Cape Town - Edgar Garwe sits repairing mobile phones behind the
counter of his tumble-down stall, worrying about a scarcity of customers
and how he’ll pay his two children’s school fees.
“We’re just waiting,” Garwe, 31, said in an interview in
the town of Mvurwi, north of Zimbabwe’s capital, Harare, where he fixes
three or four phones in a good week. “It’ll get better when he’s gone.”
“He” is Robert Mugabe, who’s led Zimbabwe since independence
from the U.K. in 1980 and overseen an economic meltdown that’s left an
estimated 95 percent of the workforce jobless and driven as many as 3
million people into exile. Even though the ruling Zimbabwe African National
Union-Patriotic Front, or Zanu-PF, insists Mugabe will be its presidential
candidate in the next elections in 2018, there’s a growing belief that the
92-year-old’s rule is nearing its end.
Read also: Bond notes: Zimbabwe's answer to cash woes?
As the Mugabe era enters its twilight, Zimbabwe is facing
rising poverty and protests. A power struggle in the ruling party to succeed
him pits one faction backing his wife Grace and another coalescing around
Vice President Emmerson Mnangagwa, a former spy chief. At the same time, unrest
is spreading over food shortages and a cash crunch that has delayed payment of
salaries and prompted the central bank to introduce dollar-pegged bond notes
that Zimbabweans immediately dubbed “zombie currency.”
Faction fights
“Mugabe has been holding the various factions of Zanu
together,” Aditi Lalbahadur, a researcher at the South African Institute for
International Affairs, said by phone from Johannesburg. “I don’t think the
question has been answered about who will take over. Until that is resolved, I
doubt Mugabe is going to step down voluntarily. There is going to be some
kind of shift, but nobody knows what that will be.”
While Mugabe and his aides say he is “fit as a fiddle,”
he’s visibly frail and has traveled frequently to Singapore to undergo
undisclosed medical treatment.
A former schoolteacher who was jailed for 11 years for
fighting white minority rule, Mugabe was initially hailed for promoting racial
reconciliation and improving health and education. Now he’s seen as a pariah by
many Western nations, who accuse him of stealing elections, waging a violent crackdown
against his opponents and ruining the economy by condoning the seizure of
white-owned commercial farms for redistribution to black subsistence farmers.
Opposition to Mugabe’s rule has been fueled by widespread
poverty, joblessness, the collapse of basic services and an abusive police
force. The worst drought in two decades has added to the gloom, with
about 4 million people, more than a quarter of Zimbabwe’s population, in need
of emergency food rations.
A Zimbabwean man shows off new bond notes outside a bank in Harare on November 28, 2016. Picture: Philimon Bulawayo/Reuters
Brezhnev Zvouya, a 32-year-old resident of the town of
Banket which lies about 96 kilometers (60 miles) northwest of the capital,
points at a Zanu-PF slogan “Empower, Employ, Indigenize” on his tattered
T-shirt. “Big, big lie,” he said. “No new jobs, and people with jobs have no
guarantee of being paid. Zanu is rotten.”
Sleeping in streets
Seven years after abandoning its own currency and
using mainly the dollar to end hyperinflation that reached 500 billion percent,
Zimbabwe is grappling with cash shortages that have stalled salary payments to
civil servants, the military and employees of private companies. Lines of
people waiting to make bank withdrawals snake around city blocks in Harare.
Some sleep in the streets to ensure they’re served.
In a bid to address the cash crunch, the central bank
started distributing $10 million worth of bond notes.
Read more: New Notes Stir Memory of Hyperinflation
With many businesses refusing to accept the notes,
protests erupted in Harare on Wednesday, and the police sealed off the city
center and used water cannons to disperse the crowds.
Read also: Mixed reaction to Zimbabwe's new bond notes
“The introduction of bond notes won’t make any difference
because you’re only allowed $150 a week and many places won’t accept them as
real money,” said Joel Matamba, a farmer from the tobacco-growing region of
Mutepatepa in northern Zimbabwe, who pays his eight staff about $150 each a
month. “It’ll take me eight weeks to pay each worker what I owe them for a
month of work. There are no banks here; these people have to be paid in cash.”
Opposition unites
The discontent is strengthening the appeal of
opposition parties, which are considering uniting to contest the 2018
vote. Mugabe’s main adversaries are Morgan Tsvangirai’s Movement for Democratic
Change and Zimbabwe People First, which is led by Joice Mujuru, who was vice
president between 2004 and 2014 and was expelled from Zanu-PF two years ago
after being sidelined in the succession race.
Mujuru, a veteran of Zimbabwe’s war for independence, has
strong support in rural areas that have traditionally backed Mugabe, while
Tsvangirai has overwhelming sympathy in urban centers.
“Mugabe’s decision to purge Mujuru and her allies was a
critical blunder that brought to life the one party that could pose a real
threat to the ruling party’s clutch on power,” Charles Laurie, head of country
risk at Bath, England-based Verisk Mapelcroft, said in an e-mailed response to
questions. “Her personal knowledge of the Zanu-PF playbook means that for the
first time the ruling party will face a political opponent that intimately
understands its strategies.”
While the end of the Mugabe era can’t come too soon for
Garwe, he expects the president to die in office or leave on his own terms.
“Life can’t improve while the old man is in State House,
so the country’s waiting for him to go,” Garwe said. “No one can chase him out,
no one has that power. When he’s gone, we can start repairing the damage.”’
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