Mugabe Said to Agree to Stand Down as Zimbabwean President

(Bloomberg) -- Robert Mugabe has agreed to end his four-decade reign as the leader of Zimbabwe and is preparing a statement with the military authorities who took power last week, according to three people familiar with the situation.

President Mugabe, who at the age of 93 is the world’s oldest leader, took the decision after his ruling party told him to resign or face impeachment, according to the people, who declined to be identified.

The Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front’s central committee decided at a meeting Sunday to fire Mugabe as its leader and ordered him to resign as president or they’ll remove him, Patrick Chinamasa, the party’s secretary for legal affairs, said in Harare. Emmerson Mnangagwa, who Mugabe dismissed as vice president this month, will be reinstated, take over as interim president and be Zanu-PF’s presidential candidate in elections next year.

The party’s decision to dump Mugabe came four days after the military placed him under house arrest and detained several of his closest allies -- a move triggered by Mnangagwa’s dismissal. Seeing the likelihood of Mugabe’s ouster, joyous crowds turned out in Harare and Bulawayo -- Zimbabwe’s second-largest city -- on Saturday to celebrate.

“Zanu-PF has fully endorsed the military intervention and lent some democratic credence to what is effectively a military coup,” said Robert Besseling, executive director of political risk advisory firm EXX Africa. “This is the end of the line for Mugabe.”

A former spy chief and defense minister, Mnangagwa had battled for control of the ruling party with Grace Mugabe, the president’s wife, and her fellow members of the so-called Generation-40 faction of mainly younger politicians who didn’t fight in the liberation war against the white-minority regime of Rhodesia. Grace on occasion publicly criticized war veterans and the armed forces. 

The party has now expelled Grace and Phelekezela Mphoko, the nation’s other vice president, from its ranks, along with several other senior officials.

Mnangagwa, 75, will inherit an economy in free-fall. An estimated 95 percent of the workforce is unemployed, public infrastructure is crumbling and as many as 3 million Zimbabweans have gone into exile. Many of the country’s woes are rooted in Mugabe’s support for the seizure of white-owned farms, which slashed agricultural production, export earnings and tax revenue.

The son of a carpenter and a catechism teacher, Mugabe was born in Zvimba, a peasant farming area west of Harare, and trained as a primary-school teacher. He was introduced to politics while studying at South Africa’s Fort Hare University, and went on to help found the Zimbabwe African National Union party in 1963. He was jailed the same year for calling for the violent overthrow of Ian Smith’s white-minority government.

During his 11-year incarceration, Mugabe obtained degrees in economics, education and law. A year after his release, he fled to Mozambique where he later became the leader of the then exiled Zanu, which controlled the biggest of two guerrilla armies fighting Rhodesia.

A U.K.-brokered peace deal that ended the war brought Mugabe to power as the elected prime minister in 1980. While he initially preached reconciliation, violence erupted in 1982 when Mugabe accused his coalition partner, Joshua Nkomo, of plotting to overthrow him. He began a military crackdown that claimed about 20,000 lives in the western region of Matabeleland, according to Genocidewatch.org.

After February 2000, Mugabe allowed his supporters to take over white-owned land, disrupting farming and creating food shortages in a country that had once been the biggest corn exporter in southern Africa. And in 2005, he authorized a slum-clearance program that left at least 750,000 people homeless, according to the Zimbabwe Human Rights NGO Forum.

While Mugabe was the clear winner of the first four post-independence elections, his victory in a violence-marred 2008 vote was disputed and his party lost parliamentary elections the following year.

Mugabe refused to step down and international mediators coaxed him into a power-sharing deal with the main opposition. That lasted until 2013 when Mugabe reclaimed outright power in an election the opposition said was neither free nor fair.

Mnangagwa was one of Mugabe’s closest allies before they fell out, and played a pivotal role in keeping him in power. He was the chief of intelligence when Mugabe ordered the North Korean-trained Fifth Brigade to crack down on rebels in the Matabeleland region in the 1980s.

--With assistance from Desmond Kumbuka

To contact the reporters on this story: Brian Latham in Harare at blatham@bloomberg.net, Godfrey Marawanyika in Harare at gmarawanyika@bloomberg.net, Mike Cohen in Cape Town at mcohen21@bloomberg.net.

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Karl Maier at kmaier2@bloomberg.net, Amanda Jordan

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