After Robert Mugabe’s resignation, the future appears to be bleak for his wife Grace Mugabe. But things are certainly not going to get better for Zimbabweans as the country will still be ruled by the same elite which looted it and ruined the economy
Someone, anyone, with close links, please make sure Uncle Bob reads the correct speech ... Old man reads the 2013 inauguration speech and we’re in kak for another five years,” tweeted Mubaiwa Bandambira just before Zimbabwe’s beleaguered President, Robert Mugabe, went on TV with what was supposed to be his resignation speech. After all, Mugabe is 93-years-old, and he has read the wrong speech before.
He did it again, but it was not a mistake. With the generals who intervened to remove him from power ranged in chairs behind him, Mugabe stumbled and bumbled through a 20-minute speech in which he made no mention of resignation. No doubt his resignation was a key part of the speech they had agreed he would make, but he skipped those pages.
The old man was clearly delusional. He vowed to preside over next month’s congress of the ruling Zanu-PF party, although it has just fired him after 42 years as its leader. He ignored its threat to begin impeachment proceedings if he does not resign the presidency within 24 hours. And he had to resign when they did. His wife Grace Mugabe, who was being positioned to succeed him as President but has now been expelled from Zanu-PF, is just as out of touch with reality.
It was Grace who persuaded Robert Mugabe to sack two vice presidents in a row in order to take the job herself. This is what triggered the Army’s intervention, because her second victim and the new President Emmerson Mnangagwa, is a powerful politician with close connections to the military. He had anyway expected to succeed Mugabe when the old man finally died, and he took his dismissal personally.
Mnangagwa went into exile in Mozambique for a week, but then the Army intervened on his behalf and the current crisis erupted. The generals hoped that they could get Mugabe to resign voluntarily, because they could then pretend that their action was not a military coup.
That was important, because the African Union no longer tolerates military coups in its member states and might even intervene against the generals. But Mugabe tricked them, using his live television speech to declare that he plans to stay in power — and the soldiers were bound to conclude that it was Grace who put him up to it. She probably did.
Ten days ago, not knowing what was to come, I wrote a piece about Grace Mugabe and her ambition to take the presidency when Robert Mugabe finally dies. But she is hated in the party and deeply unpopular with Zimbabweans in general because of her greed and arrogance, and I ended the article by saying: “Once he dies, she will be lucky to get out alive.”
For a moment there, when the Army intervened, I thought she might escape that fate. Uncle Bob would be offered a dignified exit from power, she would be excluded from the succession, and they would both go off to a comfortable retirement in Singapore or some other city where they own very comfortable homes.
Well, that’s not going to happen. She has encouraged the old man to deceive the generals and cling to power, which nearly wrecked their plans for a semi-constitutional transfer of power that doesn’t look like a coup. He was ejected from power, but no longer with dignity. They won’t kill him, because he is a hero from the time of the liberation struggle, but she is in mortal danger.
Emmerson Mnangagwa is now back in Zimbabwe, and was sworn in as President a couple of days ago. He is known as “the crocodile”, and he has no reason to protect Grace Mugabe. Her best hope is exile, but she had better take the exit soon. And what Zimbabwe will get is not an end of the dictatorship, but a new dictator.
What happened in Zimbabwe was not a popular revolution but a power struggle inside the ruling Zanu-PF party, and Mnangagwa is no democrat. He is a brutal political operator who directed the massacre of at least 20,000 people in the 1980s, when the Ndebele people of southwestern Zimbabwe resisted the takeover of the whole country by Mugabe’s party. Mnangagwa was also in charge of the military intervention in the 2008 election, in which so many civilians were assaulted, imprisoned or killed that the Opposition leader withdrew his candidacy to save lives even though he had beaten Mugabe in the first round. Zimbabwe has always held elections, but there has never been any doubt about the result.
Zimbabweans are celebrating Mugabe’s departure in the streets now, but there is no cause to believe that things will now get better for them. The same elite that has looted the country and run its economy into the ground will still be in power, led by a man more ruthless and violent than Mugabe.
(The writer is an independent journalist)