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Ryan Reynolds here from Int Mobile. With the price of just about everything going up during inflation, we thought we'd bring our prices
It's April the 18th in the year 2000, Independence Day.
Twenty years ago, at a stadium in Zimbabwe's capital, Harare, Robert Mugabe proclaimed the birth of a new nation. In a moving speech of reconciliation, the former guerrilla leader promised an end to the fighting between blacks and whites. Now those words ring totally hollow. Three hundred miles from the capital city, at a little after six in the morning, Martin Olds looks out of his window. A hundred men are breaking through the fence that surrounds his farm.
They're well armed, with guns and traditional Zimbabwean hunting knives. Three days earlier, another white farmer, David Stevens, was kidnapped, taken into the bush, and murdered by a mob. They claim to be war veterans, but from the looks of them, most of the men gathered outside Martin Old's tin-roofed farmstead are too young to have fought in the Liberation War. He grabs his shotgun and loads a couple of cartridges into the chamber. At 42,
Olds is a military vet himself, with four firearms at his disposal. A burly man with a thick brown beard, he cuts a pretty imposing figure. But Olds is no fool. He knows he stands little chance in a shootout. Instead, he attempts to negotiate. Stepping outside his front door, he sees the invaders have taken up offensive positions, and they don't seem willing to parley. Before he can get a word out, one of the men fires. Olds is hit in the leg.
bones splintering. He staggers back inside and reaches for his two-way radio. Grimacing from the pain, he manages to make contact with the Farmers' Union. He begs them to call him an ambulance. With help on its way, or so he assumes, Olds improvises a temporary splint for his broken leg. He then steel himself for the battle of his life. For the next hour or so, he exchanges fire with the men outside his home, crawling from room to room to get a clear shot.
He manages to hit half a dozen of the intruders, but the others show no sign of retreating. By now, Olds is desperate for medical attention, but the ambulance still hasn't arrived. Little does he know, it's being held at a police roadblock, along with a group of farmers who are attempting to launch a rescue. Olds keeps the siege going longer than anyone could have expected, but eventually, the invaders flush him out. They hurl Molotov cocktails through the shattered windows of the farmstead.
Soon the entire building is ablaze, choking on the fumes. Olds is forced out into the open. The invaders grab him and shoot him twice in the face at close range. For the next couple of hours they remain at the farm, cheering and singing. The farm's name, in a twist of irony, is Compensation. By the time the police finally arrive on the scene, they are long gone. Later that day, President Mugabe appears on state television.
Far from condemning the murder, he appears to sympathize with the invaders. Zimbabwe's 4,000 white farmers, he claims, are stuck in the entrenched colonial attitudes of the past. Thanks to them, the new constitution he proposed was defeated in a referendum two months earlier. Amongst other things, it would have transferred farmland from white to black owners. The whites, Mugabe declares, have proven themselves enemies of Zimbabwe.
and by now everyone knows how he treats his enemies. After two decades in office, Robert Mugabe has already shown himself to be a callous and brutal dictator. From the Kukuru-Hundi genocide launched against the minority Ndebele's, to the vote rigging, corruption, and economic mismanagement by his cronies, there have been plenty of reasons for the international community to abandon him. But only after the farm invasions at the dawn of the 21st century
will the outside world acknowledge Mugabe's true nature. And as Mugabe doubles down, he will drag Zimbabwe into the greatest economic crisis since the Wall Street crash. From Noisa, this is part three of the Mugabe story. And this is Real Dictators. For Mugabe and his ZANU-PF party, violence and intimidation are long-standing political tools
As the wave of farm invasion sweeps the country from early 2000 onwards, there's little doubt as to his intentions. Dr. Chipo Tendere
We get to 2000 and there's a vibrant opposition. Unfortunately, ZANU-PF has learned that they can use violence. They can use military tactics that were used to gain independence and they can use those of the citizens. They realize like, look, we don't have the white vote. White farmers are going to support the opposition. So let's embrace all the evil. It was very controlled.
