No fait accompli yet in Zimbabwe
Many who think President Robert Mugabe has been ousted can dream in the form of the following folklore in Yoruba that does not yet apply. Robert Gabriel Mugabe, the Zimbabwe strongman is the hubris-smitten tortoise. Tortoise announced he was travelling; but was adamant he wouldn’t return until he was disgraced. Mugabe went on a 37-year trip of power. Like the tortoise, he never returned until the disgrace of November 14. But the man, who was said to be under house arrest, walked out of the so-called captivity and attended a graduation ceremony in a university. He was not even under military spell. It was like a state function, and he was accorded some of the respect of the head of state.
Some may liken him to the Biblical Samson, dazed by luxuriousness (excessive love for a woman), led to easy slaughter by Delilah the Philistine, despite his supernatural might. To please Delilah, Samson, drunk with love and wine, gave away the secret of his power — his locks. Shorn of those, he became just a jelly.
For the love of scheming Grace, a graceless power plotter, Mugabe moved against his staying power, purporting to sack Emmerson Dambuzo Mnangagwa, Vice President, and liberation war hero. With Army Chief, Constantine Chiwenga, Mnangagwa belonged to the inner core that has sustained the Mugabe power mystique, these past 37 years. It has proved a kiss of death and Mugabe is all but history. No, sir. Mugabe is walking back a deal with the army, and he seems to be dictating to the soldiers. If he is not, it seems he has corralled his captors into corner. Nothing is certain.
Still out there, it’s a peculiar mess. Mugabe sapped Zimbabwe with civilian fascism. The best the so-called Mnangagwa-Chiwenga ouster offers is military dictatorship — or at best, the Zimbabwe military purporting to guarantee democracy (just as the Turkey Army guaranteed state secularism), with all the possible abuses that could come with that. Neither can be of cheer.
The Mugabe fascism defoliated an otherwise promising country, from the utter pit of Ian Smith’s Rhodesia. In fact, after surviving the illegal regime of Mr. Smith, the new nation, now renamed Zimbabwe, took itself so seriously it even enacted a strict leadership code that underscored unstinted service and the supremacy of the people. But the nation dreamt too soon, for under Mugabe, everything has wilted.
Yet, after 37 years of criminally personalising the state, even the military seemed defensive of the method used to throw off the Mugabe yoke. Others jeer it is coup d’etat that, with force, shoved off the president. The Zimbabwe military insists it is coup de grace, that nudged him off the throne, to correct the old man’s breach of the constitution, particularly as it affects the succession process. But the devil is in the detail. Mugabe, 93, even if by “a coup in slow motion” (used by BBC to describe Mugabe’s loss-flipped-victory election of 2008), is unwilling to leave his brazen perch of power and impunity.
It is, therefore, a crucial juncture of history and taking a wrong direction, at this crossroads, could be telling for Zimbabwe’s future.
But even with the Mugabe mess, there would appear some severe beauty in the Zimbabwe system, given the rare cohesiveness and synergy between the army under Chiwenga and the ZANU-PF. The military statement claimed they had no problems with Mugabe per se, but only with some “criminals” around him — euphemism for First Lady, Grace Mugabe, seriously plotting, with her Generation 40 (G-40) faction of the ZANU-PF and the vibrant women’s league of the party.
Indeed, as Mrs Mugabe is uncertainly holed up in the Blue House (the president’s official residence), under house arrest, Mugabe has entertained a chain of visitors, mainly the ZANU-PF, the army and at least a negotiating cleric, nudging Mugabe to step down. But the old man countered he was still president; and would serve out his term till 2018.
He even reportedly gave the assurance his wife would not run in 2018; and promised not to arrest and try the army chief, Chiwenga, for treason. But the other party has declared the long-drawn negotiation as a “football match” that would last “not more than 90 minutes”. By Sunday (today) the army said, if the president still did not budge, he would be impeached.
In all of this, blood has not flowed; and Mugabe was even allowed to sit through his so-called last days in power by attending a convocation ceremony at the University of Zimbabwe, though his wife doesn’t enjoy such a luxury. Such order in chaos is rare in Africa; and it perhaps requires some further study, for good or for ill.
Yet, how long can Zimbabwe sustain such ultra-narrow cohesiveness without something giving? Mugabe (and the presidency after him), the army and the ZANU-PF, even as the ruling party, are only agents of the state. They are not the state. For 37 years, this minority has formed a narrow core that virtually made themselves the state and monopolised its goodies, running down their country in that process.
That must stop. But it must do so not in an abrupt manner that could conjure the living tragedy of post-Gaddafi Libya. What the international community must do, aside from relaxing its crippling sanctions against the country, is to nudge ZANU-PF to genuinely open up the political space.
Fortunately, there is already a thriving, if suppressed opposition, led by Morgan Tsvangirai, the fellow who in 2008 drubbed Mugabe in the first round of elections, but ran for dear life from the follow-up. Then, in ZANU-PF itself, there is the G-40 bloc, which the ultra-ambitious Grace Mugabe has built as a counter-force to the liberation war era old guard that controls the ruling party as well as the military. The opposition cadre, with G-40 elements could fuse to give the veterans a run for the soul of their country.
In all of this, however, extra care must be taken that the whole process doesn’t peter down to some ethnic struggle. In Zimbabwe, as well as the rest of Africa, the ethnic demon is never far from the surface.
Mugabe, aside from his acute mind and doughty liberation war credentials, still needed his ethnic majority to trump the late Joshua Nkomo, to emerge Zimbabwe’s first prime minister in 1980. That was before he amended the constitution, after two terms, to become an executive president. Nkomo, was Ndebele from Matabeleland, which chief city is Bulawayo.
However things pan out in Zimbabwe, Mugabe deserves little pity. He is the very epitome of the African power megalomaniac, the type The Economist of London dismisses as “African Big Man”. Under him, the Zimbabwe state became so personalised even his wife, Grace, was fancying her chances of becoming president after her husband’s demise.
That might be a pipe dream now but it hasn’t quite sprung Zimbabwe from the trap of the Mugabe era. But for the disgrace caused by Grace, Mugabe would probably have died in office; and handed over to one of his cronies, who would then go ahead to impose his own brand of extreme personalisation of the public space.
This is a dangerous trend that would blow up one day — and the chief victims would most likely be innocent, ordinary citizens. That is why the world must help a post-Mugabe Zimbabwe to strengthen its democracy and broaden opportunities.
