Joy as Mugabe accepts defeat
ZIMBABWE: It was just before sunset in Harare when the speaker of Zimbabwe’s parliament read out the letter that sent the capital into near delirious celebration.
In it, Robert Mugabe, the world’s oldest serving head of state, had announced his decision to finally relinquish his grip on the country that he ruled with an iron fist for four decades.
‘‘Parliament has erupted,’’ said Michael Carter, an MP from the Movement for Democratic Change, speaking from inside the chamber, before holding up his phone to the cacophony of whoops echoing around the auditorium.
Outside, as dusk gathered and street lights flickered on, the old colonial thoroughfare of Samora Machel Ave was suddenly flooded with people jumping, ululating and sobbing. It was a euphoric and peaceful, if chaotic, end to seven days that shook Mugabe’s world.
Gloria Chimini, 45, a parliamentary stenographer, could not stop whooping and crying: ‘‘Oh my God, Oh my God. I am so happy . . . now I just don’t care about anything because he is gone.’’
‘‘No-one is invincible in life,’’ exclaimed Innocent Manase, a 28-year-old lawyer. ‘‘Let’s not make a mistake of forgiving his past wrongs. This must serve as an example to future presidents that you don’t take people for granted.’’
Others were blunter about their desire for retribution: ‘‘I want to see him in leg irons,’’ shouted a man in central Harare, grinning so broadly his face seemed split. Nearby, a skinny teenage man shouting obscenities in his native Shona language and in English collapsed on the pavement laughing and clutching his phone.
Celebrations were not confined to Harare. In Chitiungwiza, a shabby, litter-strewn dormitory town south of the capital, a mother of two young sons was too breathless to speak.
‘‘We are in the streets. We can’t stay inside, we have to celebrate the whole night by dancing and screaming,’’ she shouted.
In Bulawayo, Judith Todd, daughter of Garfield Todd, the former Rhodesian prime minister and a pro-democracy activist who was stripped of citizenship by Mugabe said: ‘‘Thank God. Congratulations to the brave people of Zimbabwe who have endured so much.
‘‘This is a new start and we must be now very, very careful to look after one another in this new beginning.’’
Further afield exiles and refugees of the large Zimbabwean diaspora in South Africa were savouring the fall of a regime they had fled.
Chris Greenland, Zimbabwe’s first black judge, who was appointed by Mugabe but quit the bench in protest against the regime’s disregard for the rule of law, and is now in Pretoria, laughed: ‘‘Having a treble shot . . . single malt.’’
Sally Mutseyami, a human rights activist who fled after receiving threats and is now based in Britain, said: ‘‘I am ecstatic. We’ve had enough of Mugabe. In 37 years he managed to erode his achievement from that of a liberator to a dictator.’’
Mugabe has ruled Zimbabwe uninterrupted since independence from Britain in 1980. In that time he went from a globally respected champion of the anti-colonial liberation movement and reconciliation to a despised and feared despot.
His four decades at the helm of the country unravelled in little more than a week after senior army officers took umbrage at his decision to sack his long-serving heir apparent, Emmerson Mnangagwa, last week.
But the true cause of Mugabe’s downfall was that blight of all dictatorships: uncertainty over who would succeed the tyrant once he died.
That simmering unease had festered into a raging feud between Mnangagwa, a veteran of the war of independence favoured by the military and the old guard of Zanu PF, and Grace Mugabe, the 53-year-old first lady who had made a play for the succession herself via a faction of younger party members called the G40.
Anxious to preserve a veneer of respectability, and wary of the dim view Zimbabwe’s neighbours would take of a full scale coup d’etat, the generals went to extraordinary lengths to dress up their action as a ‘‘correction.’’
Instead of putting Mugabe against a wall, slinging him in jail, or putting him on the next plane out of the country – the tried and tested methods of past African military coups – they tried to persuade him that it was time to retire voluntarily.
A less tenacious, or bloody minded, leader might have taken the hint. But even at 93, Mugabe proved both stubborn and wily.
In days of talks, he demanded a safe exit for himself and his wife and, sources suggested, ran rings around his captors by citing constitutional and diplomatic provisions that made them powerless to remove him. Sensing growing public frustration, the plotters and their allies attempted to convince him he had lost not only the faith of the military leadership, but also his party and the public.
In a demonstration of purpose, Zanu PF, the party he founded, ousted him as leader and replaced him with Mnangagwa.
To drive the point home, the War Veterans, once the mainstay of Mugabe’s support, allied with the opposition parties and civil society groups they once terrorised to mount an unprecedented march through the streets of Harare calling for his resignation.
Remarkably, even that seemed to make little impression on the isolated president. Instead of stepping down, he stunned the generals, the country and the world with a rambling speech reasserting his authority on Sunday night. But it appears the writing was on the wall.
Even before the coup, the 16-country Southern African Development Community (SADC) led by Jacob Zuma had been applying pressure on the despot to resign, according to diplomatic cables seen by Reuters.
The South African president had even suggested offering Mugabe a senior African Union role to persuade him to go peacefully.
Mugabe’s tenacious grip on power finally slipped yesterday. As parliament moved to make good its threat of impeachment, he was humiliated when ministers boycotted a cabinet meeting at State House, his Harare office.
By afternoon, hundreds of members of the upper and lower house of the Zimbabwean legislature had to move from the small colonial era parliament building in the centre of the city as it was too small for both houses to a makeshift debating chamber in the Zimbabwe International Conference Centre to hear Zanu PF table a remarkable motion of no confidence.
In a string of grievances, the motion accused Mugabe of allowing his wife to ‘‘usurp’’ power and threaten Mnangagwa’s life and of humiliating the country by falling asleep and struggling to stand and walk unsupported.
‘‘We have seen the president sleeping in Cabinet and international meetings to the horror, shame and consternation of Zimbabweans,’’ the motion read.
But they had not yet voted on the motion when Jacob Mudenda, the speaker, halted proceedings and read out a note that had been handed to him.
When he got to the sentence beginning ‘‘my decision to resign’’, the MPs did not need to hear any more.
The full sentence, if they had cared to hear it, was: ‘‘My decision to resign is voluntary on my part and arises from my concern for the welfare of the people of Zimbabwe and my desire for a smooth, nonviolent transfer of power.’’
Euphoria will, sooner rather than later, be replaced by the hard business of political bargaining.
For Mnangagwa, who will almost certainly be parachuted into the presidency in the coming hours, it will mean managing the expectations of his supporters, the Zimbabwean public, and the international community.
It is a daunting task. Sources close to him said he is not in perfect health and that he ‘‘knows exactly what has to be done to recover the economy’’ – a reference to an expected crackdown on corruption and lavish spending on officials which will not necessarily be popular with cabinet ministers and Zanu PF MPs.
For those who have spent decades campaigning for democracy, there is an uneasy awareness that Mnangagwa is a notorious character in his own right who built many of the structures of repression that kept Mugabe in power. –Telegraph Group
"Thank God. Congratulations to the brave people of Zimbabwe who have endured so much.''
Judith Todd, daughter of Garfield Todd, the former Rhodesian prime minister, and a pro-democracy activist