SADC)-mediated Global Political Agreement (GPA). The courts dismissed challenges filed after the elections by non-ZANU-PF parties. The elections resulted in the formation of a unitary ZANU-PF government led by President Mugabe and Vice President Joice Mujuru and ZANU-PF supermajorities in both houses of Parliament. The authorities failed at times to maintain effective control over the security forces. Security forces committed human rights abuses. The most important human rights problems remained the government's targeting for torture, abuse, arrest, and harassment members of non-ZANU-PF parties and civil society activists; partisan application of the rule of law by security forces and the judiciary; the government's compulsory acquisition of private property; and restrictions on civil liberties.

False Dawn
False Dawn

Author: Human Rights Watch (Organization)

Publisher: Human Rights Watch

Published: 2009

Total Pages: 25

ISBN-13: 1564325326

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"Documents how the Zimbabwe African Union-Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF), the former sole ruling party, is using its greater political power within the government to obstruct human rights improvements. ZANU-PF supporters continue to commit abuses against perceived Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) supporters with impunity. Police, prosecuting authorities, and court officials aligned to ZANU-PF conduct politically motivated prosecutions of MDC legislators and activists"--Cover, p. [4].

Whither Zimbabwe, After 37 Years of Robert Mugabe
Whither Zimbabwe, After 37 Years of Robert Mugabe

Author: Rose Jaji

Publisher:

Published: 2018

Total Pages: 7

ISBN-13:

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A non-coup coup; a coup by any other name is still a coup. What is interesting about the recent coup in Zimbabwe, is that while the world found occupation in whether what had happened was a coup or not, Zimbabweans themselves were in utter disbelief that President Robert Mugabe was finally on his way out and sooner than expected. Most of them had become resigned to him leaving the presidency upon his death. Focused on the goal to see President Mugabe out of office, no one seemed to care anymore about how this would happen; the end justified the means. Now that his departure seemed possible and imminent, they wanted him to leave soon, or, in the words of some of the people interviewed by the media during the march, they wanted him to leave “like yesterday”. While Zimbabweans may have had grievances against the Zimbabwe Defense Forces (ZDF) and other security institutions in the country for their role in President Mugabe's violent and brutal rule, this was outweighed by the fact that they did not want the man they reviled so much staying in power until they could engage in the next round of the futile exercise of voting him out. Against this pragmatism, the coup became “cool”, according to one of the placards carried by demonstrators. As non-violent as the coup was, it provided humorous moments as when men and women in the Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front (ZANU PF), the ruling party in Zimbabwe since independence in 1980, came out to disown President Mugabe and his wife. The same people had treated the couple like a cult for decades, kneeling and groveling to the shock and amusement of ordinary Zimbabweans. When exactly did it occur to them that President Mugabe and his wife were not good for the country? Had they not presented President Mugabe as the ZANU PF candidate in the election in 2018? One can only wonder how Mr and Mrs Mugabe felt watching this level of betrayal from those who had, as recently as days before the coup, praised them to the skies.

Mugabe's Legacy
Mugabe's Legacy

Author: David B. Moore

Publisher: Hurst & Company

Published: 2021-08-05

Total Pages: 304

ISBN-13: 9781787385726

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Zimbabwe's party-internal 'coup' of 2017, and deposed president Robert Mugabe's death nearly two years later, demand careful, historically nuanced explanation. How did Mugabe gain and retain power over party and state for four decades? Did the suspected and nearly real 'coups', the conspiracies behind them, and their concurrent mythomaniacal conceits ultimately, ironically, spell his near-tragic end? Has Mugabe's particular mode of power reached a finality with his own downfall, as his successors struggle more to balance Zimbabwe's political contradictions? Will the phalanxes arrayed against Mugabe's control fray further, as Zimbabwe fades? Mugabe's Legacy delves deeply into such questions, drawing on more than forty years of archival and interview-based research on Zimbabwe's political history and current precariousness. Starting with the mid-1970s, it traces how Machiavellian moves allowed Mugabe to reach the apex of the Zimbabwe African National Union's already slippery slopes, through the complexities of Cold War, regional, ideological, generational, inter- and intra-party tensions. The lessons learned by the president and the nascent ruling party then turned gradually inward, ultimately arriving at a near-collapse that may now pervade all of the country's political space. David B. Moore vividly charts this rise and fall, all the way to Zimbabwe's tenuous chaos today.

Coming to Terms
Coming to Terms

Author: Richard Schwartz

Publisher:

Published: 2001

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9780755619184

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"Robert Mugabe's ZANU(PF) party - the Zimbabwe African National Union and the Patriotic Front formed by the merger of ZANU and Joshua Nkomo's Zimbabwe African People's Union (ZAPU) - won a landslide victory in the independence elections of 1980. Mugabe came to power with an avowedly revolutionary and Marxist-Leninist programme, ehos and worldview. His dominance was butressed by victory in the brutal civil war in Matabeleland and assured by the successful marginalisation of his arch rival, the legendary Nkomo, and by rigid control over the levers of state power. Yet Zimbabwe's position on the world stage and in Africa has been profoundly affected by practical considerations of international political realities. In common with many emergent countries sharing Zimbabwe's political, economic, social and historical experience, today her political and economic relations network only very partially reflects her pre-independence Marxist positions. The country has had to jettison much of its ideological radicalism in the face of the grim practicalities of international politics. Striking examples of divergence abound in Zimbabwe's worldwide relatonships and none more so than with apartheid South Africa and in the failure to maintain friendship with powerful erstwhile supporters of ZANU in the independence struggle - China and Russia."--Bloomsbury Publishing.