Was it correct for army to remove Mugabe

ALL those who doubted whether the Zimbabwe Defence Forces did the right thing, Robert Mugabe's rambling last Saturday is your answer. Countries are ruled via constitutions, but what if the ruler is breaking every aspect of that country's constitution, do they have a right to claim that they were removed unconstitutionally?

We have citizens who love hearing the sound of their own voices without stopping to think what their messages actual mean. Some are even saying that Robert Mugabe is right, without looking at the opposite of what he is saying. Mugabe is essentially saying that he should have been in power and allowed to pass on the reins to his scurrilous wife, Grace and her G40 cabal led by Jonathan Moyo.

Mugabe never allowed any criticism of his rule at all, constructive or otherwise.

Many people big and small died for doing so at Mugabe's instruction. In my view he has NO right to talk about being removed unconstitutionally when he ruled us unconstitutionally, rigging elections, beating up citizens, killing opponents, stealing money from the State coffers, presiding over clan-based corruption, destroying State institutions the list goes on.

I know that part of that Mugabe's repressive machinery is still in place and is part of the governing class today, this we must accept as part of the process needed to rebuild our country. The same happened in Nigeria when Sani Abacha died, his henchmen took over and brought the country back to normalcy.

This was not a people's revolution but a removal of a dictator by his colleagues who feared for their own lives. So anybody who advances the argument that Mugabe was removed unconstitutionally and that the current government is illegal is failing to understand the relatedness of things. Mugabe could never have been removed by anything else other than force.

We will have our chance at the ballot box to put in place a government of our choice. So it is a waste of time singing after Mugabe about how the current administration is illegal.

We can't compare what we have today and Robert Mugabe's rule. The freedoms that many enjoy today to even insult the government didn't exist under Mugabe.

He was a ruthless man. Mugabe insulted soldiers as "uneducated" and yet the same uneducated men and women are protecting him from harm to this very day. They are the same "uneducated" folk that he used to rig elections, kill opponents and oppress the country wholesale.

You can also see how he thinks of nobody else as important and worthwhile except himself. He is a thoroughly selfish man who is there to use and abuse and then ridicule. This is the true portrait of Mugabe the narcissist!

He complains without irony that the army chose to take a side in party issues and he forgets that he was the one who brought the security services into party politics using them to campaign for him, intimidate the opposition electorate for him and in 2008 kill for him. It was okay when it was being done for him but suddenly became unconstitutional when someone else gets a little help from the same army. What a hypocritical little man Mugabe is.

Mugabe promised not to hold back in his meeting with Mnangagwa this week, adding that he will tell ED that what he did is not good for democracy.

I hope and wish that the people who will meet Mugabe with ED will tell him that democracy and constitutionalism that Mugabe has recently discovered requires him to be behind bars for the lives lost through state sponsored violence that he signed off, the lives lost in hospitals from easily treatable diseases like cholera, the looting of the state that he allowed through political patronage, the list is endless!

He accuses Vice-President Constantino Chiwenga of taking sides with Mnangagwa, he forgets that the same Chiwenga took sides with him in 2008 and Mugabe saw nothing wrong with it. The same security services took political sides with him from 1980 through Gukurahundi, 2000 Farm violence, Murambatsvina and 2008, and yet Mugabe saw nothing wrong with it then.

The very private media that he terrorised with his sidekick Jonathan Moyo is the one giving him space, all that of course is lost on Mugabe. He talks of his rights. Today he has access to a Boeing 767 jet to fly him four time a year to Singapore for his health check-ups and yet he forgets that he denied basic health access to millions of Zimbabweans through corruption and looting of tax dollars by his wife, his henchmen and of course himself.

His wife bought diamond rings worth $1,5 million each whilst mothers were dying giving birth because they couldn't afford access to public health, the very soldiers he mocks today were school drop outs because they had no money to pursue their education and yet he drove around in a $1 million Mercedes Pullman. What a hypocrite, what a revolutionary fraudster, what a liberation imposter, what a crooked old man.

I have heard people talk about Mugabe's legacy, in my book Mugabe did not fight for the independence alone. As Ian Smith once said mocking him, he couldn't even fire a gun to save his own life. He was a political opportunist who took advantage of the goodwill abound everywhere he went and screwed up a relatively wealthy African country and had to be removed by force after 37 years when he tried to impose his own wife.

That is Mugabe's legacy and history will remember him for the millions who died unnecessarily. Those who want to rewrite history can go ahead and do so, but the beauty of history is that Mugabe's lies will one day disappear and the truth will emerge.

As Mugabe says in this video, he intended to firmly rule Zimbabwe. That he did with wholesale cruelty and reckless viciousness. Thank God someone stopped him when they did, Mugabe's intended outcome would have created another 37 years of pain and suffering for future generations.

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Hopewell Chin'ono is a journalist and film maker. He writes in his own capacity