Has Robert Mugabe finally met his Waterloo?
The mutiny of the war veterans, hitherto his most ardent and loyal supporters, last week has prompted many analysts to predict that this is really the end for him.
Of course Mugabe’s imminent demise has been forecast many times over the past few years. He must have had many chuckles over all the death notices that have been issued.
But he is surely not laughing over this one.
The war veterans added their own stinging criticism to a rising chorus of protest and disenchantment among Zimbabweans about Mugabe and his government, fuelled by a rapidly-imploding economy.
A statement by the Zimbabwe War Veterans’ Association was unprecedented. It brutally accused Mugabe of an extraordinary litany of sins, including “dictatorial tendencies”, “bankrupt leadership”, “corruption” and even of eliminating his rivals in Zanu when it was in exile fighting the white government.
It described him as the “rot” which “needs to be uprooted, and right now” and vowed the veterans would no longer campaign for him if he sought re-election in 2018.
Zanu-PF has retaliated, calling the vets “traitorous” and “treasonable” and vowing to investigate and possibly prosecute them. We shall see.
What exactly prompted the attack by the vets is rather unclear. They themselves said it was because the government had used excessive force against citizens peacefully exercising their right to demonstrate against poor governance the week before.
But, to say the least, they are not famous for their upholding of constitutional rights. Interestingly, though the vets implicitly acknowledged this hypocrisy. They admitted they had only come to the defence of the people’s right to demonstrate after their own protest was dispersed by tear gas and baton charges. They regretted that other protests had been similarly broken up before, “without a word of disapproval from us”.
But the real reason for the veterans’ complaints seemed to be much less principled. Last week Zanu-PF launched a scheme to reward party loyalists with housing plots, but excluded war veterans.
“We are very angry with what the president is doing,” Beta Guvheya, a war veteran, told AFP.
So the war veterans seem to be deserting Mugabe because they are no longer being favoured as they always have been so far. In 1998 Mugabe set the economy on its downward spiral by giving into their demands for huge, unbudgeted pension rises.
They reciprocated – but in turn also benefited – by leading his seizure of white farms from 2000 onwards and by dutifully beating up opposition supporters at election time.
So no one need feel sympathy for them.
Nevertheless it is just because they of all people have also now abandoned him that this may mark “the beginning of the end for Mugabe”, as Takavafira Zhou, a political scientist from Masvingo State University told AFP.
“The war veterans have realised Mugabe is sinking and with him his regime. They don’t want to sink with the ship,” said Zhou.
“A complicated strategic calculus between Mugabe and war veterans, backed by the military, is clearly under way as he faces an endgame of tragic dimensions,” is how Dumisani Muleya, editor of Zimbabwe weekly, The Independent, put it last Friday.
“If the war veterans join forces with the national resistance movement driven by civic groups and backed by churches and opposition parties, Mugabe, already on the ropes and hanging on to power by his fingernails, could soon face his Waterloo.”
And Brian Raftopoulos, Zimbabwe’s most prominent political analyst, told the Saturday Star even before the war veterans’ statement that “ this seems to be the end of the road for Mugabe, and I can’t see him standing for re-election in 2018.
“He will be gone before then. People on the streets and groups are telling me, and I can see with my own eyes, that there is almost no respect left for Mugabe, and a lot less fear of him as well.
“The money problem is too huge for him (Mugabe) to survive as there is a complete loss of livelihoods and the government has no control over the currency they use, the US dollar.
“No flourish of nationalist rhetoric will work for Mugabe any more.”
Indeed it was that lack of fear of Mugabe, the fear which has always been his strongest force, which was perhaps the most striking thing about the war veterans’ statement.
And also that palpable sense of rats deserting Mugabe’s sinking ship and clambering shamelessly aboard that of the opposition.
Whether or not the boldness of the vets proves to be a perilous miscalculation will be a telling pointer to Mugabe’s fate in the days ahead.
Zimbabwe analyst, Piers Pigou, quips that the desertion of the war veterans is “a major chunk peeled off as part of ongoing exfoliation”. But he also thinks “it’s an accelerator, not a game changer”.
Perhaps it will be the way the army now swings that will decide Mugabe’s fate.
And with no money left to keep them at bay – and even the Chinese seemingly unwilling to cough up – his future does not look bright.
Will Pretoria prove to be his banker of last resort?