It wasn't a mass of people going onto farms and just massacring people. It almost feels like they had a meeting one day and said, "How many white farmers do you think we can kill or should kill to bring everybody to heel?"
They killed every animal they could on the farm and that was a deliberate policy because it upset white people to see their horses covered in bales of hay and set alight. Or they would chase the horses over the cattle grid so they'd break their legs and it stoned the dogs to death. In early 2000, Mugabe is still smarting from his first ever electoral defeat.
A new political party, the Movement for Democratic Change, spearheaded the no vote in the recent referendum campaign. Thanks in part to the efforts of white activists, the MDC succeeded in quashing Mugabe's plans. In large part, the farm invasions are intended to destroy the MDC's base, just as the Kokuro-Hundi massacres 20 years earlier targeted the supporters of Mugabe's rival, Joshua Nkomo.
But it's not just the white farmers who are in the crosshairs. Black farm workers are raped, tortured and massacred as the invaders are unleashed. Douglas Rogers, author of The Last Resort: A Memoir of Zimbabwe, grew up on his parents' farm near the Mozambique border. Up to one million people lived and worked on white commercial farms and they were overwhelmingly supportive of the opposition.
So in taking out white farmers, he was doing two things. He was targeting a white minority, but he was also destroying black farm workers in that community. Many were killed, many beaten up, left landless, fled to South Africa, fled to Mozambique. And that was, to me, that's the overlooked story of that time. Dr. Sue Onsler.
The way that it was reported in the press, particularly in the UK, emphasized the attacks, the damage, the killings, the invasions, the destitution of farmers. But not enough attention was given to the wider Zimbabwean black community who were impoverished, who were dispossessed, whose lives and livelihoods were wrecked. That was, I'm afraid, a statistic. Lugabe is unrepentant.
"It is our right, it is our land," he tells supporters at one rally. "We must be prepared to die for it." The history of land ownership in Zimbabwe is a complex one, stretching back more than a hundred years. Cecil Rhodes' British South Africa Company and the subsequent white minority regime plundered this land and subjugated its people. But a century on, many of the white farmers are third or fourth generation immigrants who have never lived anywhere else.
Presenting the farm invasions as a straightforward racial conflict suits Mugabe. Oh, all the white people had the best land and the best farms and everything. Not necessarily. From independence in 1980, if you had a farm and you wanted to sell it, you had to offer it to the government first of all. You couldn't just sell it to anybody.
And if they didn't want it, you got a letter of no interest. And your farm was protected, in theory, from government intervention at any time. 80% of the farms that were invaded had letters of no interest from the government. They could have bought the farms in the past. They could have resettled people on them if they wanted to. They had no interest. Despite decades of appalling leadership, Mugabe himself still garners residual respect across Africa.
Although a lot of people in Africa didn't like what Mugabe had done, they quite liked the fact that he'd given the finger to the white man. Even after all the violence on the trams and stuff, he would go internationally and be feted. He's like the old man of Africa, you know, like a father figure, this sort of giant of a continent in a way. But with parliamentary elections coming up in June, Mugabe faces the most serious political threat of his 20 years in power.
The MDC's leader, trade unionist Morgan Changaray, is younger, more dynamic, and he has the common touch. Plus, he's already beaten Mugabe once before, in the referendum campaign. Mugabe has no intention of losing again. The same day as the first white farmer, David Stevens, was murdered, Changaray's driver was killed in a petrol bomb attack on his vehicle. Now with the election looming,
Properties seized from white farmers are turned into re-education centers for dispossessed black farm workers. Men, women and children are rounded up and bundled into convoys of stolen vehicles, driven to remote farms, and subjected to days of bullying and intimidation. By June 1, the MDC have calculated that only a fifth of constituencies are safe enough for them to campaign in.
An investigation by one human rights organisation finds more than 5,000 separate incidents of political violence. But even faced with this bloodshed, millions of Zimbabweans remain optimistic as to the possibility of change. After all, if ZANU-PF can lose a referendum, who's to say they can't lose an election as well?
