I’ve been following the political and economical events of Zimbabwe through the news and it just surprises me that there hasn’t been any assassination attempts on Mugabe. What, with the 30 million percent inflation rate, huge lack of food, water, and other necessities, you’d think the hungry masses would at least throw some stones.
Here’s a blogger saying that there was such an attempt last year:
There are a few things that hold people back, based on my experiences in a corrupt but only mildly miserable African dictatorship:
First is that there are problems in organizing any sort of plot. When we had the mild civil disorder in Cameroon last February, nobody would even talk about it because the rumor was that any mention of it would land you in jail for four years. Whenever there was a strike, nobody in my town struck because they knew that would mean for the rest of their lives they would be denied advancement in the work place and assigned to the smallest, most backwards villages the farthest away from their family. Any sort of political organization was difficult and could put you and your family in a great deal of danger, and at the very least make your life pretty difficult. So opposition party meetings were a little empty. Who really wants to live the life of an outlaw just because they want to bitch about the president?
Another is that if anything was attempted and failed, it wouldn’t be just the people involved that would see retribution. It would be their family. It could be their village, or even their entire ethnicity that pays the price. There are ethnic groups in Cameroon that can’t get jobs, hold no political power, etc. because of stuff that happened decades ago. So you really don’t want to pull anything unless you are absolutely sure you are going to succeed.
Finally, people really, truly, do want peace. And they aren’t idiots. They know how things work out when African countries have revolutions. At best you end up with a new corrupt leader who is exactly the same. If you are less lucky, you could spend a few decades in civil war and genocide to get that result. A lot of people don’t want to risk that instability, no matter how crappy their preset situation is. In Cameroon people were not happy with the administration, but they were TERRIFIED about what is going to happen when things change. IMHO with good reason.
Dictators are typically very, very heavily guarded.