Zimbabwe and the risk of a power vacuum

By Lashias Ncube

Zimbabwe is balancing on a knife edge. The whole country is bristling with nervous energy. Not long now before everything comes to a head.

The natives are getting increasingly restless. The beat of their drum is getting louder and louder, ringing in Robert Mugabe and his acolytes’ ears.

The regime is facing its toughest test yet and showing signs of strain. Public displays of bravado and defiance in the face of unprecedented levels of dissent betray the fragility of the government’s hold on power.

The biggest shock to the regime’s system is the realisation that there is a burgeoning army of citizens with the effrontery to challenge its authority.

After years of behaving like a schoolyard bully terrorising timid kids, Mugabe is facing up to the reality that he has lost his fear factor. The masses are starting to push back. They will not be cowed by their leader and his minions anymore.

Yet despite this newfound temerity to stand up to their oppressors there is something gnawing at Zimbabweans. Their exhilaration is tinged with trepidation because they are acutely aware that ZANU PF’s aversion to succession planning and the party’s internecine factional feuds imperil the country’s future.

Incredulously, a party that purports to be democratic has criminalised long overdue succession debate, labelling such discourse acts of treason. So, in its eternal wisdom, the ruling party is hitching its wagons and the country’s fortunes to a cadaverous 92-year-old’s falling star.

It is clear who stands to benefit the most by keeping Mugabe in power. The faction christened the G40 has the ear of the president. In fact, this group has ‘captured’ the First Family. Mugabe speaks scathingly against factionalism, but only does so to frustrate the faction monikered ‘Team Lacoste’. The president is openly and actively aiding and abetting the G40 agenda. That’s Mugabe for you, our leader the high priest of hypocrisy.

Is it a coincidence that Jonathan Moyo was asked to step into the breach as Minister of Local Government in Saviour Kasukuwere’s absence, one G40 kingpin deputizing for another in cabinet?

Is it too far-fetched to suggest that the choice of incumbent’s short-term replacement was submitted to the president for sign off as a fait accompli? Mugabe, for many years the master puppeteer, is now a puppet doing the bidding of the faction aligned to his wife.

Despite believing in his own immortality, Mugabe is mortal. He is not going to rule from the grave either, although his wife’s quip made for a nice quotable sound bite. And no, there is no way Grace Mugabe is going to be the next president of my beloved country, not in a month of Sundays.

The economy has completely collapsed on the regime’s weak and treacherous backbone. The government, bereft of ideas on how to haul the country out of the economic quagmire is adopting bizarre and desperate policies, further alienating the masses.

For the most part Zimbabwe has an absentee president who is routinely pilloried by his subjects for his insatiable appetite for travel. In times of crisis demanding strong leadership, Mugabe is nowhere to be seen.

He is either gallivanting in Singapore or hiding under his wife’s skirt. The only time the president speaks is when he is rebuking dissenters or issuing threats of violence to those angling for his job and their supporters.

Murmurs about how Mugabe’s position as party leader is becoming increasing untenable are getting more audible by the day. It would seem that the man, who for years harboured a forlorn hope of rehabilitating his legacy, is coming under siege from his own and detractors alike.

Would Zimbabweans be surprised if they woke up one morning to the news that the First Family quietly slipped out of the country under cover of darkness never to return?

Would they be surprised if their president was suddenly incapacitated and declared mentally incompetent? At 92 and given Mugabe’s progressively deteriorating health, that is a distinct possibility.

Let’s say one of these scenarios comes to pass – good riddance to bad rubbish – but where would that leave us as a country? Would the feuding factions close ranks, bury the hatchet and rally behind one leader, or would they dig in and insist on fighting their respective corners?

In the absence of a clear succession plan, Zimbabwe faces the real and ghastly prospect of being plunged into a power vacuum.

Nature abhors a vacuum. In the scramble to fill the leadership void the odds tend to favour those with the means of violence. That would appear to put Emmerson Mnangagwa in the driving seat if the widely held view that Ngwena has the support of the army and security apparatus is to be believed.

For now though Mugabe remains ZANU PF’s main galvanizing influence, the cheap glue holding the party together. But for how long?

These are interesting times. The air of anticipation is thick enough to slice with a hacksaw. Zimbabwe expects.