Zimbabwe is the fourth country in Southern Africa to have a post-independence coup. (The others are Lesotho twice, Seychelles and Madagascar*). The army generals officially announced around 4am (CAT) on November 15, 2017 that its Commander in Chief, President Robert Mugabe and his family were safe and their security was secure. Safe and secure for those of us who study African politics is also code for secured. This effectively means that the first family is now under some type of arrest. In the same address, the military generals also announced and those closest to the First Lady Grace Mugabe who appeared to be pulling the shots in the ruling party have been arrested for attempting to re-colonize the country and undermining the revolution. This type of coup is called a “guardian coup.”  The argument goes that “… whatever motivations may have driven a coup or whatever the faults of the government it deposed, changes in the international system after the Cold War make coup-backed governments much more likely to lead a transition to democracy.”  The army at least for now claims that they have no intentions of staying in power longer than is needed to restore order. At the moment, it remains unclear what they mean by restoring order.  That Zimbabwe is at a crossroads, goes without saying. There is no constitutional mandate for a coup - even a guardian one as we have seen in Zimbabwe. Since 2000 Zimbabwe has been in deep political and economic crisis. At the height of inflation and political violence between 2007 and 2008 most Zimbabweans hoped that the opposition led by Morgan Tsvangirayi would win the election and Zimbabwe would see a peace transition of power like her neighbors. In Malawi and Zambia long ruling parties and leaders left office after opening up political space and allowing for opposition participation. In Zimbabwe, it appeared as though Robert Mugabe had managed the inevitable and reinvented ZANU-PF and himself into a democratic party that could claim legitimacy. So what happened? If this coup was about the economy and social issues then it would have likely happened in 2008 and or at the very least in 2016 when the President announced that US$15 billion has gone missing. Over the last year the economic situation severely deteriorated. Whereas between 2005 and 2008 there was some semblance of functioning industry the backbone for working class Zimbabweans by 2016 most industries had shut down. In 2016, I spent months driving around the country taking stock of the status of various industry and it was depressing. The once bustling Willoville neighborhood in Harare was a skeleton of its former self. Zimbabweans have always supported the local industry by purchasing locally made products – everything was made in Zimbabwe, however, today nothing is made in Zimbabwe. People are resorting to buying used underwear on the streets smuggled in from Mozambique. As the country was burning and the opposition depleted from years of abuse retreated from the political front lines, ZANU PF’s internal wars intensified. The First Lady Grace Mugabe rose from the shadows of just another political spouse to a powerful voice in the party. Her public denunciations of officials in the ruling ZANU-PF party have in recent years led to the demotion of several of those with whom she disagrees. In 2014, after a series of speeches in which she called for the ouster of then Vice President Joice Mujuru, the former VP was forced to quit both her cabinet position and the party. The event that sparked the coup was her public campaigning for Mnangagwa’s ouster which was confirmed on November 5, 2017. In an unprecedented move since independence, on November 13th 2017, Zimbabwe Defense Forces Commander General Constintino Chiwenga issued a statement in which he warned of a possible military takeover should the ruling party fail to address its internal squabbles. In an act of clear political naiveté and troubling failure to understand the nature of liberation politics the President did not directly respond to this ask. Instead, the President and First Lady sent the youth leader Kudzai Chipanga to issue a statement in which he denigrated the military officials and accused them of stealing the missing USD$15 Billion. The First Lady and President instructed the state controlled media not to publish the communication by the general. This was a weak move. Those of us studying the impact of social media in African countries understand that regimes can no longer keep the news contained. The General’s statement had already been broadcast live on social media and the attempt by the government to muzzle the news was indicative of a team of power players with no factual understanding of the reality on the ground. Following the statement by the Youth Leader Chipanga events became more ominous with strange sightings of the military at the state run broadcasting, sounds of gunshots and eerily silence from the usually vocal first lady. Ideally, a coup is never the best solution. The good news is that the former Vice President Emmerson Mnangagwa has not been reinstalled. This suggests to some extent that the military is reaching out to other stake holders. I would predict that Joice Mujuru and Morgan Tsvangirai have been called in to the discussions. An ideal outcome is one in which people from different political factions come together to form a unity transitional government. For my other work on social media I have joined over 50 WhatsApp and Facebook groups. There is evidence from those interactions that indeed the revolution will be tweeted. I am also glad to note that Zimbabweans are being cautious and many have remained at home and are monitoring the situation. As global events in the South continue to unfold there is a real challenge for social media gurus like Facebook and Twitter to monitor the spread of fake news in those countries because alternative facts can cause a lot of damage.

• Thanks to our alert readers (Audrey Brown on Facebook as well as Josh Budlender, Rich Brauer, Godfrey Sithole and ShezzLovely on Twitter for pointing out this error. Sarah Rich Dorman pointed out that this is the first post-liberation coup in Southern Africa--Editor.)

