guest column:Joseph E Maniragena IN 2013, we had good neighbours, a couple who suddenly started having problems in their marriage and would seek our help to solve their issues. They were not really big problems as such, but misunderstandings that most couples face from time to time. We would sit them down and help them resolve their issues. I am calling them small problems because they were such as the husband not buying flowers for his wife and the husband liking soccer too much and not wanting to spend quality time with the wife. On the other side, the guy would say that the wife didn’t like his friends and he did not like her friends. I am not calling these small issues for a couple, but when you compare them with big issues that some couples face such as a cheating partner, an abusing partner, these were really small. One day, we woke up to the sad news that the women left their marital home to live with a younger boyfriend they met at university who could offer her more affection which the first partner could not. They lived together for about three months before things started to go wrong. When we met at a mall, we could tell she was in so much pain because what she believed would be better than the first was not. This new partner had started abusing her emotionally and physically, he would go and drink with his friends and come home late and would sometimes sleep out. “Can you imagine that one day he came home with a prostitute in our home and when I asked how he could do that to me, I was beaten and told to leave; something my first partner would never do”, she told us in tears. Whenever I remember the story of our neighbour I always think of Zimbabwe and the event of November 2017; The images of the only Zimbabwe television are still vivid, when the army forced the late former President Robert Mugabe to resign. All of us were happy and joyful that finally Zimbabwe’s woes were about to be over. When the then Vice-President Emmerson Mnangagwa returned home from asylum in South Africa, was later sworn in as President, organised election, most of us closed our eyes on the serious irregularities that marred that poll just thinking that peace would come back and rule of law would finally prevail. We hoped that the new President would end violence, including State-sponsored. Excited about the change and the future we all imagined, we forgot that Mnangagwa had been Mugabe's companion for more than 35 years. He was part of everything that happened in Zimbabwe and could not dissociate himself from human rights abuses, atrocities committed under Zanu PF reign as well as attacks on opposition leaders and supporters that had become the norm in Zimbabwe. How Zimbabweans were fooled that he could bring about change? Hope for a new dispensation were short-lived. A few months after assuming power, we saw the new President crisscrossing the world with a scarf in Zimbabwe flag colours, promising that Zimbabwe was now open for business, safe for investors, as well as citizens. Some Zimbabweans, who had made names overseas, star