That's when we started thinking, okay, so maybe we might get a new president. There was really now this bubbling. I think of it as sort of like this excitement and anxiety. I remember my sister, my older sister who had never voted and her husband who was from Matabele land. I mean, they were just so euphoric. They're excited. They're talking about change, right? That something has to change. And then people start using data must go. Like the old man must go.
In fact, Mugabe's own job isn't up for grabs for another two years when Zimbabwe faces its next presidential election. But losing his majority in parliament would be a devastating blow nonetheless. In the event, he just about scrapes through. ZANU-PF takes 62 seats to 57 for the MBC. The share of the popular vote is even closer: 48 to 47 percent. One thing is crystal clear.
Had it not been for all the violence and intimidation, Mugabe would have lost the election. A decade ago, he was campaigning for a one-party state. Now, he barely commands a majority. Journalist Nathan Dodso. The parliamentary election in 2000 really was a major wake-up call. So now they had opposition. All of a sudden there's opposition to anything that we want to put forward. Things were changing. The tide was actually turning slowly but surely.
With his eye on the presidential poll two years down the road.
Mugabe doubles down on the farm invasions. In July, he announces a government program designed to formalize the so far chaotic process. Harking back to the liberation wars of the 19th and 20th centuries, Mugabe christens this program of land reform, the Third Chimurenga. In the first two years, around 6 million hectares of land are confiscated from Zimbabwe's white farmers.
But to no one's surprise, the best properties are snapped up by Mugabe and his cronies. Of course, fat cats all took the best farms and they use them to this day. They sort of go out there. It's a bit like a hunting lodge or a gentleman's country estate. And they take their mates out there and they have barbecues and stuff. And nobody's really farming too much.
Lend reform isn't about lend reform. It's about rewarding people that are loyal to you. But what that means is that three quarters of the farms stop producing right there. So when you think about hunger in Zimbabwe, people in Zimbabwe shouldn't be hungry, but they are because the farms are just not functioning.
They've got arable land, that arable land just became a wasteland. The farms were taken with no plan. It was just right, let's give the land to this person. But then the produce dropped because again, you have to train that person to use that land effectively. Zimbabwe's staple crop, maize, sees a decline of 37%. And in the ensuing years, production will continue to fall.
Even in the faraway UK, a major export market for Zimbabwean foodstuffs, consumers notice a change. Professor Stephen Chan: "At that point in time, you could go to Sainsbury's and you could bet your bottom dollar that the packet of beans that you were buying would have the label on the produce of Zimbabwe. This paid foreign exchange into the national coffers, and all of that was suddenly lost.
Suddenly, Zimbabwean produce disappeared from the supermarket shelves. There's no need to boycott, it just wasn't there. It will be several years before the full impact of the land redistribution is felt by the Zimbabwean economy. In the meantime, the apparatuses of state are becoming increasingly authoritarian. By now, the police force is little more than a government militia, and censorship of the media is stricter than ever.
In 2001, an independent paper, The Daily News, has its printing presses destroyed in a bomb blast. Foreign journalists meanwhile begin to be expelled from the country. Those who dare to criticize Mugabe's government live in constant fear of reprisals.
Morgan Changurai, the leader of the opposition, was frequently assaulted, detained. And this happened frequently if you were in the opposition, if you were an activist in the MBC, particularly around election times. I remember interviewing a guy once and he was in a rural area. And as I was talking to him, he was being attacked and you could hear the glass breaking around him. And he just said, I'm so tired. He'd been on the run for so long.
"You've got to understand the level of poverty in this country, of how hard it is to fight back." It's not just the MDC supporters who run the risk of violence. Gabriel Schumba is studying law at the University of Zimbabwe, when the government more than doubles his tuition fees. The students organize a peaceful protest, but it's dealt with like a political riot. Police go through dormitories looking for people to beat up and drop tear gas onto the campus from helicopters.
It was a crime to just voice an opposing opinion. When I was graduating from the University of Zimbabwe in the year 2000, I was president of the Student Representative Council.
