VH Kar van Cevitam

I don’t think people realize just how much Ian Smith got right about Rhodesia's future In 1976 he said on the radio that if the country went from white rule to black rule overnight “it will be a disaster for Rhodesia.” only three years after independence, Mugabe sent his North Korean trained Fifth Brigade into Matabeleland and around 20,000 civilians were killed. He warned Rhodesia would become “a kind of banana republic where the country would in no time be bankrupt.” by 2008 inflation was in the billions of percent, they printed a 100 trillion dollar note, and the next year they dropped the Zimbabwe dollar completely. He said for years that Mugabe would destroy the farms that fed the country. from 2000 about 4,000 farms were seized, and the country needed food aid. in 2020 the same government agreed to pay $3.5 billion in compensation. He warned it would end up a one-party state. Mugabe openly called for one, swallowed Nkomo’s party in 1987 and ruled for 37 years. when he lost the first round in 2008, opposition supporters were beaten and killed until his opponent pulled out. He warned the whites would leave and take their skills and money with them. there were around 275,000 in the 70s. by the 2010s there were fewer than 30,000. He said Mugabe's Marxist government would never allow a free press. in 2001 the printing press of the Daily News was bombed and in 2003 the paper was shut down. journalists were jailed and foreign reporters were thrown out. And in 2005, with Mugabe at the height of his power, Smith said “the people in the end will say we’ve had enough.” in 2017 the army moved on Mugabe and Harare filled with people celebrating in the streets. that was 10 years after his death. They called him a racist and a relic for saying all this, but its genuinely insane how right he ended up being about all of it.