The country, formerly known as Southern Rhodesia, has frequently been described as "the jewel of Africa" because of its magnificent scenery, mineral wealth that includes gold, diamonds and the world's largest reserves of platinum and some of the most fertile agricultural land on earth.

These assets, which once made the country the envy of its neighbours, have been largely squandered over the almost four decades since Robert Mugabe's ZANU party won a landslide election victory in February 1980.

Mugabe had been at the forefront of the bloody decades-long civil war that resulted in the downfall of Ian Smith's pariah regime and the establishment of Zimbabwe Rhodesia in December 1979.

Until this week the avowed Marxist has presided over the destruction of the national economy, and a catastrophic decline in standards of living, hyper inflation, land confiscations and acts of barbaric oppression, ruled with an iron fist.

Today he and other members of his family are reportedly under house arrest following what is being widely reported as a military coup believed to have been carried out by senior figures in his own administration.

The coup chiefs feared for their futures, and likely their lives, as a result of plotting and scheming by the 93-year-old tyrant's 52-year-old wife, and most likely heir apparent, Grace Mugabe. This had forced the then vice president, Emmerson Mnangagwa, to flee to South Africa last week.

In addition to commissioning palaces for herself and her husband costing up to $26 million each, the self-styled "mother of the nation" had been known to drop as much as $100,000 on a shopping spree in Paris. All of this was funded by plundering the assets of the Zimbabwean people.

The Mugabes had wisely moved much of their ill-gotten wealth, believed to be worth billions of US dollars, off-shore before the official inflation rate peaked at 11.2 million per cent in 2008.

The Mugabe-era legacy extends beyond destroying the nation's economic infrastructure and plundering its treasury. More than 3.4 million Zimbabweans have fled abroad to escape poverty, tyranny and political repression in the last two decades.

Given the perpetrators of the coup are men whose association with Mugabe dates back to the war of liberation in the 1960s and 1970s it is impossible to tell if anything has actually changed.

While there is a general view Mrs Mugabe and her new guard would be a disaster for the country there is only the faintest glimmer of hope the former Mugabe loyalists, many of whom are also heavily complicit in the tragic events of the last five decades, will be any better given their investment in the status quo.

At this stage there is little cause to hope Zimbabwe's economy will be rebuilt or that its refugees can return home any time soon.