There has been a military coup with Robert Mugabe being confined to his home by the army who has reported to have taken control. Zimbabwean opposition has reported that the army has ‘reached out’ to them, offering positions of power in a bid to reassert legitimacy.
For sure this is the end of Mugabe’s reign, but will this be the start of a long held military dictatorship or the return to civilian democracy. I see the military asserting control for the stability it brings, but they can’t hold power for long as the country will fail to work.
The only reason Zimbabwe has been chugging along so miserably was the support given to it by South Africa (and China) who didn’t want a failed state at it’s border. The new military government probably won’t command such good will, unless it reintroduces civilian rule. After that, international trade investment will probably return and Zimbabwe might finally start to rebound. A long way to go, yes, but possible.
Here’s hoping. My fear, though, is that Mugabe had been there so long and his ideology has become so set in the government, that getting that changed will be incredibly difficult.
I mean, this seems to have sparked by the Mnangagwa firing, and if he comes back, I don’t see many changes.
I believe the actions of economic restructuring was a popular one with the public. The Zimbabwean people did see the wisdom in seizing farmland from the select wealthy families who were white descendants of British colonials. Of course the international community had a problem with it because it was done under unlawful and violent means. So, Zimbabwe suffered sanctions and disinvestment. With the economy isolated and dying general society started to fail. Mugabe was able to endure due to the meager support he gathered from South Africa and then China.
If the military regime can’t keep China/South Africa nor win back the international community they will be in the same position. I’m sure that the international community will welcome Zimbabwe back into the fold if they return to open/free democracy with responsible leadership.
However it is important to remember that Mugabe’s actions wasn’t exactly unpopular. People felt that there was real grievances to how their economic society was structured. Mugabe capitalized on those real grievances to extend his reign until now.
The largest challenge any new government faces is akin to the one the US CPA faced after conquering Iraq:
The entire government top to bottom are nothing but placemen of the old regime. You can either leave them in place as a festering hive of known-corrupt intriguers with well-established but largely unknown factions, or remove them all and with that 100% of the knowledge of how to operate the few things in society that work even a little bit.
That’s a tough dilemma to navigate given huge resources AND the best of intentions AND a deep source of uncorrupt actors. It’s unclear to me that the Zim Army & the opposition parties have very much of any of those things, much less all of them.
This is not an uprising by ‘the people’ or by the political opposition. The people in charge now have been close to Mugabe for decades. That’s why it will be resolved quietly.
Mugabe and his wife are out, and maybe some of the opposition figures will be brought into a coalition government. It will only be an incremental change and an incremental improvement.
It’s business as usual in Harare at the moment. No celebrations, no demonstrations, no mobs, no big fuss, just people going about their normal daily routine.
Why? Because this is just an internal conflict between factions within the ruling party, within the existing power structure. Mnangagwa ‘the Crocodile’, who is now apparently taking over, is one of the most feared men in Zimbabwe. He was deeply involved in the Gukurahundi massacres in the 1980s as Minister of State Security, under Mugabe.
This ‘coup’ may lead to some improvements, because the faction that has now seized power has been talking about economic reforms, and seems a little more open to negotiations with the opposition - but it’s certainly not a revolution.
Indeed. Its likely Mugabe will “choose” to retire and that former vice president Emmerson Mnangagwa will be president, pending fresh elections. Until very recently, he was Mugabe’s right-hand man and had been for decades. The elite are simply rearranging the deckchairs on the Zimbabwean Titanic.
My personal opinion is that revolution is for the passionate/romantics, pragmatists should have a different view. A country’s people are better served by real change, and its even better when that change is ushered by a stable government. Whoever ends up calling the shots in Zim, they should put both economic change and political stability at the forefront.
