The end can’t come soon enough for Robert Mugabe, Zimbabwe’s tyrant

After 37 years in power, it looks like Robert Mugabe, the most infamous dictator in Africa, is on the way out. Though the outcome is still uncertain, a quasi-coup began earlier this week in Zimbabwe, which will likely remove the Savile-row suited autocrat from office. Nobody really knows what will come next, and it might very well be that one strongman is traded for another. But even if that is the case, it’s hard to conceive of a future where Zimbabwe’s leadership could get worse, and it’s worth reviewing the enduring misery and despair that the 93-year-old Mugabe leaves in his wake.

For almost four decades, the former schoolteacher Mugabe put on a master class in the utter destruction of a nation’s economy, freedom, and hopes. He turned Zimbabwe into a tragedy and a cautionary tale for the world. A sub-Saharan African country that was blessed with fertile soil and abundant natural resources was transformed into a vicious kleptocracy with Soviet-style lines for food and gas.

{mosads}If there were a despotism playbook, Robert Mugabe executed it to the letter. For decades, he relied on brute force and the constant threat of violence to maintain power. Political opponents were imprisoned, tortured and murdered. The army and intelligence services were instruments of the regime’s oppression. Back in the 1980’s, Mugabe even brought in North Koreans advisors to train his notorious “Fifth Brigade” army unit, which then went on to slaughter more than ten thousand civilians in Matabeleland. To this day, Mugabe has a soft spot for the ruthless Kim dynasty.

Think of a policy meant to subjugate, and Mugabe tried it. He banned journalists, conducted sham elections, operated forced re-education camps and changed Zimbabwe’s constitution to entrench his powers. Originally elected in a democratic process in 1980 that the United Kingdom blessed as free and fair, Mugabe went on to abandon rule of law. Election fraud and voter intimidation have been top-down policies of the Mugabe government, enforced by party loyalists and assorted thugs who engage in all manner of brutality.

State Dept instructs U.S. citizens in Zimbabwe to shelter in place over threat of military coup https://t.co/63OgpX4eJt pic.twitter.com/xj7XtZPFZc

— The Hill (@thehill) November 15, 2017

His role as liberation hero conferred a degree of political invulnerability on Mugabe in the early decades of his rule, which he exploited to the fullest. To evade accountability abroad, Mugabe has wrapped himself in the mantle of freedom-loving revolutionary. To deflect outside criticism of his regime, he cynically accused his critics of pro-apartheid leanings. Inside Zimbabwe, his government waged a campaign of systematic land theft and eradication of white farmers. He used the racist past of southern Rhodesia (Zimbabwe’s pre-independence name) to justify the racial policies of his own regime.

When it comes to the mismanagement of an economy, Mugabe and his army of cronies are really the world champs. Zimbabwe has the dubious distinction of having reached the highest rate of inflation in history, hitting an all time peak of 500 billion percent in 2008. It also had the highest ever denominated bill — a 100 trillion Zimbabwe-dollar note — which was worth about 40 cents in U.S. dollars when they abandoned their currency entirely in 2009. Today, the unemployment rate is estimated to be more than 95 percent and GDP per capita is estimated at about $700 a year. Mugabe did not damage the economy so much as he erased it.

Meanwhile, the most prominent symbol of opulence in Mugabe’s Zimbabwe comes courtesy of his wife. Grace Marufu, known as both “Gucci Grace” and the “Shopper in Chief” is a walking, talking reminder of the unfathomable corruption that defined Mugabe’s rule. She has been known to blow through a hundred thousand dollars in a single shopping spree in European capitals, while the citizens of her country struggle with food shortages and power outages. She is 40 years Mugabe’s junior, and he proposed to her while his first wife was dying of cancer. But given her reported habit of attacking journalists and assaulting models, in many ways she may have been a perfect match for Mugabe.

Despite all this oppression and suffering, the West allowed Zimbabwe to slip deeper and deeper through the cracks over the years. Geopolitically speaking, it was a problem that could be ignored, and it largely was. There were no international terrorist groups operating within its borders for the United States or the international community to combat. As a landlocked country in the middle of southern Africa, there was no obvious or urgent reason for outside efforts to intervene. Mugabe took full advantage of this indifference.

With Zimbabwe, absolute power and corruption came to their expected ends. Mugabe has spent almost four decades pillaging, traumatizing and terrorizing his own people because he is an evil man, and because he could. While despotisms like Venezuela and North Korea receive greater attention on the world stage, we should not forget the lesson of Mugabe.

A man who began his public life as a hero turned into the worst kind of tyrant. It has happened countless times before, and in any nation that fails to maintain a citizenry vigilantly devoted to individual rights and the rule of law, it could happen again. If there is any positive to be taken from Mugabe’s legacy, it is as a warning.

Buck Sexton is a political commentator, national security analyst and host of the nationally syndicated radio program, “Buck Sexton with America Now.” He is a former CIA officer in the Counterterrorism Center, appears frequently on Fox News Channel and CNN and has been a guest radio show host for Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity. Follow Buck on Twitter @BuckSexton.