The revolutionary hero apparently poked the wrong portions of his permanent military, intelligence, and diplomatic bureaucracies — or "deep state" — when he removed members of a rival faction earlier this month who were purportedly against the presumed accession of his wife Grace as the country's next leader following a planned party conference next month. Former Vice President Emmerson Mnangagwa, called the "crocodile" because of his political finesse, was among those who were sacked, but he's since staged a remarkably dramatic comeback following the de-facto military coup that just took place in Zimbabwe and was just installed as the interim President.
Head of the Zimbabwe Defence Forces, General Constantino Guveya Chiwenga, freshly back from a preplanned visit to China around the time that Mnangawa was removed, warned Mugabe against continuing his "deep state" purge, after which he took decisive action in commencing an "anti-criminal" operation that basically amounted to a coup. It's important to specify two things at this point. The first one is that the Western Mainstream Media has been trying to malign China as supposedly being responsible for Zimbabwe's "deep state" conflict in order to draw a false equivalency between it and the US, intending that the fake news intrigue could dampen African states' enthusiasm for participating in Beijing's paradigm-changing One Belt One Road global vision of New Silk Road connectivity. The second issue is that the recent events in Zimbabwe have deliberately not been called a coup by the country's leading figures in order to avoid the automatic imposition of African Union and Western sanctions.
Regardless of what the events are called and what prompted the military to take action, the fact remains that Mugabe's rule has come to an unexpected and unceremonious end in Zimbabwe, thereby opening up a chance for the country's Western-friendly opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai to make another bid for power whenever new elections will eventually be held. Furthermore, there's the disturbing risk of a regional copycat effect taking place considering that South Africa's chief whip Jackson Mthembu recently remarked that his country could learn from what was happening in Zimbabwe in order to seek President Zuma's ouster as well.
Andrew Korybko is joined by Kwanele Mkheswa, Political commentator from Nkayi in Southern Zimbabwe.
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