President Robert Mugabe is insisting he remains Zimbabwe’s
only legitimate ruler and balking at mediation by a Catholic priest to allow
the 93-year-old former guerrilla a graceful exit after a military coup, sources
said on Thursday.
A political source who spoke to senior allies holed up with
Mugabe and his wife, Grace, in his lavish “Blue Roof” Harare compound said
Mugabe had no plans to resign voluntarily ahead of elections scheduled for next
year.
“It’s a sort of stand-off, a stalemate,” the source said.
“They are insisting the president must finish his term.”
The army’s takeover signalled the collapse in less than 36
hours of the security, intelligence and patronage networks that sustained
Mugabe through 37 years in power and built him into the “Grand Old Man” of
African politics.
The priest, Fidelis Mukonori, who has been mediating between
Mugabe and the generals who seized power on Wednesday in a targeted operation
against “criminals” in his entourage, had also made little headway, a senior
political source told Reuters.
The army appears to want Mugabe, who has led Zimbabwe since
independence from Britain in 1980, to go quietly and allow a smooth and
bloodless transition to former vice-president Emmerson Mnangagwa.
Still seen by many Africans as a liberation hero, Mugabe is
reviled in the West as a despot whose disastrous handling of the economy and
willingness to resort to violence to maintain power pauperised one of Africa’s
most promising states.
Once a regional bread-basket, Zimbabwe’s economy collapsed
in the wake of the seizure of white-owned farms in the early 2000s, followed by
runaway money-printing that catapulted inflation to 500 billion percent in
2008.
Reuters
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