via Wary Mugabe baulks at army chiefs’ purge? – New Zimbabwe 27 January 2015
WITH two months having passed since President Robert Mugabe ruthlessly downgraded Zanu PF heavy weights for alleged mutinous conduct, Zimbabwe’s wily political schemer has curiously baulked from extending a similar clean-up campaign to the country’s security forces.
Internal rows over Mugabe’s succession have long divided Zanu PF, pitting former vice President Joice Mujuru against new VP Emmerson Mnangagwa and including a group that wants neither but backs Mugabe to remain in office even as he turns 91 next month.
The divisions are thought to have affected the country’s security services with police chief, Augustine Chihuri, and the top honchos in the spy Central Intelligence Organisation (CIO) lining up behind Mujuru while the defence forces top brass were thought to prefer Mnangagwa.
A horrid campaign against Joice Mujuru and her allies by the First Lady, Grace Mugabe supported by her husband, ignited a fierce backlash against the former VP which led to her ouster from office.
Several of her suspected allies, included cabinet ministers, were also kicked out office with analysts suggesting Mugabe would, upon returning from his annual holiday, go after Mujuru backers in the security services.
But the veteran leader has floundered in that area, raising questions as to whether he feared a backlash from the controllers of the country’s armouries.
Harare based political analyst Charles Mangongera feels Mugabe still wants to clear any traces of Joice Mujuru’s influence in his regime but would want to tread cautiously with the country’s volatile security establishment.
“I think he will purge those that he knows are aligned to Mujuru (both Amai and the late General) but he will do so in a smart way given the strategic nature of the security institutions.
“He will not summarily dismiss them but will wait until their contracts expire and he will not renew them,” Mangongera said.
Fambai Ngirande, another Harare political analyst, feels Mugabe is still capable of causing an upset within the military and still emerge unscathed.
“Since the liberation war it has always been politics before the gun,” he said, “I do not know of any other time where the military has been such a threat. I do not think it would begin now.”
There have been suggestions that Mugabe is controlled by his generals rather than the other way round
In 2013, main rival Morgan Tsvangirai, claimed that Mugabe had refused to relinquish power despite “being defeated by the MDC in the 2002, 2005 and 2008 elections” because he was a puppet of the country’s powerful security services.
“I think this fits well into the age-old narrative that Mugabe is now a puppet of the military,” said another political analyst who requested anonymity on professional reasons.
“He is a normal human being who has his own fears and knows any attempt to touch the military can even trigger banditry activity and plunge the whole country into irreversible instability.
“My take is that in the absence of an outright purge on them, he is well and good with keeping them guessing, constantly looking over their shoulders perhaps and suspicious of each other.”
The analyst said the current situation is also a security threat to the veteran leader as some military elements may decide to turn the heat on him, before they are struck first.
He continued: “Another narrative is that Mugabe does not fear the military per se but wants to maintain a system that keeps his ex-gun men under the radar.
“Remember that as soon as they leave the army, he immediately co-opts them in the country’s parastatals. To me, that’s a way of ensuring they do not stray from the feeding trough at the same time allowing them to monitor their movements.”
A very proactive group when Mugabe is cornered by political opponents, the country’s security chiefs form an integral part of the near-91-year-old leader’s support base.
They have variously been accused of waging terror campaigns against the electorate and meddling with the country’s poll systems to keep their Commander-in-Chief firmly in power.
At the height of calls for security sector reform by the opposition in the past five years, President Mugabe sprang to their defence, saying they were, in fact, politicians in their own right, having been at the front of the country’s liberation war.
Perhaps comments by Information minister Jonathan Moyo, an ally an anti-Mujuru Zanu PF camp led by incumbent VP Emmerson Mnangagwa, could be the closest in solving the puzzle.
Speaking at a SAPES Trust debate forum last week, Moyo dismissed the Mujuru potential for mounting a serious comeback from political oblivion by saying her group are a disgruntled lot that did not control the gun.
“What we are going to see is this development of people who have tested power before and have now lost it,” Moyo said, adding, “Because they don’t control the instruments of the state, there is very little that they are going to do.”
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