Despot Mugabe under house
ZIMBABWE’S tyrant Robert Mugabe looked to have lost his 37-year-old grip on power yesterday after the army effectively placed him under house arrest.
It also claimed to have seized his wife Grace – known scathingly by her people as Gucci Grace – who he was grooming to be his successor.
Army chiefs said they were holding president Mugabe, 93, and his family safe while targeting “criminals”. They seized control overnight, taking over the state broadcaster, but denied they had staged a coup, describing the action as a “bloodless correction”.
Bankrupt
Tanks and armoured vehicles blocked streets to the main government offices, parliament and the courts in central Harare while Mugabe’s palatial 25-bedroom home was sealed off.
Soldiers guarded police who were sat by a road with their weapons removed.
And 20,000 UK citizens in the African country were advised by Prime Minister Theresa May to stay at home until the crisis passed.
In a phone call, Mugabe told South African president Jacob Zuma he was fine but confined to his home in a Harare suburb.
General Constantine Chiwenga had threatened to “step in” on Monday after Mugabe sacked his deputy, former spy chief and vice president Emmerson Mnangagwa, 75. He is understood to have been planning to rebuild Zimbabwe’s bankrupt economy by bringing back white farmers kicked off their land by Mugabe’s henchmen and mending relations with the World Bank and IMF.
But Labour MP Kate Hoey said Mnangagwa is “probably the one person in Zimbabwe who inspires even greater terror than Mugabe”.
Known as The Crocodile, the former security chief was implicated in the massacres of Mugabe’s rivals in the 1980s in Matabeleland. His dismissal was seen as paving the way for the anointment of Mrs Mugabe, 52, as her husband’s successor.
But yesterday, in a statement on Zimbabwe’s state TV, Major General Sibusiso Moyo declared: “We are only targeting criminals around him who are committing crimes that are causing social and economic suffering in order to bring them to justice. As soon as we have accomplished our mission, we expect that the situation will return to normalcy.”
The leader of the liberation war veterans, Chris Mutsvangwa, said: “This is a correction of a state that was careening off the cliff. It’s the end of a very painful and sad chapter in the history of a young nation, in which a dictator, as he became old, surrendered his court to a gang of thieves around his wife.”
Mrs Mugabe, the despot’s second wife, rose from her husband’s typing pool to find herself on track to be the next president of the country as her husband tried to ensure her succession. While her country was on its knees economically,