A Predictable Tragedy. Daniel Compagnon

of the Zimbabwean president, his personality and personal history deserve some scrutiny. Since 2000, Mugabe has stubbornly opposed any suggestion of political reform or resignation and is likely to do so to his death. He is a man of consuming ambition who worked very hard to reach his top position. He entertains a superiority complex and belittles other contenders for power—especially those without higher education—including aspiring successors from his own party. People who have met him in private acknowledge his brilliant mind, his sober and even Spartan way of life, and his intellectual sophistication backed by several university degrees. But behind this posture of the modest and seemingly competent statesman there is another Mugabe and a more sinister character: reckless, extremely cunning, and tactically patient, a born political animal. A former guerrilla commander who contributed to Mugabe’s ascent to ZANU’s leadership in the camps admitted having nurtured a political monster: “He was arrogant, paranoid, secretive and only interested in power.”²⁰ A tormented psyche could explain his strange antics and any amateur psychiatrist would be tempted to speculate on possible childhood traumas.²¹ This psychosis of power commonly plagues African political systems.²² However, a psychological line of explanation would not lead us very far in understanding Mugabe’s thirst for power and his cunning ability to remain in control of the state. Mugabe’s mind is clearly behind the social and economic devastation in today’s Zimbabwe, but this is the work of a cold-blooded, rational, political entrepreneur. Resorting to violence, for instance, is part of a shrewd calculation and the focus is always on specific targets: it is not the product of his emotions. For example, he is not known for taking pleasure in witnessing torture and killings, rather the opposite. He is no Idi Amin Dada or Macias Nguema.

      In many ways the eventual subjugation of the Zimbabwean society, the violent suppression of any dissenting voice, and the complete collapse of the economy were virtually contained in Mugabe’s political enterprise from the beginning. What needs to be clarified is not “What went wrong?” but rather “Why did it take so long to go obviously wrong?” In other words, we need to analyze Zimbabwe’s society and social institutions’ resistance to authoritarian incorporation, and the national economy’s ability to countenance the predatory tendencies of the benefactors of state patronage for nearly two decades.

      This book, therefore, is neither a detailed history of Zimbabwe since independence nor a theoretical essay on African politics, although we do use a few political science concepts. Nor is it a detailed chronology of political developments in Zimbabwe since 2000, and we make no pretense of addressing all dimensions of a complex crisis that has engulfed the whole Zimbabwean society. Our aim is to contribute to a better understanding of the process of institutional decay and growing authoritarianism generated by Mugabe’s long tenure of power, in a country that had high potential in 1980. There was no curse, no Western plot against Black nationalism and Mugabe himself as alleged by the regime’s propaganda, no fatal destiny that took Zimbabwe into the league of derelict, bankrupt, postcolonial African autocracies. For those having hope in Africa’s future it is important to find out how and why this man-made disaster became reality. It is important also to set the record straight about the responsibilities of fellow African and non-African leaders who let Mugabe have his ways and taint the image of the continent through his actions.

       Chapter 1

      Authoritarian Control of the Political Arena

      Contrary to a view commonly held in the media and by some observers—that there was a sudden turn of events in 2000, supposedly reversing a previous trend toward democratization—the political system set in place at independence and throughout the 1980s was authoritarian in essence. For ZANU-PF leaders, the institutions, values, and procedures of parliamentary democracy were alien and a potential impediment to their objective of fully controlling the postcolonial state—something hardly disguised by the claim to adhere to “socialism.” Adopting an Eastern European Communist-style one-party state guaranteed absolute control over both state and society by those entitled to it—so they thought—by right of conquest. Power was theirs because they had won the “struggle” and the “struggle within the struggle.” In spite of profound changes on the international scene since 1989, and unlike many other authoritarian regimes in Africa, ZANU-PF has retained the abusive vocabulary and the power techniques of former Communist parties and upheld the one-party-state mentality. The state capture of the economy and the bullying tactics used against the media, civic organizations, and judiciary are addressed in subsequent chapters. We will focus first on the political arena, and more precisely on the party system and the electoral process.

      This drive for control has been the real political project of ZANU-PF’s leaders, and within the ruling party Mugabe has always assumed prominence. His relations with his lieutenants bear similarities to those between a Mafia supreme boss and members of his crime syndicate. The boss has to quell dissent without mercy—including from “family” members—because the moment the president’s authority is directly challenged he becomes vulnerable, exposed to an insider coup. For the sake of survival in power, control is a round-the-clock business. From the outset there were two arenas that Mugabe and his close associates needed to dominate: first, the ruling party (where power contenders could emerge from within the nationalist ranks), and, second, interparty politics (to prevent a credible opposition from disputing ZANU-PF’s claim of an “inherent right” to rule). Although this was achieved in part using calculated violence, which is assessed in Chapter 2, the manipulation of the electoral process was the main conduit of ZANU-PF’s monopolization of power.

       Controlling ZANU-PF

      To establish himself securely at the top of the power structure, Mugabe needed to maintain a constant grip on the ruling party. He transformed a liberation front riddled with tribal factionalism in the mid-1970s into an efficient political machine that took over power in 1980. Furthermore, Mugabe’s personal drive for absolute power required the careful monitoring of party dynamics. As in other African autocracies, the personal ruler did not suppress factionalism but used the faction leaders’ ambitions to his benefit. At one time posing as a benevolent referee above opposite camps, at another leading one coalition against would-be dissidents, Mugabe consolidated his authority over the years, effectively preventing an anti-Mugabe coalition from forming within the party. Free speech and open debate became increasingly rare in spite of the pretense of collective decision-making; although ZANU-PF Politburo and Central Committee meetings and party congresses and conferences continue to receive extensive coverage in the government press, the real decisions on important issues have always been Mugabe’s preserve. When troublemakers appeared to be a potential threat, they were ruthlessly eliminated and punished—and some murdered. Mugabe’s control over the party apparatus has endured in spite of the scale of the current national crisis, which is largely of the president’s own making and is used as a power management tool. From this perspective, the so-called “succession” debate that has been going on since the mid-1990s, and with more intensity since 2002, is largely futile. Recurrent outsider speculations that a “reformist wing” within ZANU-PF could force Mugabe into retirement was not only wishful thinking but demonstrated a lack of understanding of his lifelong enterprise.

       “Struggles Within the Struggle”

      Factionalism was always the curse of African nationalism in Southern Rhodesia. There has been much debate about the nature of this “struggle within the struggle,”¹ especially among scholars of various neo-Marxist schools, many of whom assumed that ZANU was a genuine revolutionary movement. Thus they read the factional struggle as a confrontation between “radicals” and “reformists.” David Moore, for example, identifies ideological cleavages within the nationalist camp that led to the elimination of the radical elements by the more conservative leadership of both ZANU and ZAPU.² Others, such as André Astrow, maintain that it was instead a classic nationalist movement fighting for genuine decolonization and equal rights for native Zimbabweans. In his view, the entire leadership of these movements being petit bourgeois by nature, factional struggle had a generational dimension, with younger leaders aspiring to a faster promotion.³ Non-Marxist analysts such as Masipula Sithole take into account the tribal