A certain amount of volatility has always accompanied President Robert Mugabe’s long rule in Zimbabwe, even – especially – within his inner circle. An avid student of colonial history, Mugabe has long perfected the British Empire’s ‘divide and conquer’ tactics to keep himself in power, pitting his allies and his opponents against each other as a way to keep them from challenging the president himself.
It has been an enormously successful strategy. Even today, with the 92-year-old Mugabe struggling to cope with the demands of his office, the deep divisions within the ruling ZANU-PF party – divisions that Mugabe created and cultivated – mean that no single faction is powerful enough to seize power from him. Even if Mugabe is no longer pulling the strings, the puppet show he put in motion continues to protect him.
But for how long? The faction fighting is getting uglier by the day. The volatility within the ranks of the ruling party is increasing to unprecedented levels, and spilling into the public eye with alarming frequency.
Take, for example, the fraud and corruption charges filed against Higher Education Minister Jonathan Moyo, a senior figure in the G40 faction of ZANU-PF. These have been accompanied by a virulent smear campaign against the minister in the state-run Herald newspaper, including repeated requests for his immediate arrest.
Moyo has been in trouble before, of course. At one stage in his career, he was even expelled from the party. But this is different. A sitting minister is being dragged through the coals in public, by institutions supposedly loyal to a different faction (Vice-President Emmerson Mnangagwa’s Lacoste faction) within the party. At the very highest levels of ZANU-PF, there is no longer even a pretence of party unity.
Another example of how Mugabe’s divide-and-rule tactics are spiralling out of control are the divisions within the war veterans’ movement. The war vets have long been an important element in maintaining Mugabe’s legitimacy, using their struggle credentials – accompanied, on more than one occasion, by violence – to bolster the regime.
But even the war vets are now fighting amongst themselves, with some openly breaking ranks with the ruling party. Earlier this month, one war vets organisation formally dumped Mugabe as its patron, while the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC-T) openly brags that some war veterans are now on its side. This could lend the opposition some serious political capital.
But even as Mugabe’s power base fractures, possibly beyond repair, so the political opposition are trying desperately to present a united front. They know some kind of coalition is the surest antidote to divide and rule – and their best chance of success in the 2018 presidential election.
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