Zimbabwe is going through an evolution, not a revolution. Over the past few weeks, pundits and analysts alike have debated about the future of the country’s nascent citizen movement. In a widely circulated post, the academic Blessings Miles Tendi cautioned against premature optimism, and listed the lack of a united opposition movement, the limited activist base of young middle class urbanites, and underestimating the role of the country’s military (still loyal to President Robert Mugabe) as key factors determining the movement’s fate in future. Meanwhile, Pastor Evan Mawarire (he made the viral #ThisFlag video that kickstarted the protests in Zimbabwe and its diaspora), is possibly in exile in the United States. Nevertheless, #ThisFlag managed to mobilize thousands of Zimbabweans for a national stayaway in June 2016 and tap into people’s simmering disappointment with the ruling Zanu-PF. #ThisFlag is obviously not the first time that Zimbabweans have raised their voices. On and off over the past two decades, the people have repeatedly expressed their displeasure with the status quo. For much of the early 2000s they rallied behind the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), a coalition of trade unionists and civil society movements. Although the MDC and its allies were subjected to various forms of political repression, its electoral successes forced ZANU-PF into a Government of National Unity (GNU) in 2009. The GNU was, however, disbanded in 2013 when President Mugabe’s ZANU-PF won the elections with results questioned by many observers. But the election also exposed organizational weaknesses within the opposition movement and the MDC. Similarly, there are questions about the strategic direction and ideological coherence of #ThisFlag. Whether the movement can sustain itself is an open question and we know that the hashtags will change, but the demands of Zimbabweans for change will only grow. So, what is different this time around? For one, the economic crisis brought about by the GNU between 2009–2013 deeply effected the middle class in Zimbabwe. The majority of people are underemployed or unemployed. Zimbabwe has a staggering unemployment rate of about 80%. Those with jobs are underpaid or have not received their salaries in months or, in some cases, years. Second, is the decline of the industrial sector. There are fewer factories and the majority of large companies that once employed thousands have shut down or drastically reduced production. This summer, I went looking for the famous Kingstons bookstore in Harare, only to learn from an older book vendor at one of the flea markets that Kingston’s closed its doors a few years ago. He had worked there as a manager, but since the shut down has been unable to secure a job and was left with no option but to vend books on the street. The former Longman Publishing House, was functioning at less than 50% of its earlier capacity. In July, the once vibrant tobacco floors were deathly quiet. Locals joked that even city robbers are avoiding the tobacco farmers. Third, it is clear that rural Zimbabweans, who constitute the majority, bear the brunt of the economic crisis. Rural voters also happen to be the largest voting block and support base for the ruling party. I interviewed an 85-year-old grandmother, living in a small village deep in the valley of Masvingo, in the southeastern part of the country. Unlike most of her friends she is fortunate to have watched all eight of her children grow up, get married and have children. Until recently she had no reason to vote against ZANU-PF or question the way in which it has run the country. She lived through the brutality of the colonial regime and so was willing to give the “boys” – the freedom fighters of Zimbabwe’s liberation war – a chance to right things. She is still a farmer. Her silos are packed with maize, groundnuts and round nuts. She is not in danger of starving. However, in 2016, she is heartbroken that her university educated 45-year-old son, his wife and their five children have relocated home to share her compound. She is still holding on to buckets of Zimbabwean dollars that are now worthless and mourning the loss of her livestock: she sold all her cattle one by one to educate her children who, in their late forties and early fifties, still do not own homes. She has watched her children spend their income on her grandchildren’s education, only to have those grandchildren return home empty handed and jobless. Today, she is frightened by the prospect that the US$500 she has saved under her mattress since 2009, can overnight be rendered useless. In the early 2000s the option to leave the country and seek employment or political asylum abroad, despite the prohibitive costs, appeared the most logical strategy. Today, however, it is harder for Zimbabweans to migrate, in part because of the wide spread anti-immigration rhetoric in their favored destinations (South Africa, Botswana and the UK) and tougher immigration laws. Furthermore, in the last few months the government has introduced import bans that make cross-border trading unprofitable and undesirable. The majority of Zimbabweans supplement their incomes by engaging in cross border trading, importing goods from South Africa and other nearby countries to sell to the local market. The local use of the US dollar allowed more traders to make a decent living wage. However, the ban on importing certain commodities has robbed a significant portion of the population of their livelihood. Then there is the collective fear of bond notes. The dollar has been the primary currency since the introduction of a multi currency system in 2009. In early May 2016, the government announced it would introduce a local version of the dollar. Central Bank Governor John Mangudya explained that the bond notes would be backed by a US$200 million loan from the Africa Export/Import Bank and that the local currency would have the same value as the US dollar. The announcement was not well received. Fearing a repeat of the period of hyperinflation witnessed between 2005 and 2008, anti-bond notes campaigns (hashtag: #notobondnotes) have become one of the key rallying points for citizen protests against the government. Zimbabweans are afraid of losing the little savings they have built up following the introduction of the multi currency system and do not trust the government not to over print money. Finally, tensions within the ruling party have boiled over into the public sphere. Sections of the war veterans (the soldiers who fought in the 1970s liberation war against white Rhodesia) have turned against the ruling ZANU PF and President Mugabe and the vice president, Emerson Mnangagwa, who some see as a successor to the current head of state, was forced to publicly respond to allegations that he may be too ambitious. The challenge for Zimbabwe’s opposition, as Tendi argued earlier, is “… is a well-thought-out and pragmatic approach to the [upcoming] 2018 election [for which Mugabe, now 92 has declared his candidacy again] – one that will unite civil society, the opposition parties, online activists, and urban and rural youth. That is the key to finding a new path ahead.”