Zimbabwe inaugurates Mnangagwa
HARARE, ZIMBABWE » Zimbabwe on Sunday inaugurated a president for the second time in nine months as the country once jubilant over the fall of longtime leader Robert Mugabe is now largely subdued by renewed harassment of the opposition and a bitterly disputed election.
The military-backed President Emmerson Mnangagwa, who again took the oath of office, faces the mammoth task of rebuilding a worsening economy and uniting a nation divided by a vote that many hoped would deliver change.
The 75-year-old Mnangagwa, who took power from his mentor Mugabe with the military’s help in November, said “my arms are outstretched” to main opposition leader Nelson Chamisa after the Constitutional Court on Friday rejected opposition claims of vote-rigging and upheld the president’s narrow July
30 victory.
Some supporters of the president, however, carried a makeshift coffin bearing Chamisa’s name during Sunday’s ceremony.
“In just nine months we’ve birthed a new Zimbabwe,” said Mnangagwa, who has promised democratic and economic reforms after Mugabe’s repressive 37-year rule. He opened his speech by reading a letter from the 94-year-old Mugabe, whose firing of Mnangagwa
sparked November’s dramatic events, offering congratulations and saying he could not attend because “I’m not well.”
Mnangagwa told the crowd that “our democracy has indeed come of age” and he invited all political parties to unite and “develop the motherland.”
The 40-year-old Chamisa on Saturday said he respectfully rejects the court ruling and called the inauguration “false.”