Mugabe’s Generals

Zimbabwe's self-declared president Robert Gabriel Mugabe has long been a lonely figure. He has no known friends; his marriage to a wife half is age is reported to be rocky; he's a disappointment to the white priests who raised him and an embarrassment to British and American leaders who once publicly admired him. Now he has suffered another comedown: on Monday, he finally agreed to discuss a political settlement with Morgan Tsvangirai, the opposition candidate who bested him in the first round of a presidential election and then sat out the second. Mugabe even shook hands with the bitter enemy he had long dismissed as a "teaboy" for the British, before they sat down to sign an agreement to negotiate.

How much longer can the 84-year-old Mugabe stay in office? And perhaps more pertinently, will it be his own generals who finally push him out? By some accounts, Mugabe is ready to step down. Diplomats and well-connected observers in Harare say that he'd had enough when it became clear that Tsvangirai had won the most ballots in the bitterly contested March 29 poll.

While his government delayed announcing the results showing Tsvangirai as the number one vote getter, on the Monday after the vote Mugabe convened his top aides, the five generals and two civilians who make up the Joint Operations Centre (JOC)-a military-style command center that ran his election campaign--and told them he planned to retire to Malaysia, where he maintains a second home. The diplomats' accounts were confirmed by a high-ranking ZANU-PF party official. "They said, 'Hold on, you're not leaving us, we're in this together,'" the official related.  "These people said to him, No,' said a well-informed diplomat in Harare, the capital, 'because we'll win the runoff for you.' Mugabe is still the first among equals, but he can no longer rule this country without the army, the civil service has collapsed.  There has been a coup by stealth."

These sources believe that Mugabe will remain in power for a face-saving interval, while negotiations for a government of national unity go ahead under the auspices of South Africa's president Thabo Mbeki. After that, Mugabe would hand over to one of the JOC members. Those talks were due to begin formally today, in South Africa, to be completed within two weeks.  They promise a respite from the violence that has continued to plague Zimbabwe even after the June 27th runoff election, as ZANU-PF militants backed up by the security services continued to attack opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) activists and party workers, forcing most of them to flee or go into hiding.  That, in turn, strengthened the regime's bargaining power, potentially enabling Mugabe's ZANU-PF to take control of the parliament, where the MDC now has a slim majority.

Under a constitutional change Mugabe forced through last year, the parliament can elect a successor if the president leaves office for any reason. This allows the generals to choose one of their own, who some think would most likely be the head of the JOC, Emmerson Mnangagwa. "As the JOC head, Mnangagwa is actually in charge now," says Ray Matikinye, news editor of the Financial Gazette, one of the few remaining independent papers in Zimbabwe. "He has the respect and control of the police and military." Matikinye, too, has heard the stories that the JOC refused to let Mugabe step aside.

Since the run-off farce, Mugabe's bitterness has been on abundant, if somewhat incompetent, display.  At an African Union summit in Egypt last month, he lashed out at a British reporter, at one point seeming to lunge at him when he asked how Mugabe claimed the right to represent Zimbabwe as its president. Flustered, he responded that he had "as much right as [Britain's] Gordon Brown does to be prime minister of Zimbabwe."