Former Zimbabwe dictator Robert Mugabe dies aged 95
Former Zimbabwe dictator Robert Mugabe has died aged 95.
Mugabe died in Singapore, where he has often received medical treatment in recent years, a source with direct knowledge of the matter told Reuters.
Zimbabwe President Emmerson Mnangagwa confirmed the former dictator’s passing on Twitter.
“It is with utmost sadness that I announce the passing of Zimbabwe’s founding father and former president, Robert Mugabe,” the tweet said.
“[Mugabe] was an icon of liberation, a pan-Africanist who dedicated his life to the emancipation and empowerment of his people.
“His contribution to the history of our nation and continent will never be forgotten.
“May his soul rest in eternal peace.”
Mugabe was ousted from power in a military coup in November 2017, ending his three-decade reign.
The former president had served more than a decade in prison after he criticised the government of Rhodesia in 1964.
He was appointed as president the the Zimbabwe African National Union in 1973 while he was still imprisoned.
He was feted as an African liberation hero and champion of racial reconciliation when he first came to power in a nation divided by nearly a century of white colonial rule.
Mugabe ‘left a broken man’
Nearly four decades later, many at home and abroad denounced him as a power-obsessed autocrat willing to unleash death squads, rig elections and trash the economy in the relentless pursuit of control.
Mugabe, was ultimately ousted by his own armed forces in November 2017.
He demonstrated his tenacity – some might say stubbornness – to the last, refusing to accept his expulsion from his own ZANU-PF party and clinging on for a week until parliament started to impeach him after the de facto coup.
His resignation triggered wild celebrations across the country of 13 million. For Mugabe, it was an "unconstitutional and humiliating" act of betrayal by his party and people, and left him a broken man.
Mugabe’s final years
Confined for the remaining years of his life between Singapore where he was receiving medical treatment and his sprawling "Blue Roof" mansion in Harare, an ailing Mugabe could only observe from afar the political stage where he once strode tall. He was bitter to the end over the manner of his exit.
On the eve of the July 2018 election, the first without him, he told reporters he would vote for the opposition, something unthinkable only a few months before.
Educated and urbane, Mugabe took power in 1980 after seven years of a liberation bush war and – until the army's takeover – was the only leader Zimbabwe, formerly Rhodesia, knew since independence from Britain.
But as the economy imploded starting from 2000 and his mental and physical health waned, Mugabe found fewer people to trust as he seemingly smoothed a path to succession for his wife Grace, four decades his junior and known to her critics as "Gucci Grace" for her reputed fondness for luxury shopping.
"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," Chris Mutsvangwa, leader of Zimbabwe's influential liberation war veterans, told Reuters after Mugabe's removal.
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