After Robert Mugabe’s dramatic victory in the Rhodesian elections 36 years ago, the former prime minister, Ian Smith, told the BBC: “[White] Rhodesians are pretty pragmatic. I don’t visualise them resorting to panic action, [or] stampeding. I think they will act in a very mature, responsible, way. After all, it’s our country, where would we run to?”
Mr Mugabe, in turn, said: “There can never be any return to the state of armed conflict which existed before our commitment to peace.”
Robert Mugabe in 1982.
Almost four decades on and inflation is running at 120 per cent, millions are out of work and hundreds of thousands depend on food aid for survival.
Mugabe had been in exile for a decade before the elections, arriving back in the country only weeks before the people went to the polls.
The 92-year-old is one of the oldest, if not the oldest, elected leaders in the world. He spent 10 years as a political prisoner of the white-dominated government in the 1960s and 1970s.
A former teacher who was educated by the Marist Brothers and the Jesuits, he earned two law degrees in jail. He became the leader of ZANU, the Zimbabwe African People’s Union, in 1975.
The path was cleared for new elections when Mugabe agreed to allow whites to have 20 reserved seats in the new parliament under the Lancaster Agreement of 1979.
In the March 1980 election, 57 of the 80 common roll seats went to ZANU, while the 20 white seats went to the Rhodesian Front.
Initially feted by the world press, Prime Minister Mugabe subsequently emerged as a controversial figure with possible links to massacres, ethnic cleansing and the assassination of political rivals.
The position of prime minister was abolished in 1987. Mugabe assumed the newly created position of Executive President of Zimbabwe.
The changes extended his constitutional power and influence.
Gross domestic product fell about 40 per cent in the noughties.​
By 2006, Zimbabwe had the lowest life expectancy of any nation, 37 years for men and 34 years for women.
