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Exit Mugabe
Stephen Chan, Prospect Magazine
April 02, 2008

http://www.prospect-magazine.co.uk/article_details.php?id=10124

Robert Mugabe, it is said, contemplated conceding defeat with a degree of grace, but was pressured by his army generals to fight to the end. But even with the slow and determined efforts to bias the counting of results in Mugabe's favour, it steadily became clear that the scale of the rigging required would never win the support of even Zimbabwe's staunchest and most patient allies. Then the generals discussed a coup, meaning that they themselves would ditch Mugabe, or make him their puppet—which, to an extent, he has been for some time. Then word came up, hard and clear from South Africa, that they were not to do that. South African diplomatic pressure has had a huge influence in turning back the course of what would have been a rigged election towards a murky compromise negotiated in back rooms, but one which might still see the retirement of Robert Mugabe.

I am writing this late in the afternoon of 2nd April. The parliamentary seats have been almost fully counted. It is still neck and neck, but even if Mugabe's Zanu-PF party wins a slender majority, Morgan Tsvangirai's Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) should win enough court challenges overturning initial results to secure an eventual majority. The painstakingly slow announcement of results—both to accommodate the attempt to rig and to allow time for compromise diplomacy—gave Zanu-PF huge majorities in those rural areas where opposition party agents and observers were thin on the ground. The constituencies that were won by the MDC were done so with slender majorities. In this way, the government hoped to coax a victory in the presidential race for Mugabe or, at worst, the chance for him to fight a run-off against Tsvangirai in three weeks' time.

But Mugabe must know by now that he cannot win a run-off. The South Africans are telling him that as I write. Make one last gracious speech now, they say.

Meanwhile, Tsvangirai has announced that he has won the Zimbabwean presidency, but by a more slender margin than his party had first claimed—by 50.3 per cent against Mugabe's 43.8 per cent. But that leaves just 6.5 per cent for Mugabe's other challenger, his former finance minister Simba Makoni—a ridiculously low figure. It seems that the MDC either got its own early figures wrong, or that this too is part of the South African effort to achieve an endgame with as much face left for Mugabe as possible. The price of his departure, they might be saying, is that there should be no triumphalism.

Either that, or all parties in this historic but vexed election have been overplaying their hands. I myself have no doubts that Tsvangirai won the presidential election with a vote of well over 50 per cent and that his MDC captured an absolute majority in parliament.

But Mugabe and his people—whether they hold him captive or the other way around—are never ones to be written off. Wily and ruthless, they have lasted a very long distance at the expense of the vast majority of their people. As a result of the country's soaring inflation, I had to carry a small briefcase full of Zim$10m notes to make my way around in the ten days I was in Zimbabwe. To put it in some sort of bleak perspective, I also had to carry a suitcase of notes in the aftermath of Idi Amin in Uganda. But South Africa and other countries in the region need Zimbabwe to be prosperous again for the sake of the economic future of all the countries in southern Africa. Mugabe, the denunciator of western neocolonialism, has been the one to slow the growth rates of the independent countries that are his neighbours. Finally, even though they supported him in public, no president in southern Africa will breathe anything but a sigh of relief when the brilliant but vainglorious Robert Mugabe slouches off into the ignominy of history.

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