Will Mugabe Share Zimbabwe?
BU’s Stith on the power-sharing treaty
Robert Mugabe, the controversial president of Zimbabwe, who has ruled that country since 1980, told the United Nations General Assembly yesterday that he is confident a power-sharing agreement between him and opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai would be carried out in the coming weeks. However, the 84-year-old leader, who was elected to a sixth term in a violent and widely disputed and denounced election in July, told reporters that he had no intention of ceding his country’s leadership anytime soon. The negotiations also suffered a setback when Thabo Mbeki, the president of South Africa, who brokered the agreement, was forced to resign as president earlier this week by his political party, the African National Congress.
Charles Stith, director of BU’s African Presidential Archives and Research Center (APARC) and a former U.S. ambassador to Tanzania, is the editor of For Such a Time As This: African Leadership Challenges, a compilation of writing from 13 current and former African heads of state. He spoke with BU Today about the power-sharing agreement and how Mbeki’s resignation will affect it.
BU Today: Do you think Mugabe is looking for a way out of the agreement, or is his stated commitment solid?
Charles Stith: I think that the seasoned Mugabe-watchers will probably say that you don’t want to try to read too much into what this means about Mugabe becoming a reconstructive reformer. On the other hand, we shouldn’t read too little into the fact that this is a significant step forward and represents a significant step away from Mugabe’s position a month ago or a year ago. There are still Ts to be crossed and Is to be dotted as relates to the fine details of the agreement, but the fact that we have an agreement at all is pretty significant.
Why do you think Mugabe has held on to power for so long?
I think we should take him at his word. He says he’s holding on because the revolution isn’t complete. Likewise, if we’re going to take him at his word, then we ought to hear what seems to be the voice of the people, who have indicated, despite the elections having been cooked, that his time is up. And at the end of the day, that’s the only thing that matters. He says he ought to stay in office because the revolution isn’t complete. And the people have said, over and over again, that his time is up, and that’s the point.
Will Mbeki’s resignation stall, or end, the power-sharing talks?
I think that’s a question mark. Most people were surprised by his having stepped aside. I was down in New York for the opening of the U.N., on a day devoted to the issue of African development. In one of the closed-door sessions that I attended, Mbeki was supposed to moderate and John Kufuor, the president of Ghana, wound up taking his place. I’m fairly certain that like those of us in the United States, nobody really saw it coming. I don’t think anybody’s begun to think about whether Mbeki will be replaced or whether somebody else will be brought in to continue to see this thing through to its conclusion.
The critical thing that Mbeki has done is to get both parties, Mugabe and Tsvangirai, to sign on the dotted line that the best way forward, in terms of the future of the country, is some sort of power-sharing arrangement. Now, clearly, the devil is in the details and there are still other issues that ultimately have to be worked out — from exactly what portfolio the vice president and prime minister will have to how cabinet positions will be allocated between the two parties. At the end of the day, the commitment to work to make this power-sharing agreement work is going to be driven by the fidelity of the two parties. And at best a figure like Mbeki serves as a midwife to a process. So whether his being in the president’s office in South Africa will impact that — at this point it’s hard to tell.
Is there a history of such power-sharing agreements in African countries?
The short answer is no. The longer answer is that we’ve seen the first and most significant power-sharing agreement come into being in Kenya in February and March of this year. As the electoral crisis in Kenya was playing out, I was editing the chapter by Daniel Arap Moi, the former president of Kenya, and it was interesting to read his analysis: that one of the legacies of colonialism were these arbitrary boundaries and the grouping of amalgams of tribes together into a falsely created nation. Then, when you layer on top of that the push that we’ve seen from the West since the end of the Cold War around the multiparty democracy, what you saw were parties organizing along tribal rather than ideological lines. So the problem that creates is that instead of an ideology or a philosophy of one party or the other holding sway, what in fact happens is that one tribe over the others is the winner. And so everybody else is considered a loser in that context.
Moi actually suggests that if Africa is going to make multiparty democracy work, it must be done in a way that while you have winners and losers in an election, the spoils of victory are not dispersed so that the losers feel like they no longer have a stake in the process or feel like they are no longer stakeholders in the country. And what he is alluding to, I think, is what we have eventually seen come to pass in Kenya, and that is a power-sharing agreement that engages the opposition — or, to say it more finely, that engages other tribal groups — in a meaningful way in the governance of the country and opens up to them in a meaningful way the benefits of citizenship and the opportunities that the government can help create. So while it doesn’t have a long past, there is recognition of the historical circumstances, which point the way towards a similar source of power-sharing agreements in the future across the continent.
Edward A. Brown can be reached at ebrown@bu.edu.
Comments & Discussion
Boston University moderates comments to facilitate an informed, substantive, civil conversation. Abusive, profane, self-promotional, misleading, incoherent or off-topic comments will be rejected. Moderators are staffed during regular business hours (EST) and can only accept comments written in English. Statistics or facts must include a citation or a link to the citation.