Mugabe ‘resisting’ army pressure to quit

Harare, November 16 

President Robert Mugabe is insisting he remains Zimbabwe’s only legitimate ruler and balking at mediation by a Catholic priest to allow the 93-year-old former guerrilla a graceful exit after a military coup, sources said on Thursday.

A political source who spoke to senior allies holed up with Mugabe and his wife, Grace, in his lavish “Blue House” Harare compound said Mugabe had no plans to resign voluntarily ahead of elections scheduled for next year. “It’s a sort of stand-off, a stalemate,” the source said.

“They are insisting the President must finish his term.” The army’s takeover signalled the collapse in less than 36 hours of the security, intelligence and patronage networks that sustained Mugabe through 37 years in power and built him into the “Grand Old Man” of African politics.

The priest, Fidelis Mukonori, who has been mediating between Mugabe and the Generals who seized power on Wednesday in a targeted operation against “criminals” in his entourage, had also made little headway, a senior political source said.

The army appears to want Mugabe, who has led Zimbabwe since independence from Britain in 1980, to go quietly and allow a smooth and bloodless transition to former vice-president Emmerson Mnangagwa.

Still seen by many Africans as a liberation hero, Mugabe is reviled in the West as a despot whose disastrous handling of the economy and willingness to resort to violence to maintain power pauperised one of Africa’s most promising states.

Once a regional bread-basket, Zimbabwe’s economy collapsed in the wake of the seizure of white-owned farms in the early 2000s, followed by runaway money-printing that catapaulted inflation to 500 billion percent in 2008.

Millions, from highly skilled bankers to semi-literate farmers, emigrated. Most went to neighbouring South Africa, where an estimated 3 million still live, despite a brief economic revival under a 2009-13 power-sharing government.

A fighter, both literally and figuratively during a political career that included several assassination attempts, Mugabe now appears to have reached the end of the road.

With the army camped on his front door and the police, once seen as a bastion of support, showing no signs of resistance, force is not an option. Similarly, he has no popular backing in the capital, where he is widely loathed, and his influence in the ruling ZANU-PF party is evaporating.

ZANU-PF youth leader Kudzai Chipanga, a vocal Mugabe supporter, publicly apologised for opposing the army after being marched into the state television headquarters to read out a statement, sources at the broadcaster said.

He was then taken back to the army’s main KGVI (pronounced KG Six) barracks in Harare, where Finance Minister Ignatius Chombo is also being held, an army source said.

Video footage obtained by Reuters from the houses of two key Grace Mugabe allies, cabinet ministers Jonathan Moyo and Saviour Kasukuwere, indicated that the army was also prepared to use lethal force if necessary.

Moyo’s front door was blown open with explosives, scattering glass across the entrance hall, while the inside walls of Kasukuwere’s house were pocked with bullet holes.

The pair managed to escape on the evening of the coup and make it to Mugabe’s compound, where they remain under effective house arrest, one political source said. — Reuters

Likely players in post-coup unity govt

• Emmerson Mnangagwa (Likely President): A lifelong Mugabe aide and 1970s liberation war veteran known as “The Crocodile”, Mnangagwa, 75, was in the pole position to succeed Mugabe until his progress was impeded by the ascent of Mugabe’s wife, Grace. His sacking as vice-president cleared a path for Grace to the presidency and appears to have been the trigger for the army to step in to advance its preferred successor
• Morgan Tsvangirai (Likely PM): A former union leader who founded the Movement for Democratic Change in the late 1990s, Tsvangirai, 65, has been Mugabe’s main political rival for two decades. He served as PM in a 2009-2013 unity government formed after violence-ridden elections in 2008. Tsvangirai has been undergoing treatment for cancer