End of the road for Mugabe – analyst

ROBERT Mugabe’s final humiliation is at hand. He can’t get out of the latest mess he created because at the end of the day it comes down to the money, and he doesn’t have enough to save either himself or the country.

Even his avaricious wife, Grace, arguably the most disliked person in much of Zimbabwe has been “cooled down” in the last months and no longer plays much of a political role.

The overdue end of the Mugabe era is the message spewing out of Harare after ten days of social unrest, including a stay away, strike, and some violence against the state by people on the street who say they are too desperate to be frightened any longer.

“They have so little they have nothing to lose” is the message on the streets. “Why should I care? I have nothing, said a vendor of mobile recharge cards in a small shopping centre in the city.

Yesterday the Zimbabwean government backed down on the banning of the importation of all basic commodities that led to serious rioting, saying the ban was intended for commercial importers, not individuals. The review of the policy came only one day after Home Affairs minister Ignatious Chombo said the government would never back down on the implementation of the new import regulations because they were meant to encourage Zimbabweans to buy locally and stop enriching South African businesses.

The unannounced implementation of the banning order caused chaos at Beitbridge border post and led to a series of deadly riots on the South African and Zimbabwean sides of the border as anger swelled within the business community and among importers. The riots forced the government to close the border post for the first time since it was opened in 1929.

This week, Mugabe’s finance minister Patrick Chinamasa was in London, cap in hand, addressing a conference, looking for money. Assuring any investor who would listen that Mugabe’s controversial and investor unfriendly “indigenisation” policy no longer counts and insisting that Zimbabwe has changed, and that it would also massively revamp its land policies to pay out evicted white farmers and complete valuations of confiscated farms within months.

“The past is over, let’s look to the future,” Chinamasa said at this prestigious conference about “rebooting and rebuilding” Zimbabwe which was arranged by prominent UK political publication, Africa Confidential. He wants Zimbabwe to be reunited with the UK, particularly with the Conservative Party, Mugabe’s preferred UK political party.”

A few days earlier in an interview about Zimbabwe’s financial situation with French radio, Chinamasa said: “Right now, we literally have nothing.”

The UK Economist which covered the Tuesday conference in London said that Chinamasa was hoping to finalise a deal to borrow about R15 billion to pay off its debts to the World Bank, International Monetary Fund and the African Development Bank, so that it can borrow again and restart the economy.

“Western governments worry that if they let Zimbabwe’s economy collapse, it will cause regional chaos. Far better, some argue, to stump up some cash and thereby strengthen the hand of ‘reformers’ within the ruling party, Zanu-PF, such as Mr Chinamasa,” The Economist said.

Reform

It said this week that the IMF believes that if Zimbabwe gets some cash and speeds up reforms then its economy could leap ahead by about eight percent a year. Without this it would bump along, they reckon, at about four percent. Others at the conference in London believe Zimbabwe will not even score one percent.

No investors actually turned up to listen to Chinamasa.

But analysts say this is all academic as Mugabe doesn’t have time for any of this to be put in place as the treasury cannot pay most of its civil servants on time next week – again – and many companies cannot pay South African suppliers for equipment or stocks of materials they need.

The final nail in Mugabe’s coffin, many analysts say, is that a small cellphone campaign of SMSes brought the country to a halt on Wednesday, in a week when some civil servants were also on strike.

And Zanu-PF doesn’t know how to stop the social media backlash as most Zimbabweans have a cellphone.

“Yes, finally this seems to be the end of the road for Mugabe, and I can’t see him standing for re-election in 2018. He will be gone before then. People on the streets and groups are telling me, and I can see with my own eyes, that there is almost no respect left for Mugabe, and a lot less fear of him as well,” said Brian Raftopoulos, Zimbabwe’s most prominent political analyst and senior academic.