And at some point I was then nominated to hand over a petition to protest the police brutality against student demonstrations. President Mugabe was the chancellor of the University of Zimbabwe. As I was approaching him to hand over that petition, I was whisked away by his security forces, his security aides.
I was taken away in gown and cape and thrown into jail merely for attempting to hand over a petition. I spent three days in jail. Despite such treatment growing increasingly common, within Zimbabwe, the D word remains taboo. Dr. Chippo Dendere left the country to pursue her education in the United States.
In my studies, because I was a political science major, you were talking about Zimbabwe as a dictatorship, but the average person is not using this word, this word of a dictator. I think it's the fact of you're living in the state and there are these constant contradictions, right? Well, is it a dictatorship if we have elections? Then at what point does it become a dictatorship? Now, I think looking back, people use that phrase more openly.
One of the few democratic bulwarks left in Zimbabwe is the judiciary, which, despite Mugabe's best efforts, continues to uphold the law as best it can. After losing her job at the state-run broadcaster, Jerry Jackson decides to try a legal route to set up the country's first independent radio station.
I was speaking to some people who felt that if you took a case to the Constitutional Court about the government's broadcasting monopoly, you would win. So I thought, okay. And I did win the right to set up the first independent radio station. All five Supreme Court judges ruled in my favor. So I bought a transmitter in South Africa, found some offices, found a couple of people,
And then, of course, Mugabe used his presidential powers to overturn the court ruling and had it shut down. They were wielding AK-47s and they surrounded the radio station and they were trying to break down the door and they seized all the equipment and they surrounded my house with AK-47s. I was advised to go into hiding.
I decided to try and get some donor funding and relocate offshore because I was now on a mission. I'm on a mission here. I'm going to start a radio station come hell or high water. So it was complex. But after a year, I set up a shortwave broadcast service broadcasting just outside of London. For the next 13 years, Jackson and her colleagues will put together a nightly bulletin at their studio in Boreham Wood.
transmitted via a satellite station in South Africa. For around a million Zimbabwean listeners, many tuning in on wind-up radios, the uncensored broadcast is a lifeline. If Mugabe's goal is to reduce the number of voters likely to oppose him, then in one respect at least, he's succeeded. Millions of Zimbabweans quit the country for less repressive climes. The resulting brain drain of blacks and whites sees the country lose around half its doctors
With Zimbabwe in the grip of an AIDS epidemic and medicines in short supply, the timing couldn't be worse. As the presidential election approaches, Mugabe's rhetoric becomes increasingly combative. "What we are now headed for is real war," he tells a party conference, three months before the polls open. "This is the third Chimurenga. You are soldiers of ZANU-PF." Once again, Mugabe's goons unleash hell on the Zimbabwean people.
This time, it's youth brigades, known as the "Green Bombers" for their distinctive fatigue uniforms, who are responsible for the brutalization. Across the country, MDC activists are abducted, tortured, and murdered. Shops are looted and homes burned to the ground. International election observers are expelled. Two days before the election, hundreds of urban polling stations are closed down, leading to impossible queues at those that are permitted to open.
After waiting for hours to cast their ballots, many voters simply give up and go home. Meanwhile, in the countryside, amongst ZANU-PF's traditional base, the number of polling stations is increased. The result? A 14% majority for Mugabe is denounced by the opposition as daylight robbery. The United States, the European Union, and, most infuriating for Mugabe, Great Britain, all refuse to accept it.
A week later, Zimbabwe is expelled from the Commonwealth. But for another six years at least, the presidency is his. Newly emboldened, Mugabe goes for broke on land reform. All 3,000 remaining white farmers in the country are served a 90-day notice to abandon their properties or face imprisonment. He even talks of seizing white-owned factories. The following year, Mugabe compares himself to the most hated figure of the 20th century.
"I am still the Hitler of the time," he boasts, "at the funeral of a ZANU loyalist. This Hitler has only one objective: justice for his own people, sovereignty for his people, recognition of the independence of his people and their right to their resources. If that is Hitler, then let me be a Hitler tenfold." In 2003, Morgan Changaray is arrested and charged with treason, a crime that carries the death penalty.
