George B. N. Ayittey - Zimbabwe’s Coconut Coup Installs a Crocodile Liberator

George B. N. Ayittey is a Senior Fellow at the Independent Institute, and President of the Free Africa Foundation.

(Independent Institute) - Erratic economic policies drove investment away. Zimbabwe’s mineral wealth was blatantly plundered by Mugabe’s securocrat—military and police officers strategically placed in government buildings to protect the ruling ZANU-PF regime. Unable to find money to fund spending, the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe simply printed it.

The resulting hyper-inflation was of world-historic proportions, reaching 6.5 quindecillion novemdecillion percent—65 followed by 107 zeros—in January 2009. The Zimbabwean dollar collapsed the next month. Mugabe then adopted a basket of currencies, including the U.S. dollar and the South African rand, as its national currency. This brought on a temporary respite until Mugabe returned to his old wayward ways.

November’s military coup was a tragic end to an intelligent and sophisticated man who should have known better. Mugabe had only to observe the history of postcolonial Africa, whose first-generation liberation heroes succumbed to temptations and takeovers. Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, for example, was overthrown by his military in 1966, and Modibo Keita of Mali was toppled in 1968. Only a couple stepped down voluntarily—Leopold Senghor of Senegal and Julius Nyerere of Tanzania—but after more than 20 years in office.

Read more: http://www.independent.org/news/article.asp?id=9236