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Mugabe pins survival hopes on CIO
By Jonathan
Moyo MP
THE
saying that when you are 40, half of you belongs to the past, and when
you are 80 virtually all of you is past material, best describes the
stubborn reality facing the 83-year old President Robert Mugabe whose
dream to remain in power for life is turning into a terrible nightmare
as he finds himself trapped between the frustration of his rejected
2010 plan and his hopeless 2008 re-election bid which would leave him
and Zanu PF sitting ducks at polls should presidential and parliamentary
elections be held together early next year.
Anyone who listened to Mugabe’s addresses at the hurriedly organised national assembly meetings of the Zanu PF youth and women’s leagues in Harare on March 16 and 23 would have noticed how Mugabe came across as an incoherent, disoriented, rambling and tired old man who wants to remain president for life without any compelling national reason. Throughout his addresses, he was prone to incomprehensible fits of anger and outbursts.
While Mugabe’s irrational desire to remain in office for life by hook or by crook is unfortunate but understandable, it is utterly shocking to see that there are securocrats in his office who are desperate to force his re-election bid through foul means including using at least 14 government ministries that are now doing commissariat work for Mugabe. The coordination work of these ministries is being done by military personnel who have been deployed in all of the country’s 59 districts and 120 constituencies to do political work for Mugabe as they did in 2002 as "the boys on leave" from the army.
Although everyone else can see that Mugabe’s time has gone with the winds, his securocrats want to have the world to believe otherwise. They are busy inventing imperialist enemies for Mugabe while giving the impression that he remains an irreplaceable liberator and visionary whose commanding presence and future promise have no contemporary match.
Guided by this dangerous view, Mugabe’s securocrats were particularly keen to use today’s Zanu PF central committee meeting to steamroll his controversial bid to seek re-election in March 2008. The securocrats were hoping to whip up political emotions at today’s central committee meeting in support of Mugabe’s ill-fated re-election bid on the back of what they are now dangerously labelling as "domestic terrorism" arising from the political violence apparently instigated by the same securocrats after they bashed and broke the limbs of some opposition politicians in police custody two weeks ago.
The patently unlawful assaults, which were publicly supported by Mugabe with shocking ramifications, have unleashed a bloody chain of violent incidents whose origin and control has remained a mystery. However, there are growing indications with lots of probable causes pointing to the securocrats in the president’s department, otherwise known as the Central Intelligence Organisation (CIO) that was formed by Ian Smith in Rhodesia, as the source of what is now being dubbed as "domestic terrorism". The objective is to benefit Mugabe politically through a campaign of violence reminiscent of the blood-letting of the land invasions in 2000 and the dreadful Operation Murambatsvina in 2005.
What Mugabe’s securocrats are now peddling as "domestic terrorism" with the incompetent assistance of poorly briefed government propagandists includes deplorable incidents of petrol bombings of some police stations, a passenger train and private residences. While government propagandists have been quick to conclude that these wicked incidents are perpetrated by MDC factions, there is enough evidence to worry any rational and objective mind about dirty tricks through the infiltration of opposition groups in the brutal track record of the CIO as a Rhodesian creation.
In order to locate the source of the so-called "domestic terrorism" about which a lot of nonsense has been said by Mugabe and his propagandists since he declared his re-election interest and in the run-up to the Sadc extraordinary summit in Dar es Salaam, it should be recalled that prior to the sporadic outbreak of the violence in question, Mugabe had been cornered with his political back against the wall. This was following the rejection by his own party of his ploy to extend his rule by two years without facing the electorate under his 2010 plan and also after the fallout from his astonishing public attacks on Vice-President Joice Mujuru. Throughout this episode Mugabe’s mantra was that his position as president is not vacant and that therefore nobody else in his party should seek it in the hope of succeeding him.
As the political challenges against him from his own party begun gaining momentum following the Goromonzi Zanu PF conference last December, and as the national consensus started building up with the chorus that he must retire now, Mugabe had to find a desperate way out. For obvious reasons, he had to look to the CIO.
A convenient fiction of foreign-sponsored "domestic terrorism" came in handy because it is the sort of stuff lifted from the arcane methods of organisations like the CIO steeped in dirty and brutal Rhodesian roots without any public accountability whatsoever. Many Zimbabweans still remember only too well how the same CIO in Rhodesia used to infiltrate the liberation movement and how it impersonated freedom fighters and abused their guises to unleash violence worse than the current fiction of "domestic terrorism". That Rhodesian book of dirty tricks is still there.
The latest security ploy to win Mugabe undeserved political support has two key aspects which are principally designed to restore some semblance of unity within Zanu PF after the fiasco in Goromonzi and, more significantly for the intended purpose, to divert national and international attention away from very serious divisions rocking the ruling party to the opposition MDC factions and their alleged backers when at the material time and in point of fact neither these factions nor their alleged backers were doing anything that would worry even a fly.
One aspect of this ploy was to get Mugabe to unilaterally abandon the consultation process by the Zanu PF provincial structures on the 2010 project as sanctioned by the party’s annual conference in Goromonzi. That conference decided to refer the 2010 proposals for debate and discussion by the party’s provinces after which the central committee meeting today was expected to take a decision on the matter.
But all that is now water under the bridge because, in what has become typical of his unacceptable leadership style, Mugabe has subverted the provincial discussion and debates on the 2010 plan and usurped the powers of his party’s central committee by making the decision alone with his securocrats and propagandists during his recent visit to Namibia where he dropped the 2010 plan in favour of seeking re-election in 2008.
The other aspect of the security
tactic which was deployed two weeks ago has been to use the spoils of
the now well-established infiltration of opposition groups to invent
"domestic terrorism" out of the blues and to link it with
the feuding MDC factions, particularly the one led by Morgan Tsvangirai
who was yet again arrested on Wednesday under a heavy show of police
force in what was a brazen rebuke to Sadc
leaders as they arrived in Dar es Salaam for the landmark session on
Zimbabwe.
What makes the claims of "domestic terrorism" too much to be believed is not only because the whole saga appeared heavily choreographed by the traditional CIO hand of classical dirty tricks perfected in Rhodesia, but also because thus far, not a single person has been charged with "domestic terrorism" in a court of law. Indeed, if there is any "domestic terrorism", then the best guess on its perpetrators would be the securocrats who believe that violence is the best platform upon which to breathe life into Mugabe’s failing political career.
What emerges from this is that while the ranks of the CIO do indeed have patriotic and professional Zimbabweans who include some well-meaning former veterans of the liberation war committed to the protection of the national interest, the undeniable fact that needs urgent attention is that the CIO has largely remained Rhodesian and therefore brutal in structure and purpose.
In Rhodesia, the CIO was not accountable to parliament, the courts or even cabinet as it was directly and exclusively only accountable to Prime Minister Ian Smith. Because it has not been restructured or reformed to meet the constitutional demands of independent Zimbabwe today, the only change that the CIO has undergone is that it now directly and exclusively reports to Mugabe.
That is why it is called the President’s Department. Over the years since 1980, this name has had literal consequences in terms of how the CIO has done its work entirely and always in the service of Mugabe’s political interests in a personal way.
Never before since Independence have Mugabe’s political and personal interests of remaining in power for life been as challenged from his own party and everyone else in and outside Zimbabwe as they are today. The one political weapon that Mugabe is using in his fight against everyone else is his CIO. The nation faces an unprecedented risk of economic and political disaster if this opprobrium is allowed to continue.
Professor Moyo is independent MP for Tsholotsho. This article was originally published in the Zimbabwe Independent. He can be contacted on: moyoz@mweb.co.zw
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