His old Africa hands can’t wait for coup leader Simon Mann to get out of jail, says damien mcelroy
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Tonight the BBC will nervously screen Coup!, its dramatisation of the
attempt by a bunch of old Africa hands to overthrow an oil-rich
dictatorship in 2004. But viewers won't be getting the final word on this
saga. Two years on, there's more drama still to come.
As early as September, Simon Mann, the old Etonian brewery heir, MCC brat
and ex-SAS commander, is eligible for parole from Zimbabwe's granite-glum
Chikurubi Prison.
It was Mann who, during an extended sojourn in Cape Town, latched on to the
idea that the government of Equatorial Guinea was ripe for overthrow.
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Everybody agrees
that it was a
bloody good idea |
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It
was time, he thought, to depose the testicle-eating tyrant Teodoro Obiang
whose tiny African nation had recently uncovered untold oil and gas
reserves.
With chums - since variously identified as Nosher, Oil Slick, Smelly
and Scratcher - Mann conceived an operation straight from the Frederick
Forsyth novel, The Dogs of War.
The putsch collapsed, however, when Mann was arrested while attempting to
source a small arsenal of machine-guns and bazookas in Harare. The capture
of a Brit by Robert Mugabe's regime inevitably pitched the affair into the
limelight and embroiled each of Mann's associates in legal actions.
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