Although the case against him is eventually dropped, the threat never quite goes away. The fourth estate isn't much safer either. After expelling a number of international journalists, Mugabe now declares them the enemies of the state. This is the cue for journalist Nathan Dodso to leave the country.
December of 2002, they had actually put a front page article in the Sunday Mail, which is the main paper read by everyone on a Sunday saying scribes spy for BBC.
So pretty much everyone who was an international journalist at the time was now seen as a spy. After we saw that article, I remember going back to where I was staying and people were saying, "Oh, you're in the front page, you know, how can people ever talk to you again?" Knowing that now anyone who's again seen in that sense is now an enemy of the state. That's the reason why I came back to the UK in 2003.
It is sad to feel that you're not welcome in your own country or you're not free in your own country. I was just reporting what I saw or just filming what I saw, you know. But sometimes what I saw at times could be seen as something that shouldn't have been reported or shouldn't have been filmed, you know. But only they can decide that. Lawyer Gabriel Schoombe also finds his days in the country are numbered. Since being hauled away by police at his graduation ceremony,
Shumba has been working as a human rights lawyer and as an activist for the MDC. Two occupations in the current climate that are as good as putting a target on your back.
I have been arrested for not less than 14 or 15 times in Zimbabwe for my activism. But at no period did any of the charges stick. It was mainly intended as intimidation and harassment under President Mugabe. So I didn't, for the life of me, think that it would culminate to something worse than just an arrest case.
As an MDC lawyer, Shumba has grown used to hearing stories of horrific abuse by the authorities, some of them so shocking that he finds them hard to believe.
I was incredulous when I heard those stories. And I, you know, the only time that I fully, 100% believed it, it only hit home when it happened to me. And I was blindfolded, taken for days, tortured, forced to write a confession.
confessing to treasonous activities in Zimbabwe. So when that happened, I was electrocuted, I was urinated upon, I even vomited blood, and I was made to drink my own urine and my own blood, merely for representing an opposition member of parliament. After three days of torture, with no access to food or water, Shumba is released. But it's clear that staying in Zimbabwe is no longer an option.
Thanks to the false confession he was forced to sign, his passport has been confiscated by a judge. He'll have to find another way out of the country. Obviously, I can't mention the nitty gritties of how that happened because I would be exposing some people, but only to say that I escaped from Zimbabwe in the boot of a car and I found myself in Botswana and ultimately in South Africa. Even in South Africa, though, Shumba knows he's not entirely safe.
Mugabe's agents operate across international borders. People were being abducted and rendered back into Zimbabwe. I was almost abducted inside a theatre in Johannesburg. I only survived because I removed my shirt. They were holding me by both hands. And I removed the shirt and they were left holding the shirt. And I escaped. In Johannesburg, Shumba is able to return to his work as a human rights lawyer.
But living a life in exile is never easy. I had left my children inside Zimbabwe. I had left my wife in Zimbabwe. I ended up with depression and post-traumatic stress disorder. Sometimes I would go into court and just freeze, fail to even rise when the judge arrives in court.
feeling as if my legs were stuck in concrete or something. Sometimes I would start bleeding from the nose endlessly. Sometimes nightmares when I was sleeping. I was suicidal and I almost became an alcoholic during those days.
So it became such a nightmare just working through a day. So I was in serious problems. I ended up seeking treatment in Denmark and also in Johannesburg. And I'm happy to say that I've at least passed some of those difficult moments. So I feel as if I am a better person than I was earlier on. Meanwhile, back in Zimbabwe,
Another election means another stolen result. By 2005, ZANU-PF have all but given up pretending the electoral process is free and fair. There's less violence than before, but the gerrymandering has gone into overdrive. Constituency boundaries are redrawn to increase the ZANU vote. Postal votes from exiled Zimbabweans are blocked. Thousands of fictitious names suddenly appear on the electoral rolls, while genuine citizens find theirs have been scrubbed off it.
