Zimbabwe’s Mnangagwa turns improbable saviour of nation

Bloomberg

Zimbabwe is turning its weary eyes to Emmerson Mnangagwa, the man known as the crocodile who was Robert Mugabe’s right-hand man for much of his 37-year rule. The former spy chief, who’s due to be inaugurated as interim president, has signalled he’d move to woo investors from Asia and the west to help rebuild a shattered economy. But he isn’t likely to dismantle the security apparatus that was used to carry out repression during Mugabe’s administration before he resigned as president.
Nicknamed, ngwena, or crocodile in the Shona language, during the war against white-ruled Rhodesia, Mnangagwa, 75, has been at the center of power during some of Zimbabwe’s darkest moments. He joined the insurgency in the 1960s, received
military training in China and Egypt, and allied himself with Mugabe’s faction of the liberation movements.
After independence in 1980, he was security minister as North Korean-trained troops carried out massacres in Matabeleland in the 1980s that claimed as many as 20,000 lives, according to human-rights groups. He was also in the cabinet when Mugabe authorized the seizure of white-owned farms that led to agricultural production, export earnings and tax revenue being slashed, and during the 2008 election campaign that saw almost 100 opposition supporters killed.
“The tyrant may have fallen but we may not have ended tyranny,” said Showers Mawowa, the Zimbabwean director of the Southern African Liaison Office, a civil-rights group based in Pretoria, the capital of neighboring South Africa. “The infrastructure of violence is still there. We know that it is the military and the police that have kept Mugabe in power and these are the same securocrats that have supported Mnangagwa.”
Mnangagwa’s enduring power was the key to Mugabe’s downfall. The decision to fire Mnangagwa as his deputy on November 6 after the president’s wife Grace Mugabe accused him of plotting a coup prompted the armed forces generals to take power and put the only leader Zimbabweans had ever known under house arrest. After he fled Zimbabwe, citing “incessant threats” against him and his family, Mnangagwa issued a defiant statement, pledging to return to lead the country.