‘Big man’s’ defeat ripples across Africa
JOHANNESBURG: When Zimbabwe’s generals moved against President Robert Mugabe on Wednesday, their action foreshadowed the potential end of more than just one political career. It echoed across a continent where the notion of the “big man” leader is defined equally by the lure of power in perpetuity and the risk that, one day, the edifice will crumble under the weight of its own decay.
Mr Mugabe, 93, who took in 1980, is the only leader Zimbabwe has known. He has suppressed perceived threats to his dominance, often brutally, and manoeuvred with guile to outflank his rivals. He waved his liberation credentials with such skill and frequency that he stood as an emblem, however flawed, of Africa’s yearning to be free of outside control.
In the end, though, his deft touch deserted him as he weighed the question looming over the end of his regime: who would succeed him. By favouring his polarising and politically inexperienced wife over his powerful vice-president, whom he fired last week, Mr Mugabe overestimated the loyalty of the military and security elite who took him into custody on Wednesday.
Mr Mugabe’s unrivalled hold on Zimbabwe seems at an end. That is a message that offered an unpalatable reminder to leaders who have clung to power for decades in Africa — from Equatorial Guinea and Cameroon to Eritrea and Uganda. Even the wiles of a politician of Mr Mugabe’s stature do not guarantee success to those who seek to extend their tenure indefinitely.
Patrick Smith, editor of The Africa Report magazine, said that since Mr Mugabe made the decision to break with his former vicepresident, Emmerson Mnangagwa, and other liberation leaders, “there was not going to be a way back”.
Zimbabwe’s business, political and military elites are known for the farms, villas, cars and bank accounts that they have accumulated since independence, in marked contrast to ordinary Zimbabweans who have either fled the country or lived in perilous economic times, facing the unemployment and hyperinflation that made many dependent on remittances from family members in exile.
Through all of it, Mr Mugabe remained in power. He had modest roots as the Catholic-educated son of an absentee father in the rural area around Kutama, where he was born on Feb 21, 1924.
His political ambitions crystallised between 1950 and 1952, when he attended the University of Fort Hare, an institution in South Africa that became an incubator for some of the continent’s most fabled nationalist leaders, including Nelson Mandela.
“Marxism-Leninism was in the air,” Mr Mugabe once said in an interview before Zimbabwe’s independence. “From then on I wanted to be a politician.”
It was a time of passions churning across Africa as more and more nations achieved independence — a phenomenon that alarmed the white minority, many of them settlers from Britain, who called the colony of Southern Rhodesia home.
For Mr Mugabe and many others, the white authorities represented the enemy. He was jailed, and his bitterness toward his adversaries deepened while in detention.
When he was released in 1975, he soon slipped across the border into Mozambique, which had just achieved independence from Portugal. The country was to become the base for Chinese-backed guerrilla fighters loyal to his movement, the Zimbabwe African National Union. Mr Mugabe, who was never seen to bear arms, struggled initially to secure the fighters’ support.
By the time a ceasefire was declared in late 1979 at a peace conference in London, some 27,000 people had died, most of them from the black majority.
Mr Mugabe was elected prime minister just before independence from Britain in April 1980. From the moment he took office, he worked assiduously and sometimes bloodily to cement his rise to power. In the early 1980s, soldiers from his 5th Brigade swept through Matabeleland, the home base of a rival from the liberation struggle, Joshua Nkomo, killing thousands of people, mostly civilians.
By 2000, when voters registered growing dissatisfaction with him, he embarked on an often violent campaign to expropriate white-owned farmland. And soon after, he turned to the task of suppressing a nascent opposition, just as he had previously suppressed Nkomo and his followers.
In elections in 2008, Mr Mugabe’s security forces and loyalists beat, killed or intimidated thousands of opposition supporters, prompting their leader, Morgan Tsvangirai, to withdraw.
In 2013, elections were again flawed but Mr Mugabe won, insisting he would run again in 2018 — a prospect that now seems unlikely.