But most blatant of all is the count. Between the polls closing and the official results coming in, thousands of extra ballots mysteriously appear, giving ZANU candidates some implausible majorities. In 11 constituencies, the party somehow receives more votes than the total numbers cast. But even with the cheating, Mugabe has succeeded in clawing just 16 seats back from the MDC.
In the cities, despite his best efforts, their support remains strong. Two months later, hundreds of thousands of urban Zimbabweans feel the full force of Mugabe's wrath. Supposedly, Operation Murambachina is a slum clearance program intended to improve living conditions and flush out petty criminals. The name, ominously, translates as Operation Drive Out the Filth.
Unofficially, it becomes known as Zimbabwe's Tsunami. On May 25th, police and youth militias move simultaneously against many of the country's poorest communities, in particular those in the slums and shanty towns on the outskirts of Harare and Bulawayo. They bulldoze homes, shut down market stalls, and confiscate everything from food to flowers. Displaced families are transported to rural transit camps, where they're left without water or electricity.
Operation Maramachina leaves almost a million people homeless. And I'm talking to my friend, my best friend at the time, she had started selling things in the markets and she writes to me, those were the days of email, so no social media, no WhatsApp. She writes to me and said, "We've lost everything." They came to the market and they just took our stuff.
So again, the word dictator doesn't come up, right? But in the frustration of people, in the conversations about things have to change, the violence is now in the cities. It's not just something from the rural areas. Now it's in the cities.
It was again a brutal assertion of the will of the state. It led to very real hunger, distress, death, disruption, and it also struck directly at constituency strongholds of the political opposition. Still, Mugabe cannot dent the popularity of the MDC's leader. Morgan Changore has become the dictator's bête noire, and that is a dangerous position to occupy.
In 2007, after MDC activists are arrested at a gathering in Harare, Changaray personally visits the local police station to argue for their release. But while there, he is subjected to the same horrific treatment as his comrades. "I told the police. Beat him a lot," Mugabe later boasts. "He asked for it." When images of the beaten Changaray in his hospital bed get out, the international community is shaken.
U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice declares, "The regime of Robert Mugabe is ruthless and repressive and creates only suffering for the people of Zimbabwe." A few weeks later, the cameraman responsible for leaking the images is murdered. Dee Ed was his name. He worked at television, big guy. And he wasn't really a political person.
But like all of us, he'd been pushed to the limit with what was happening. And apparently he was standing with his wife in his house and he saw the gang coming for him and he turned to his wife and he said, "I am dead." And they found his body the next day. As Mugabe continues to throw punches, all the while the economy is unraveling at an alarming rate. Ever since the start of the farm invasion seven years earlier, inflation has been on the rise.
Investors are looking at this country going, well, this is lawless. Like I can't invest in a farm. You're going to take it. So investment went away. Then a place like Harare looks like this big fancy city, but it's tied to agriculture. You've got tractor businesses and fertilizer and agribusiness ran the country, right? So in taking away these commercial farms, you destroyed so many sectors of the society.
And the only way out of it at that point then was to print money. As hyperinflation takes hold, the value of the Zimbabwean currency plummets further still. The highest denomination banknote, the red $500 bill, acquires a new nickname, the Ferrari, so-called because of the speed at which it leaves your wallet. Before long, new bills are being printed. $1,000, then $1,000,000, then $1,000,000,000.
We would go into a restaurant with a toilet bag full of notes, high denomination notes, millions and millions, which would then be put into a Chinese-made counting machine. So paying for your dinner, they just put the stack of notes into the counting machine, and the price of dinner would have increased while you were having the dinner. Bakers in the streets would throw away the money you gave them. In fact, you would come across alleyways just littered with ostensibly high denomination notes, and no one wanted because they were valueless.
If you realize that they don't care if the economy collapses, then it's easier to understand. They really don't care because they have so much money and they are plundering so much. It's actually, "I don't care if you die and you can't eat and you can't afford bread. I really don't care."
Hyperinflation actually presents new opportunities for Zimbabwe's ruling elite to make money. Senior officials now have access to US dollars at an absurdly low exchange rate, which they can then sell on the black market at a massive markup.
