The Zimbabwean president’s popularity is at an all-time low and Zanu-PF must decide whether to ditch him Chris McGreal
Zimbabwe’s ruling party opened an extraordinary congress this week with the one issue on everyone’s lips officially off the agenda Robert Mugabe’s future.
The Zanu-PF party has purged and sidelined critics of Zimbabwe’s beleaguered president ahead of the meeting and used the thuggish “war veterans” against dissidents in the way they were earlier used against white farmers in an attempt to stifle accusations that Mugabe is driving the party towards its doom.
Issues that are on the agenda, however including land reform potentially open the way for more daring critics to press for the president to stand down before the 2002 election.
Mugabe went into the meeting amid open hostility from former allies in the party and the tepid backing of some of his own Cabinet, including the finance minister, who has cast doubt on the president’s leadership.
But Mugabe loyalists, such as the former Cabinet minister and key politburo member Nathan Shamuyarira, say there is no question of the president being challenged.
“We are quite happy with President Mugabe’s leadership. He’s dynamic, he’s forceful, he’s given good leadership on the land issue. He was elected leader of the party in December last year. Mugabe is our president and will be our candidate,” he said.
The country’s financial and polling numbers should spell Mugabe’s doom as president. Inflation, unemployment and poverty surged this year as the land conflict helped contract the economy by 5%. Nearly half the government’s expenditure is on debt interest, much of it short-term loans taken out to deal with the crisis.
Spending on health is now below the level it held at independence 20 years ago, and Zimbabwe can afford only half its fuel needs. With the occupation of white-owned farms continuing, and crop production declining as a result, critical food shortages look increasingly likely.
In September a senior World Bank official in Zimbabwe, Rogier van den Brink, warned that the only way out of the crisis was for the present government to go.
“A wide cross-section of economists tend to agree that a successful political transition, as illustrated by restoration of law and order and a more pluralistic political dispensation, is the key to a successful economic stabilisation and recovery,” he said.
The best hope for that transition is the 2002 presidential election. If Mugabe stands again as Zanu-PF’s candidate, he faces almost certain defeat in a free and fair poll.
According to a comprehensive survey by South Africa’s Helen Suzman Foundation in October, support for the president and the ruling party had fallen sharply since its narrow victory over the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) in parliamentary elections six months ago.
Zanu-PF has the backing of just one in five voters, the survey found; three-quarters want Mugabe to step down immediately, and half the voters think he should be put on trial for the Matabeleland massacres in the early 1980s and the election violence earlier this year.
In contrast just 5% of Zimbabweans blame their country’s problems on the white population, and more than half of voters, including a substantial number of Zanu-PF supporters, believe that whites who emigrate are an important loss to the country.
With public dissatisfaction growing, it is little surprise that the party is struggling to keep a lid on internal dissent. Among the more open critics of Mugabe’s policies is the politburo member and former Cabinet minister, Eddison Zvobgo.
In September, by when he was out of office, he offered the most forthright denunciation of the government ever heard in Parliament.
“We have tainted what was a glorious revolution, reducing it to some agrarian racist enterprise,” he said. “We have behaved as if the world owes us a living. It does not. We have blamed other people for each and every ill that befell us. As every peasant, worker, businessman or woman now stares at the precipice of doom, let us wake up and draw back. We must clear the slate, bury everything that has divided us, and begin again.”
Zvobgo has already lost his Cabinet post and the war veterans have been used to take over the party leadership in his own province, Masvingo. His days in the politburo are probably numbered but on Monday, in a sign that he speaks for more than himself, the Zanu-PF politburo said it would permit a “Zvobgo faction” to attend the congress.
Others have been more subtle but their message is no less clear.
Finance Minister Simba Makoni gives a less than wholehearted endorsement of Mugabe when asked if the president can win another election.
“The majority of Zimbabweans need political leadership that leads the country out of the present social and economic problems. If President Mugabe delivers that leadership, I’m sure Zimbabweans will vote for him. If he doesn’t deliver the leadership, they will not vote for him,” he said.
Is he delivering the leadership? “Time will tell,” he said.
Some have left or been thrown out of the party for challenging Mugabe’s policies.
Moses Mvenge, parliamentary chief whip until this year’s election and a founder of Zanu-PF, won no friends for questioning excessive government spending and exposing large-scale corruption in the building of Harare’s new airport.
“Zanu has one major weakness. It is not able to reform itself. What the party was when it was formed in 1963 it is now,” he said. “It all comes back to one man. The politburo is appointed by the president. The Cabinet is appointed by the president. They are paying allegiance to one man. Our party never used to be like this. We never wanted this hero-worshipping of an individual. It started at independence.”
Zanu-PF’s leaders, however, are determined to prevent such views being aired at the congress. The war veterans have taken control of some key posts in the party and are expected to make up a substantial number of delegates. They will prove a fairly effective method of intimidation.
The war veterans are also being used to stifle dissent on the ground. In provinces such as Masvingo, armed veterans have invaded party offices, thrown out elected officials and threatened to use violence.
‘Mugabe is using the war vets against the party the way he used them against the white farmers,” said Mvenge. “They don’t want people who criti-cise the party. If you criticise the party, you are a rebel. But the party is riddled with factions and even the war vets can’t stop people thinking. That’s why this congress is very crucial because most of the young people in the party know that if they go into an election with Mugabe they will lose.”
Through all of this, the opposition has kept an unusually low profile. A few weeks ago the MDC was threatening to force Mugabe from office by the end of the year with popular street protests and strikes. But the MDC came to realise that Zimbabwe’s president is more than willing to use the police and army to suppress an insurrection, and it did not want to be responsible for bloodshed.
In any case, elections are less than two years away and a win at the ballot box would give a new government greater legitimacy than the overthrow of an elected president.
Zanu-PF says the poll will go ahead and it will respect the outcome. But Shamuyarira is not alone in attempting to portray the MDC as a front for foreign interests, and so question its legitimacy.
“The opposition is steered by the British press and financed by the British government, including Peter Hain, Clare Short and others,” he said.