Zimbabwe’s former president
Robert Mugabe was granted immunity from prosecution, sources close to the
negotiations said on Thursday.
Mugabe ruled Zimbabwe for close
to four decades but stepped down on Tuesday after the army seized power and the
ruling party turned against him.
Emmerson Mnangagwa, the former
vice president, is set to be sworn in as president on Friday.
Zimbabwe was once one of Africa’s
most promising economies but suffered decades of decline as Mugabe pursued
policies that included the violent seizure of white-owned commercial farms and
money-printing that led to hyperinflation.
Most of its 16 million people
remain poor and face currency shortages and sky-high unemployment, something
Mnangagwa promised to address.
“We want to grow our economy, we
want peace in our country, we want jobs, jobs, jobs,” he told the crowd,
adding: “The will of the people will always, always succeed.”
Mnangagwa’s dismissal was the
trigger for the army and former political allies to move against Mugabe, feted
as an independence hero when Zimbabwe broke with former colonial power Britain
in 1980 but later feared as a despot.
He resigned as president on
Tuesday as parliament began an impeachment process, after resisting pressure to
do so for a week.
People danced in the streets
following his downfall, some brandishing posters of Mnangagwa and army chief
Gen. Constantino Chiwenga, who led the takeover.
Parliamentary speaker Jacob
Mudenda said on Wednesday that Mnangagwa would be sworn in as president on
Friday after being nominated by ZANU-PF to fill the vacancy left by Mugabe.
The demise of Mugabe leaves Zimbabwe
in a different situation to a number of other African countries where veteran
leaders have been toppled in popular uprisings or through elections.
The army appears to have
engineered a trouble-free path to power for Mnangagwa, who was for decades a faithful
lieutenant of Mugabe and member of his elite.
He was also in charge of internal
security when rights groups say 20,000 civilians were killed in the 1980s.
“Mugabe has gone but I don’t see
Mnangagwa doing anything different from that old man.
“This is not the change I
expected but let us give him time,” said security guard Edgar Mapuranga, who
sat by a bank cash machine that was out of money.
Restoring the country’s fortunes
and international standing will be a challenge.
Alleged human rights abuses and
flawed elections prompted many Western countries to impose sanctions in the
early 2000s that further hurt the economy, even with Chinese investment to
soften the blow.
Staging clean elections next year
will be key to winning fresh funds.
Although Mnangagwa is almost
certain to win any vote, German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s personal
representative for Africa, Guenther Nooke, said it would be a victory for
Zimbabwe’s “old elites” with the help of China.
“He will manage to get elected
using fear or many tricks, and then we’ll have a succession from one tyrant to
the next,” Nooke told broadcaster SWR2.
China’s foreign ministry said on
Wednesday it respected Mugabe’s decision to resign.
In London, Prime Minister Theresa
May said Britain wanted Zimbabwe to rejoin the international community now that
Mugabe has resigned.
Mnangagwa met neighbouring South
Africa’s President Jacob Zuma before his return on Wednesday.
Mugabe is one of the last of a
generation of African leaders who led their countries to independence and then
ruled, among them Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah, Jomo Kenyatta in Kenya, Felix
Houphouet-Boigny in Ivory Coast and South Africa’s Nelson Mandela.
The African Union said he would
be remembered “as a fearless pan-Africanist liberation fighter and the father
of the independent Zimbabwean nation” and that his decision to step down would
enhance his legacy.
But he also stifled democracy en
route to winning a series of elections. His government is accused by the
opposition and human rights groups of persecuting and killing opponents.
The forced takeover of
white-owned farms from around 2000 aimed to bolster his popular support but
crippled foreign exchange earnings from agriculture.
Mnangagwa’s human rights record
also stirs hostility in many Zimbabweans.
“The dark past is not going to
disappear. They will be following him around like a piece of chewing gum on his
shoe,” International Crisis Group’s southern Africa senior consultant Piers
Pigou said.
“For him to really be seen to be
doing the right thing, he’s going to have to introduce policies that
fundamentally undermine the power structures of ZANU-PF, through a shift to
genuine political pluralism and a decoupling of the party and state.”
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