The more the gap in value between the two currencies increases, the greater the jackpot. And by reinvesting the same money over and over again, they can become overnight millionaires. Their privileged financial access gives Mugabe's cronies unprecedented spending power. Before long, in Zimbabwe, 50 US dollars is enough to buy a brand new Mercedes. For ordinary citizens, though, hyperinflation is totally ruinous.
In the summer of 2007, with inflation at 20,000%, the government orders shops to halve their prices. Within a week, supermarket shelves have been emptied, and thanks to the state-imposed discount, managers can't afford to restock them. Then, in September, the unthinkable happens: Zimbabwe runs out of beer. The following year sees a combined presidential and parliamentary election. Robert Mugabe and Zanu Piaf have never been less popular.
For once, the MDC are allowed to campaign freely, and the impact is huge. On April 2nd, the Electoral Commission publishes the results. By a majority of one seat, Changaray now controls the National Assembly. The presidential election, meanwhile, is apparently too close to call. The MDC are confident of victory here as well, but Mugabe has a trick up his sleeve. With the count trending towards Changaray,
The order comes through from on high. All counting and announcements are to be stopped. The ballots will be recounted by hand. "Chakrashtra have won the elections. I had him at 56% on the night. One way or the other he should have been president. Instantly when this trend became clear, counting and announcements stopped and the long grind towards a manual as were fixed ballot paper by ballot paper started.
It was quite clearly a forged result. It will be another six weeks before the presidential results are made public. While Mugabe's people carefully massage the figures, a spree of violence erupts that's unprecedented even in the bloody history of Zimbabwean politics. The campaign carries a sinister code name: Operation Where Did You Put Your Ex? For many, the reign of terror is known simply as the fear.
I guess you're a sore loser, you know, which you are if you're to become a dictator. At long last, the presidential election results are published. Astonishingly, Changaray is acknowledged to have won around 100,000 more votes than Mugabe. But it's too early to break open the champagne. Thanks to a couple of fringe candidates, he's still short of an overall majority. He and Mugabe will have to face each other again in a runoff.
A second round of voting is set for June 27th, almost two months away. In the meantime, hundreds of MDC agents disappear in mysterious circumstances. Before long, more than 80 are confirmed dead. Changarai can only imagine the bloodbath that will ensue when the polls open again. Five days before the runoff, he makes the most difficult decision of his career and officially pulls out of the race.
Mugabe is duly elected for a sixth term in office. Twenty years earlier, after crushing his political nemesis Joshua Nkomo in the Gokuro-Hundi, Mugabe invited him into his cabinet. Now history repeats itself, with parliaments split right down the middle. Mugabe and Chang'e Rai come to terms. A most unlikely coalition is announced, a so-called "government of national unity." Mugabe will remain as president,
But Pachangarai is his prime minister. For Mugabe, it's not simply a case of keeping your friends close and your enemies closer. He's come under intense pressure from international leaders, including South Africa's president, Thabo Mbeki, to come up with a democratic solution.
The world put enormous pressure for the GNU to happen. At the time, I was now an intern on Capitol Hill, and there was just so much pressure from the global community that you need a plan B. You have to come to the table. ZANP have kept a lot of the big ministries to themselves. They gave MDC a lot of the crappy ministries where they had to do a lot of work. What Changarai does get is the finance portfolio. His new finance minister, Tendai Beattie,
replaces the Zimbabwean currency with the US dollar. The currency black market vanishes overnight and goods start reappearing on supermarket shelves. But on March 6th, 2009, only a month after the government of National Unity is formed, Morgan Changaray is involved in a horrific car crash. On his way to a political rally in his hometown of Buhara, the car Changaray and his wife Susan are traveling in is struck by a 7-ton lorry.
