…as Mnangagwa excel in walking the haunted trail
ZwNews.com
The soft coup that dethroned Zimbabwe’s long serving iron fisted ruler, President Robert Mugabe, who is now late, was code named ‘operation restore legacy.’
As the code name implies, under this plan, Mugabe’s legacy was slipping away, and the junta saw it fit to restore it.
Did Mugabe had a legacy to be restored? Some had asked. And the correct answer is a big YES.
Every living being has a legacy good or bad.
To understand it better let us look at the definition of the word itself. At law, a legacy is something held and transferred to someone as their inheritance, as by will and testament.
This include personal effects, family property, marriage property or collective property gained by will of real property.
Or let us use an economic term of business a legacy debt is something (debts) handed down or received from an ancestor or predecessor.
The two examples has now made it clear that even Mugabe, loved or hated, liked or disliked had a legacy.
It is true, Mugabe had a legacy, and it is that legacy the junta wanted restored.
However, his legacy was not a pleasant one. Let us now look into Mugabe’s legacy.
In his early years in power Mugabe promised a good legacy. He inherited a good one.
“You have inherited a jewel. Keep it that way,” Mwalimu Julius Nyerere, the founding father of Tanzania, once told Mugabe.
Interestingly, Zimbabwe’s current President Emmerson Mnangagwa was present when Nyerere said those words.
Mugabe back then, preached reconciliation and said he will see to it that all swords are reshaped and modified into ploughshares. However, before long, he started beating the same ploughshares into swords again.
That was the route (legacy) he took until his dethronement from power and his death.
Mugabe left a terrible legacy, a legacy of torture, a legacy of state brutality, a legacy of economic mismanagement and corruption, a legacy of being isolated, a legacy of enforced disappearances, a legacy of state capture.
It is this legacy that the junta and Mnangagwa wanted restored.
And Mnangagwa is happy to see it restored. In fact as for now Mnangagwa has been successful in restoring that legacy.
Mugabe left a legacy in which citizens are spied on by state security apparatus and treated as enemies of the state. Mugabe left a legacy in which opposing views are not tolerated.
For him, in Zimbabwe there was freedom of expression, but no freedom after expression.
He left a legacy where CIO operatives are more than civilians in number.
He made sure they are everywhere, from primary school teacher, journalists, bank teller, vendor, musicians, council street cleaners, barman, combi driver, to village cattle herder.
He even had CIO operatives who are street kids. All these assigned not to keep in check not the security of the nation, but to spy on citizens.
Mugabe’s aides during his time in power used to say he will rule from the grave, people thought they were crazy, but it has become clear that he will indeed rule from the grave.
Mugabe will rule from the grave, through the hand of Emmerson Mnangagwa, and the junta who promised to restore his legacy, and are doing very well in that regard.
