Mugabe’s Generals

A new leader from the ranks of the JOC won't be a change for the better, especially if Tsvangirai isn't able to negotiate a significant share of power. Mnangagwa, 61, is reputedly the country's richest man, earning a fortune on investments in Congo when Zimbabwe intervened there on the side of Laurent Kabila. Mnangagwa also was director of the country's secret police, the Central Intelligence Organization, during the Matebeleland massacres of the 1980s, when thousands of supporters of Joshua Nkomo, Mugabe's rival black liberation leader, were killed. "Mnangagwa is more ruthless than Mugabe, and he's younger," says Shari Eppel, a Zimbabwean human rights activist.

The others aren't much more promising. The only other JOC civilian is Gideon Gono, 52, head of the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe, who has presided over the country's hyperinflation, printing money at such a furious pace that the Zimbabwe dollar--nearly on par with the U.S. dollar in the 1980s--now trades at more than 20 billion to a single American greenback. Secret policeman Didymus Mutasa, 73, is minister of state security. In 2006 he responded to questions about the Zimbabwe's raging AIDS epidemic and the growing flight of Zimbabweans from their country with this comment: "We would be better off with only six million people [the population is 12 million], with our own [ZANU-PF] people who supported the liberation struggle," he said. "We don't want all these extra people." 

Air Marshall Perence Shiri, 53, now the air force commander, previously had been in charge of the notorious North Korean-trained Fifth Brigade of the Army when it carried out the Matebeleland massacres.  Paradzai Zimondi, 53, the prisons chief, publicly ordered all prison officers to vote for Mugabe. Augustine Chihuri, 55, the commissioner-general of police, told the government mouthpiece, the Herald, that "we will not allow any puppets to take charge," even if they won the election.  He was the architect of the notorious 2005 Operation Murambatsvina ("Drive Out the Trash"), in which squatter settlements and impoverished roadside vendors were forced off city streets, to subsequent condemnation by a United Nations rapporteur. Finally, there's armed forces commander General Constantine Chiwenga, 51, who recently told a Zimbabwean newspaper, "the army will not support or salute sell-outs and agents of the West before, during and after the presidential elections." Chiwenga's wife, Jocelyn, is a key player in farm takeovers. White farmer Roger Staunton says when she came to take his huge, flower-producing farm, she called him a "white pig" and warned him to get going because "she had not tasted white blood since 1980 and missed the experience." All seven JOC members-already subject to European Union sanctions--are among 14 Zimbabwe officials who would be subjected to international financial and travel sanctions by the U.N. Security Council if a Western-backed resolution passes.

The JOC "cabal", as the ZANU-PF official referred to it, or "junta" in the words of the diplomat, is itself riven with internal disputes.  Mnangagwa and some of the other JOC members were accused in an abortive coup plot last year hatched by junior officers, but were later absolved of involvement.  When the MDC's deputy chairman, Tendai Biti, was arrested during the election campaign, his high-level interrogators had no interest in the trumped up charges against him, according to his lawyer, Lewis Uriri.  Uriri says instead they questioned Biti on what kind of deal he had been discussing with negotiators from their own government.  Biti and two lower ranking Mugabe officials had been talking about possible power sharing arrangements in some sort of unity government, through South Africa's mediation. "Biti realized there were powerful people in ZANU-PF who wanted to find out what was going on, people don't trust one another," Uriri said.

Whether Mugabe goes or stays after Monday's agreement, there's little room for optimism.  The JOC's leaders are hardly the sort to do anything about the country's daunting problems. "You can rig an election but you can't rig the economy, which will say, ah ha, the holes are still leaking," Makumbe says.  Four million Zimbabweans have "already voted with their feet," in U.S. ambassador James McGee's words, and fled.  Another five million face possible starvation after a 90 percent drop in this year's harvests.  That has not seemed to bother Mugabe and the power-brokers around him; holding on to control has been their overriding goal, and one they're not likely to give up on easily.  The last of Africa's Big Men may be on his way out, but, unhappily for his countrymen, his spirit is far from extinguished.

With Scott Johnson in Cape Town

© 2008