Emmerson Mnangagwa
Emmerson Mnangagwa has been president of Zimbabwe since November 2017, when the army put Mugabe under house arrest and the party expelled him and the parliament began impeaching him, a fortnight after Mugabe had sacked Mnangagwa as vice-president to clear the way for his wife Grace, and the seventy-five-year-old who had fled to South Africa came back to a crowd at the airport as the man who had removed the man. The Crocodile, called so for his patience and his bite, had been Mugabe's bodyguard. He was his security minister during the Gukurahundi of 1983-87 in which the Fifth Brigade killed some twenty thousand Ndebele, which he has never accounted for. He was his justice, finance and defence minister, the manager of the elections of 2008 whose violence kept Mugabe in office, and the speaker and vice-president in the succession war with Grace's G40 faction that ended with the tanks in the road. He was born in Shabani in 1942, went to school in Zambia, and was trained in China and Egypt as one of the first guerrillas of ZANU. He was arrested in 1965 for blowing up a train, and was spared the rope only because he could not prove he was over twenty-one, serving ten years, some of them beside Mugabe, and studying law in prison. He was Mugabe's special assistant in Mozambique and the first security minister at independence in 1980. The presidency promised that Zimbabwe was open for business. It delivered the election of July 2018, won with fifty-one per cent and followed by soldiers shooting six protesters in Harare. There were the fuel-price protests of January 2019 answered with seventeen dead and an internet shutdown. There was a new currency in 2019 that lost ninety per cent of its value and another, the gold-backed ZiG, in 2024 that has lost half. There were the lithium mines sold to China, and the compensation agreement with the white farmers of 2020 that has paid a fraction. There was the election of August 2023 that the regional observers called not free, and the resolution of his party in 2025 to extend his term to 2030 against the constitution, which the war veterans who made him have opposed. He is at eighty-three the last of the founding generation in office. The country he took from Mugabe is poorer than the one Mugabe took from Smith.
- Lived: 1942 CE – ?
- Nationality: Zimbabwean
- Roles: president, politician
