ZIMBABWE:After 28 years in charge of Zimbabwe, many members of the Zanu-PF party realise they could soon lose power, writes ALEC RUSSELL.
ISHMAEL DUBE, a former diplomat and senior intelligence officer under president Robert Mugabe, was sitting at home last Sunday when a state vehicle drew up at his door with a director of the feared Central Intelligence Organisation and a special presidential aide.
It was the day after Zimbabwe's election and, with early results indicating an opposition victory, the first tremors were starting to shake the ruling party, Zanu-PF. The more astute cadres were starting to think the previously unthinkable: after 28 years in charge of the country, the party could soon lose power.
"They said they had come to us as friends and colleagues," Mr Dube said yesterday. "They wanted to know what we thought about the unravelling of the party and they wanted us to put them in touch with the [ opposition Movement for Democratic Change's] intelligence." Mr Dube (60) was an obvious choice as an intermediary. As a liberation war veteran who spent 10 years in prison on terrorism charges, and a former intelligence officer and diplomat in Beijing and Washington in the first decade of independence, he has impeccable anti-colonial credentials.
Yet he broke with Mr Mugabe's government a decade ago, criticising it, he says, for abandoning the genuine war veterans and instead busying itself with enriching a few. He now straddles the political divide with links to both Zanu-PF and the MDC. "He [ the CIO officer] was very concerned," Mr Dube stressed. "He said this is the right time to get in touch with the opposition, and that it looks like the old man [ as 84-year-old Mr Mugabe is widely known] is going, whether he likes it or not.
"'We don't want to be associated with torturers,' he told me. 'We daren't go to Chitungwiza [ the sprawling township southeast of Harare] right now for fear of being stoned.'" There comes a time in all decaying regimes when its enforcers and senior functionaries sense that a "tipping point" may be near and that it is expedient to start making discreet contacts with the opposition.
That delicate moment now appears to be at hand for Zanu-PF. The party's core, although shaky, has not disintegrated. Hardliners are, a senior former government official told the Financial Times yesterday, still urging Mr Mugabe to cling to power. "The problem is at the top. The hawks, including the head of the police and combined head of the armed forces, are telling him to fight," he said.While the party has received its first defeat since independence in 1980, it does not appear to have suffered the fate of the United National Independence party, which led neighbouring Zambia for 27 years until it was all but annihilated in 1991.
And Mr Mugabe's repeated denunciations of Morgan Tsvangirai, head of the MDC, as a puppet of the white population who will take back the thousands of farms Zanu-PF supporters expropriated eight years ago, have resonance for some, particularly those who gained farms.
"One Zanu-PF guy I spoke to, when he heard Mugabe was going to lose, he collapsed. Until a new rumour came out that Mugabe was to get 52 per cent [ of the vote and so avoid a presidential run-off], and then he celebrated," said Mr Dube.
"He doesn't want to hear about a Tsvangirai victory. He has the notion that when Tsvangirai takes over, the white people will return to take over the land."
Yet it is also clear that many in the party are wondering whether their interests still coincide with those of the man who has led Zanu-PF for the past 34 years.
"Mr Mugabe knows only too well that his party is not united," said Jonathan Moyo, a close former aide who won a seat in the elections as an independent.
"Zanu-PF is disintegrating as we are talking now," said Happy Mariri, another veteran of the liberation war, who spent three years on death row in a Rhodesian prison before serving a further 12 years in jail.
"The pressure is mounting. They realise [ that] even if Mugabe is thinking of staging a coup or fighting on, it will just in the long run make things more difficult."