The Crocodile, a maniac feared even more than tyrant he ousted
OUSTED vice president Emmerson Mnangagwa landed at an airforce base in Harare yesterday, ready to wrest power from despot Robert Mugabe. But many Zimbabweans fear the man known as The Crocodile for his political cunning will be as bad, if not worse than Mugabe, who has brought the country to the brink of ruin.
With a reputation for brutality, Mr Mnangagwa, 75, is said to be the only man in Zimbabwe to inspire more fear than Mugabe, and has been implicated in the massacres of thousands of civilians.
He was Mugabe’s former bodyguard, spymaster and political enforcer, and intimidation, detentions, violence and torture became the tools of power in the regime’s 37-year misrule.
Mr Mnangagwa’s decades of loyalty saw him rise to become the ageing president’s heir apparent, only to be sacked last week in favour of Mugabe’s wife Grace.
The president accused his deputy of using witchcraft in a plot to overthrow him – but in losing his henchman, his support from the military and the powerful war veterans who supported Mr Mnangagwa was fatally damaged.
The ousted vice president fled, saying he and his family faced death threats. But he now appears poised to form a unity government and finally end Mugabe’s corrupt reign.
The pair have been politically inseparable since the Sixties, when both were imprisoned for fighting in the struggle for independence from Britain and white minority rule in what was then Rhodesia.
Mr Mnangagwa, the son of a political agitator against colonial laws, was sent to China and Egypt for military training.
But he was arrested on returning to Rhodesia when he and his gang – also called The Crocodiles – blew up a train near Victoria Falls.
HE narrowly escaped a death sentence after claiming to be under 21, making him too young to hang, but spent a decade in prison, including three years in solitary confinement.
He was tortured, hung upside down until he lost consciousness, and was beaten so savagely that he lost the hearing in his left ear.
The guerrilla insurgency continued through the Seventies and when Mugabe fled to Mozambique to build support and direct the fight from exile, Mr Mnangagwa went with him as his lieutenant and bodyguard.
When Zimbabwe became independent in 1980, he was named as the new country’s national security chief and became notorious for his role in the brutal repression of civilians in Matabeleland.
The new country’s military Fifth Brigade – trained by North Korean soldiers – was sent to crush a potential rebellion, and executed thousands of men of fighting age.
Soldiers made victims dig their own graves before they were shot, and their relatives were forced at gunpoint to dance on the graves, chanting pro-Mugabe slogans.
Tens of thousands of civilians were believed to have died during the four-year operation, but none of the perpetrators were ever brought to justice.
Mr Mnangagwa was said to have been fully aware of what was happening, and reportedly even directed the massacre, although he has always denied any role in the killings, blaming the army.
His reputation for cruelty continued as he was implicated in countless plots to intimidate Mugabe’s opponents, and was strengthened by his links with the war veterans who led the campaign of violence and land grabs against the country’s white farmers.
He became so feared that he was one of the few political figures who travelled without security, safe in the knowledge that no one would risk an attack against The Crocodile. He had Mugabe’s ear and – like countless others at the top of the ruling Zanu-PF party – he appears to have reaped enormous financial rewards from his position of power. A US diplomatic cable published by WikiLeaks claimed he had amassed ‘extraordinary wealth’ during civil wars in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where Zimbabwe’s troops were accused of plundering the country’s diamonds and gold resources.
He is also said to control the lucrative gold industry in his home region of Zvishavane.
When Mugabe made himself president, Mr Mnangagwa was appointed to a series of key roles, including as minister for justice, defence, and vice president.
He developed his own power base of supporters – known as Lacoste because of the fashion brand’s crocodile logo – who often used violence.
An opposition candidate who defeated Mr Mnangagwa in a parliamentary election in 2000, Blessing Chebundo, was abducted by Zanu-PF thugs who doused him with petrol, but were unable to light a match to set him on fire.
The violence continued during the 2008 elections, when Mr Mnangagwa was credited with masterminding a campaign against opposition supporters from the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) that left hundreds dead and forced thousands more to flee their homes.
MDC leader Morgan Tsvangirai won the first round but the aggression grew so extreme that he stepped aside, and Mugabe was given a clear run at the presidency.
Mr Mnangagwa, who has a law degree from the University of London, describes himself as a bornagain Christian and a Chelsea fan.
He has nine children by two wives and is described as a sharp and business-savvy politician, who understands the need for economic reform in Zimbabwe and plans to revive agriculture by inviting the country’s former landowners and white farmers to return.
Although elderly, he remains physically imposing, but his hopes of becoming president appeared to have been dashed this year when they put him on a collision course with Mrs Mugabe, who said of him: ‘The snake must be hit on the head.’
Mrs Mugabe was thought to have won the encounter when her husband sacked Mr Mnangagwa and he fled. But once out of sight, The Crocodile appears to have waited for his chance to bite, and may yet prove to be deadly to Mugabe.
THE forced removal from power of 93-year-old Robert Mugabe should be cause for celebration, since he has been one of the wickedest despots on earth, who in his 37-year rule brought the once prosperous country of Zimbabwe close to ruin.
But unfortunately he seems likely to be succeeded by his former collaborator and Marxist comrade-in-arms, emmerson Mnangagwa, who until last week was Vice-President. This man is probably as brutal, nasty and tyrannical as Mugabe.
So it grieves me to say that the future for Zimbabwe — the former British colony of Rhodesia — looks as grim today as it did before the army coup against Mugabe. The head of the army, General Chiwenga, is another very unpleasant piece of work.
how did it happen that a country which was once a net exporter of food has been reduced to its pitiable state by self- serving and corrupt politicians who live like kings while some of their people starve, and 90 per cent are unemployed?
