Robert Mugabe, the former president of Zimbabwe who was in power from 1980 until his resignation after a military coup in 2017, has died, the country’s current president announced Friday morning.
“It is with the utmost sadness that I announce the passing on of Zimbabwe’s founding father and former President, Cde Robert Mugabe,” President Emmerson Dambudzo Mnangagwa, who was elected after Mugabe stepped down, tweeted.
Mugabe’s family also confirmed his death to the BBC, and said the former president had been battling ill health.
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Mugabe, 95, was the world’s oldest ruler when he resigned as Zimbabwe’s president in November of 2017, following a military coup.
Before he resigned, the ruling Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front party had already removed Mugabe as leader and named Mnangagwa in his place.
Mnangagwa said Friday that Mugabe was “an icon of liberation” and “a pan-Africanist who dedicated his life to the emancipation and empowerment of his people.”
“His contribution to the history of our nation and continent will never be forgotten. May his soul rest in eternal peace,” Mnangagwa tweeted.
Fadzayi Mahere, a politician with the opposition Movement for Democratic Change, tweeted “rest in peace” and “My response to your passing is complicated … However, for now, deepest condolences to his family.”
Before he resigned, it was said that Mugabe’s firing of Mnangagwa as his vice president, which would have paved the way for Mugabe’s wife, Grace, to succeed him, triggered the army to seize control.
The U.S. Embassy in Zimbabwe said the at the time that the resignation of Mugabe “marks an historic moment” for the country and congratulated all Zimbabweans who raised their voices.
Then-British Prime Minister Theresa May said the resignation of Mugabe gave Zimbabwe “an opportunity to forge a new path free of the oppression that characterized his rule.”
He became prime minister after the end of white minority rule in 1980 in the country, which was previously known as Rhodesia, Reuters reported. He took office as president in 1987 following a change in the constitution.
He was hailed as an African liberation hero and champion of racial reconciliation when he first came to power, but nearly four decades later critics denounced him as a power-obsessed autocrat willing to unleash death squads, rig elections and trash the economy in the relentless pursuit of control, according to the news agency.
Mugabe pushed legislation through parliament, allowing his government to seize more than half the white-owned farms, and his crackdown against the Movement for Democratic Change and journalists in the early 2000s increased his international isolation, Reuters reported.
Land reform was supposed to take much of the country’s most fertile land — owned by about 4,500 white descendants of mainly British and South African colonial-era settlers — and redistribute it to poor blacks. Instead, Mugabe gave prime farms to ruling party leaders, party loyalists, security chiefs, relatives and cronies, the Associated Press reported.
The economy of Zimbabwe, an African nation of more than 14 million north of South Africa and bordered by Botswana, Mozambique and Zambia, collapsed under Mugabe after 37 years of near one-party rule.
His last five-year term began in 2013 after elections that the U.S. criticized as flawed. Mugabe responded by telling his critics to “go hang.”
Mugabe told NBC News in 2013 that “we have never, ever rigged an election.”
He blamed Britain for the country’s problems, and said at that time that he had no regrets about his time leading the country.
“I don’t have regrets at all,” he said.