CASH AND CORRUPTION
Can new leaders be trusted to bring Zimbabwe back from bankruptcy?
Zimbabwe’s intra-elite transition — a palace coup with little blood spilled and careful diplomatic power-transfer language – resolves a long-simmering faction fight within the ruling party and ends the extraordinary career of Robert Mugabe. His long-standing Zanu-PF comrade, Emmerson Mnangagwa, is widely mistrusted due to his responsibility for (and refusal to acknowledge) the "Gukurahundi" massacre of more than 20,000 people, mainly members of the minority Ndebele ethnic group from 1982-85. He also stands accused of subverting the 2008 election. And as for his personal wealth, consider Mnangagwa’s close proximity as defence minister to widespread diamond looting from 2008-16. Indeed, in 2016 Mugabe himself complained of revenue shortfalls from diamond mining in eastern Zimbabwe’s Marange fields: "I don’t think we’ve exceeded $2bn or so, and yet we think that well over $15bn or more has been earned in that area." The vast scale of this theft was confirmed by anticorruption campaigne...
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