It’s not only Mugabe who has failed his people
Gerontocracy means entrenched privilege, hypocrisy and misrule. That is our smug conclusion from Zimbabwe, where a rightly reviled 93-year-old dictator has been dislodged by a 75-year-old, Emmerson Mnangagwa, whose “Crocodile” nickname barely encompasses his decades-long record of ruthlessness. What should be one of Africa’s most prosperous countries has been ruined by Robert Mugabe’s clique of brutal, incompetent crooks, united chiefly by their history as guerrilla fighters in the 1970s.
The pattern is familiar. Revolutionaries become arch-conservatives as they get older. In 1924 the average age of the Soviet Politburo was 42. By the time Leonid Brezhnev died, it was 69. It was the same story in China, giving rise to the joke that the country’s political system consisted of 80-year-olds summoning meetings of 70-year-olds to decide which 60-year-olds should retire.… Seguir leyendo »