The military coup of November 15, 2017, in Zimbabwe, which the protagonists who carried it out euphemistically call Operation Restore Legacy (ORL) was an ultimate power play between two competing factions within Zanu-PF, the military-backed Lacoste faction and the pro-Mugabe Generation 40 faction. It was an operation by the army, not to rescue the country from a grinding economic decline, but a means to perpetuate the fall, for the benefit of the military elite who have alway

Zimbabwe’s leader, Emmerson Mnangagwa was sworn in as president on the 24th November 2017 to replace president Robert Mugabe who was deposed through a military coup. Today marks exactly three years since the assumption of Mnangagwa as the president of Zimbabwe. The unfortunate events of November 2017 will forever be remembered as the time that Zimbabwe kissed "democracy" goodbye, with the military apparatchiks taking control in the running of the central government. While a m

EMMERSON MNANGAGWA completes three tumultuous years at State House on 24 November 2020, as President of Zimbabwe, having been sworn into the office backed by tanks and bullets on the same date in 2017 following a military coup, dubbed “Operation Restore Legacy”, that deposed former and late President Robert Mugabe. Against this backdrop, it is propitious to unpack how the military’s Operation Restore Legacy coup has fared in terms of the situation of state politics in Zimbabw

The most stubborn question about the Zimbabwean social and political condition is exactly how the protracted war against Rhodesian settler colonialism did not lead to the liberation of Zimbabweans. How political independence from Rhodesia did not graduate to economic and political liberation of Zimbabweans is a durable historical dilemma and one that now urgently needs to be pondered and radically acted upon. Exactly forty years after Zimbabwe’s political independence the peo

It is exactly three years since the late former President Robert Mugabe was booted out in a military coup. Many Zimbabweans poured onto the streets celebrating the ouster, the humiliation of a man who had become an institution over 37 years in power. New dawn beckoned. The military had six days earlier issued a statement marking the coup in slow motion. In the statement, it said Mugabe was safe and it wanted to deal with crooks surrounding him. The coup did not have only loca

Three years ago, euphoria gripped a nation that was epitomised by cronyism, corruption mis-governance and repression when President Emmerson Mnangagwa took over from long-time leader Robert Mugabe after a military-assisted intervention that was code-named Operation Restore Legacy. Zimbabwe had known one leader since Independence in 1980 and this gave many who took to the street the more reason to celebrate Mugabe’s fall. Mugabe’s ouster was a culmination of dramatic events