Zimbabwe soldiers blocked thousands of protesters as they tried to march on embattled President Robert Mugabe‘s official residence in Harare on Saturday, an AFP correspondent on the scene said.
The demonstrators, participating in nationwide protests calling for the 93-year-old veteran leader to step aside after the army took power earlier this week, staged a sit-down protest in the road after being halted by the troops.
The crowd got within 200 metres of the gates to the complex that has been the nerve centre of Mugabe’s authoritarian rule, as large protests swept through the capital.
The 93-year-old Mugabe has been under house arrest in his lavish ‘Blue Roof’ compound in Harare, from where he has watched support from his Zanu-PF party, security services and people evaporate in less than three days.
“This is not fair. Why are the soldiers preventing us to march to State House?” Rutendo Maisiri, an unemployed 26-year-old woman said. “It is wrong. We will stay put.”
Mugabe’s nephew, Patrick Zhuwao, told Reuters on Saturday that the elderly leader and his wife were “ready to die for what is correct” and had no intention of stepping down in order to legitimize what he described as a coup.
Speaking from a secret location in South Africa, Zhuwao said Mugabe had hardly slept since the military seized power on Wednesday but his health was otherwise “good”.
The extraordinary scenes in Harare are indicative of the anger and frustration that has built up in nearly two decades of economic mismanagement that started with the seizure of white-owned farms in 2000, the catalyst of a wider collapse.
