In How To Kill a Country, Samantha Power discusses Mugabe’s ten-step approach for national destruction:
How could the breadbasket of Africa have deteriorated so quickly into the continent’s basket case? The answer is Robert Mugabe, now seventy-nine, who by his actions has compiled something of a ‘how-to’ manual for national destruction. Although many of his methods have been applied elsewhere, taken as a whole his ten-step approach is more radical and more comprehensive than that of other despots.
The ten steps:
- Destroy the engine of productivity.
- Bury the truth.
- Crush dissent.
- Legislate the impossible.
- Teach hate.
- Scare off foreigners.
- Invade a neighbor.
- Ignore a deadly enemy.
- Commit genocide.
- Blame the imperialists.