If there were a Nobel Prize for patience, Zimbabwe’s Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) leader Morgan Tsvangirai would be very much in the running. In the month since “swift” talks began on the distribution of ministerial posts in the new government, Zimbabwe’s veteran leader Robert Mugabe has put every obstacle in the way of a power-sharing arrangement. Now former South African President Thabo Mbeki has returned to Harare to see if he can rescue the deal he brokered.
Though his ultimate sanction is to pull out of negotiations, Tsvangirai has plugged on even in the face of mounting evidence that Mugabe has little intention of yielding any real power to the MDC, which beat ZANU-PF in parliamentary elections in March. Tsvangirai himself almost certainly won more than 50 percent of the required presidential vote to avoid a runoff. It was only when Mugabe last week unilaterally appointed two of his own supporters to be vice presidents that Tsvangirai threatened to quit and Mbeki hurried back to Zimbabwe.
It is hard to see what the South African statesman can do now that he has been eased from office that he could not do when he was still his country’s president.
If Mbeki has played the honest broker all along, he must be feeling that his long-standing freedom-fighting hero Mugabe has let him down. He surely did not spend so long — too long some would argue — building up a deal between the rival sides to see it wrecked by the intransigence of Mugabe himself and just as significantly the police and army chiefs around him who fear for their futures in an MDC-dominated administration.
His only new lever might be to warn Mugabe and his people that the new emerging power in South Africa — ANC leader Jacob Zuma is far less inclined to protect ZANU-PF not least because as a popular trade union leader, his many supporters are angry at the way Mugabe has crushed union opponents in Zimbabwe. With Zuma likely to be elected president next year, South African support for Mugabe will wither further. Mbeki can, therefore, claim with justice that his latest mission is the last opportunity for ZANU-PF to reach a deal that may have the support of its southern neighbor.
All the evidence is, however, that Mugabe and his people are not prepared to surrender a jot of real power. They have created a police state and history shows what happens to such countries when the reins of power are lost by their rulers. The men around Mugabe do not dare surrender their power bases, though the economy continues to crash and burn and with 80 percent unemployment and stratospheric inflation, there is not much a country left to run. The challenge now is for ZANU-PF to keep its own supporters on side. There is after all only so much payola to go around. But in truth the Mugabe’s camp has only the power to delay, not to stop change. The only question now is whether it will come peacefully.