The vehicle flips over, rolling several times before coming to rest on its roof. Changaray will recover in hospital, but his wife of 31 years is pronounced dead on arrival. The crash has all the hallmarks of a Mugabe hit job, but when Changaray returns to Harare three days later, he tells supporters he believes this one actually was an accident. Apparently the driver of the lorry was asleep at the wheel. After a short trial,
He is fined $200 and sent home. Not everyone is inclined to believe the official story. Suspicions are raised after a local farmer who took photographs of the crash scene is arrested, with his camera confiscated by police. Sinister accidents have long been routine in Zimbabwe. An emotional Changaray buries his beloved wife and then returns to work as the country's prime minister. If the crash was an attempted hit, then it failed.
His rival/colleague is alive and well, bruised, bloodied and grief-stricken, but more popular than ever. For Mugabe, though, the removal of Susan Changarai does have its benefits. Susan was an enormously popular figure in her own right, as well as a much-loved First Lady. She served as a constant reminder of the popularity that Mugabe's own first wife, Sally, enjoyed as mother of Zimbabwe. Perhaps more significantly,
Susan drew an uncomfortable contrast with his much younger second bride, Grace. Ever since she and Mugabe married more than a decade earlier, Zimbabweans have been struck by Grace's conspicuous failure to live up to Sally's legacy. Sally Mugabe was just a highly respected and much loved figure. A good influence on the nation and the country.
And Grace came to be almost everything opposite to that as time went on and as Mugabe got older. And people came to see her as incredibly manipulative, power hungry, disrespectful. All things that the sort of traditional society in Zimbabwe would not be in favor of. And it's easy to dislike the wife. And then she also became very public. So yeah, people did not like her.
And she's obviously accumulating wealth, taking land from smallholder farmers. I mean, just doing a lot of dictator wife type things. Grace Mugabe has acquired a reputation as a voracious consumer, earning herself some disparaging nicknames. Chief among them, the first shopper and Gucci Grace.
When a reporter notes her apparent addiction to $1,000 Ferragamo shoes, she replies, "I have very narrow feet, so I can only wear Ferragamos." Over time, her extravagant tastes have rubbed off on her husband. For a man who still claims to represent a Marxist revolution, it's a hard circle to square. With their fast cars and designer handbags, the Mugabes take the term "Champagne Socialist" to a whole new level.
Their home in the swanky Borodale suburb of Harare is a literal palace. Three times the size of the president's official residence, it boasts 25 bedrooms, gold taps in all the bathrooms, and is surrounded by 44 acres of land. Built for Mugabe by the Chinese, the eight-figure edifice is an icon of dictatorial extravagance.
It was called the Blue Roof because it had these tiles imported from Shanghai and it was done in sort of Chinese style. It had a herd of antelope, pools, gazebos, high security, of course, and like guards at its various entry points. I never went there, but I knew some people who had been to it. And yeah, again, in just stark contrast to how most Zimbabweans lived at that time.
The blue roof is the jewel in the crown of Mugabe's growing property empire, which also includes a £4 million villa in Hong Kong, purchased when he and Grace's daughter, Bona, started university there. Not to mention more than a dozen formerly white-owned farms within Zimbabwe. In total, the president's assets are believed to exceed a billion US dollars. Rightly or not,
Public perception puts the blame for Mugabe's transition from austere headmaster to extravagant tyrant, squarely at Grace's Ferragamo-clad feet. What few could have predicted, though, is that the deeply unpopular Grace has political ambitions of her own. With her husband approaching his nineties, a succession crisis is looming. And, ironically, after almost forty years in power,
It's Mugabe's wife who will help to bring about his downfall. They wanted Grace gone more than they wanted Robert Mugabe gone. I think if they could have arrested Grace and taken her out of the equation and kept Robert Mugabe as their head figure, I think they would have kept him. He felt he was surrounded by lesser people and he couldn't hand over. He couldn't hand the revolution safely onto these people.
The revolution required him. He's in his 90s. People knew he didn't have long. So there was this internal war as to who would succeed him. It was a game of thrones within the ruling party. We would need to rally everybody together to ensure that we execute this. And with Mugabe, if you are using one bullet, you better not miss because if you miss, you are the dead one. That's next time.
In the final part of the Mugabe story,