The answer to that question is that we, the British, nurtured and succoured Mugabe. he is our creation. Yet there is a widespread view, which must be debunked, that the man was not always a monster, and only became so when left to his own devices.
In the space of a few minutes on Radio 4 yesterday morning, Mugabe was three times described as a ‘former freedom-fighter’. Then the Tory MP Nicholas Soames asserted that for a number of years after becoming leader of Zimbabwe in 1980 he had behaved quite well but changed later for the worse. Both notions are utterly wrong.
In truth, Mugabe was always a brute, and he was a terrorist not a ‘freedom-fighter’. And almost from the moment he achieved power, he continued in his old ways of murdering his opponents.
BUT why should anyone be surprised? During the war against Ian Smith’s white- minority Rhodesian government in the Seventies, Mugabe’s troops were guilty of numerous terrorist atrocities.
In particular, they targeted — which means they killed — white missionaries in the belief that such acts of terror would subjugate rural blacks to their cause. At least 33 missionaries and members of their families were murdered.
In one gruesome incident in June 1978, Mugabe’s terrorists — not ‘freedom-fighters’ — axed, bayonetted and clubbed eight British missionaries and four of their children in eastern Rhodesia. Of five women, most were sexually assaulted before they were killed, and one was mutilated.
After Mugabe became prime minister following the Lancaster house Agreement brokered by the British government, he set about eliminating his enemies. In 1983, a campaign of terror was launched against the Matabele people in western Zimbabwe.
The ‘crime’ of the Matabele, in Mugabe’s mind, was that many of them supported his Matabele rival, Joshua Nkomo. An estimated 20,000 people were slaughtered by Mugabe’s Fifth Brigade, which had been trained by North Korea.
So when Nicholas Soames implies all was reasonably hunky- dory until Mugabe started confiscating whiteowned farms around the year 2000, he is talking nonsense. I suppose he is seeking to defend his father, Christopher, who was briefly Governor of Rhodesia while the Lancaster house Agreement was implemented.
The British government of the time was similarly deluded. It continued to pet and buttress the Mugabe regime, and Foreign Office types congratulated themselves for having installed such a reasonable fellow. Almost unbelievably, in 1994 he was given an honorary knighthood (of which he was not stripped until 2008). We sold Mugabe hawk fighter-trainer aircraft, which were later used by him in an illegal war in the Congo. We also sold some 1,500 Land Rover Defenders to the Zimbabwean police at half price, weakly requesting that they would not be used for riot control. They often were.
It was only when Mugabe illegally seized control of white- owned farms that the scales began to fall from the eyes of his cheerleaders in this country: most of the Labour Party, sections of the Tory Party, the Foreign Office, the BBC and swathes of the British Press.
As many of these farms were given to Mugabe’s cronies, most of whom weren’t interested in farming, or very proficient at it if they were, agricultural production slumped, and a country that had been the bread basket of Africa was driven into poverty.
It is a sorry tale — as sorry as they come, even in poor, benighted Africa. I don’t at all excuse Ian Smith, the white prime minister of Rhodesia who declared independence from Britain in 1965. his fatal flaw was his refusal to encourage moderate African leaders until it was too late.
But in my experience, most black Zimbabweans who remember the Smith era prefer it to what has happened in more recent times under the malign, corrupt and intermittently violent Mugabe regime.
At least Smith (who fought with the RAF as a pilot in the war, and was badly scarred) was not corrupt. A few years before his death in 2007, I interviewed him at home in what was a very modest house in the suburbs of the capital, harare.
MUGABE, by contrast , has enriched himself grotesquely. his venal wife, Grace (who may have fled the country), has dug her talons even deeper into government coffers, acquiring homes in Dubai and South Africa, as well as a £300,000 Rolls-Royce.
The fascinating question is why commentators and politicians persisted in admiring this ghastly man when it should have been plain to them how bad he was. I think it has something to do with a kind of reverse racism — the assumption that whites in Africa must always be morally at fault.
It didn’t weigh with Mugabe’s defenders that he was a hardline Marxist, or that he was happy to use violence (they must surely have known as much), or that before the Lancaster house Agreement he had vowed to appropriate white- owned farms ( as he eventually did).
It’s true that after Lancaster house the British government hoped the moderate Bishop Abel Muzorewa might win subsequent elections. But when Mugabe triumphed, the Foreign Office quickly persuaded itself he was a decent chap who would play by the rules.
What a tragedy this has been. I remember how, during my first visit to what was still Rhodesia in 1978, a scientist showed me a new sort of highyield wheat grain which had been developed there. It struck me that this was a sophisticated, rather civilised country.
It’s no longer at all civilised or remotely sophisticated. Zimbabwe has been virtually destroyed by a revolution in which only the elite — as is invariably the case — has prospered. What has happened was entirely foreseeable.
Shouldn’t those who rooted for Mugabe 30 and 40 years ago examine their consciences? Most of them would never want such a man ruling their own country. Why was he ever considered fit to rule Zimbabwe?
If only this beautiful and fertile land, blessed as it is by hard- working people and ingenious entrepreneurs, could find benevolent and democratic rulers — why, then it could thrive again despite the nightmares of recent decades.
Alas, Robert Mugabe seems likely to be replaced by men just as bad as him. This is a wicked ruling cadre, which our politicians helped to create, and it’s not going to vanish simply because we have decided we no longer like it.