Mnangagwa is not called the crocodile for nothing. Big electoral reforms such as an accurate voters roll and, even more critically, breaking the stranglehold that the security agencies secretly have on the nominally independent Zimbabwe Electoral Commission, seem unlikely.
But will that matter in the end? Will the necessary infusion of foreign capital be dependent on Mnangagwa fully liberalising Zimbabwe’s political system? Will the international community after all demand fully free and fair elections?
The International Crisis Group seems to think so. It said recently that Mnangagwa had so far shown no signs of implementing the raft of necessary electoral reforms which he would need to do fast ‘lest the vote be flawed and fail to deliver the required legitimacy for donors to re-engage’.
Matyszak suggests otherwise, believing that investors, creditors and donors are so relieved to see the back of Mugabe that they will give Mnangagwa a pass if he just produces a plausibly free and fair poll. Investment could start to flow even before the election, to beat the competition.
Matyszak believes Britain, Mugabe’s arch-enemy, seems particularly inclined to gloss over any signs of poor governance by the new administration. British officials strongly deny this, saying the misperception is based on the fact that the UK ambassador to Harare did indeed engage Mnangagwa a while ago, but that was only because she correctly predicted his victory in the bitter battle to succeed Mugabe.
‘But we don’t endorse Mnangagwa personally,’ one official insisted, though acknowledging that having Mugabe out of the way certainly enabled it now to have ‘an adult, grown-up’ relationship with Zimbabwe.
London is also discussing Zimbabwe’s quick return to the Commonwealth. If Zimbabwe agrees, the organisation will offer to send a Commonwealth election observer mission to the elections. Its judgement will be more credible to foreign capital than the exclusively African election observer missions Mugabe insisted on, Britain says.
Britain, officials say, will also insist on deeper political reforms before endorsing the large International Monetary Fund (IMF) debt relief package it believes will be essential to kick-start Zimbabwe’s economy.
Mnangagwa will later this month attend the annual World Economic Forum meeting in Davos to woo mainly Western investors. However UK officials also note that he will undertake a state visit to China in April and that if President Xi Jinping opens up the coffers with no political strings attached, Mnangagwa may have less need for a conditional Western financial injection.
With so many suitors from all sides lining up to proposition Mnangagwa, one wonders if indeed political conditionality won’t go out the window. Mnangagwa’s saving graces – his objectivity, rationality and pragmatism, as Matyszak points out, and his lack of the obsessive political ideology, anti-Western imperialism and racism which so repelled the world from Mugabe – may just be enough to help him pull off another ‘coup’ – the feat of reviving the economy while relinquishing not an iota of real power.
Patient democracy, it seems, will have to keep waiting.
By Peter Fabricius. This article was first published by ISS Today
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