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Show of hands, or maybe of teeth
Mail & Guardian (SA)
September 16, 2007

Zimbabwe's ruling Zanu-PF party has called a surprise special congress for December, setting the stage for a showdown between President Robert Mugabe and rivals within his party, who are plotting to oust him.

A conference had been scheduled, but a meeting of Mugabe's politburo last week decided that an extraordinary congress should be called instead.

According to Zanu-PF's constitution, it is only at a congress that new leadership can be elected. The party's constitution stipulates that an extraordinary congress can meet only to debate on a single-item agenda.

Elliot Manyika, Zanu-PF political commissar, says the agenda for the congress will be set by the central committee, the highest decision-making body outside congress.

The official party line has been to keep mum on the agenda, but Joice Mujuru, Mugabe's deputy and head of a faction vying for the presidency, said on Tuesday in the state media the congress had, in fact, been called "to nominate [Zanu-PF's] presidential candidate" for elections next year.

The party has called an extraordinary congress only twice since independence in 1980; the first in 1987 to discuss unity with Joshua Nkomo's PF Zapu party and the second in 2000 to complete debate from the congress held a year earlier.

Events at the last congress in 2004 have shaped Zanu-PF's internal politics in the past three years. Emmerson Mnangagwa was Zanu-PF secretary ahead of that congress and had secured the backing of the required six of the 10 provinces in his bid for nomination for vice-president. But Mugabe backed Mujuru instead and sacked the six chairpeople of the provinces that supported Mnangagwa, accusing the camp of a wider plot to unseat him.

But the Mugabe-Mujuru alliance has been strained since then by what Mugabe sees as the impatience of her supporters for her to gain power and his stated belief that divisions will boil over and paralyse Zanu-PF if he leaves the scene.

Now, Mugabe has been forging new, convenient alliances with the Mnangagwa camp, hoping to isolate the Mujuru faction ahead of the special congress.

"He [Mugabe] is experienced enough to know that he needs to control all the influence that he can," a member of Mugabe's politburo said this week. "There's a whole lot going on in the background, but the whole purpose [of holding the congress] is so Mugabe can silence those who are going around saying he has no official mandate to go in."

A key meeting of Zanu-PF's central committee last March had been expected to discuss Mugabe's future as leader. But Mugabe, latching on to global outrage at the time over the torture of opposition activists weeks earlier, succeeded in stifling discussion on his candidacy, steering debate instead to the subject of the "siege of the country", the politburo source said.

Having passed that test, Mugabe has set about whipping leaders of the key wings of his party into publicly endorsing his bid for re-election.

Last week local media quoted Oppah Muchinguri, leader of the Zanu-PF women's league, making veiled criticisms of Mujuru, suggesting the vice-president had done little for women since her election.

Mugabe has described war veterans, the muscle of previous Zanu-PF campaigns, as the "torch bearers" of his 2008 bid. The war veterans' association has backed Mugabe's candidacy.

Traditional chiefs, who have strong influence on how their rural subjects vote, also have endorsed Mugabe and were rewarded with a brand-new bakkie each at the weekend.

With the public backing of key wings of his party already secured, analysts say Mugabe's opponents will find it hard to push for him to be ousted during the extraordinary congress.

Still, it might not be plain sailing for Mugabe. Divisions among the top leadership run down into the rank and file of the party. There have been violent clashes among Zanu-PF supporters in the southern province of Masvingo and in Bulawayo, suggesting grassroots pressure for a change of leadership might be stronger than Mugabe believes.

SA denies writing Zim report The South African government has expressed concern that there are people actively working to destabilise the talks the SADC region has tasked it to mediate between the two factions of the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) and the ruling Zanu-PF.

This follows indications that a report that blamed Britain for the deepening crisis in Zimbabwe did not originate from President Thabo Mbeki's office as originally reported. Media reports in the lead-up to the SADC summit in Lusaka, Zambia, last month suggested that Mbeki would paint a picture of optimism on the talks between Zanu-PF and the MDC.

According to the reports, Mbeki was said to have written that "the most worrisome thing is that the UK continues to deny its role as a principal protagonist in the Zimbabwe issue and is persisting with its activities to isolate Zimbabwe".

The reports further said that "none of the Western countries that have imposed the sanctions that are strangling Zimbabwe's economy have shown any willingness to lift them".

However, the Director General in the South African presidency, Reverend Frank Chikane, on Thursday reiterated that the report was definitely not a South African government report.

"We believe that somebody deliberately changed the facts of the story. We are concerned that even when we pointed out that South Africa was not responsible it has taken so long to correct this matter. We believe that the story was intended to damage South Africa's integrity and present us as people who don't act in good faith and to impact negatively on the progress being made by South Africa with the two Zimbabwean parties. Fortunately both parties are committed to stay the course and to find a solution," he said.

The South African government believes that the same kind of forces were responsible for destroying the progress that South Africa had made when it was negotiating the peace process in Haiti.

Chikane said the comments falsely attributed to Mbeki could have damaged South Africa's standing internationally. "If we don't correct this kind of information, this country will continue to be a victim of disinformation," he said.

He added that anybody who had read the report would have immediately noticed that, given its language and tone, it could not have come from the South African government. He further elaborated that Mbeki did not table any written report at the SADC summit but had briefed heads of state on the progress of the brokered talks.

It had emerged that "the document was actually a Zimbabwe government position paper for the summit concerning the situation in that country and not one from South Africa", a senior Zambian foreign affairs official said on Wednesday.

"There were several documents given to officials prior to the summit and even during the summit, and the mix-up on originality of some of the documents could have been caused by this," the official said.

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