HARARE: After hours of deliberations, Zimbabwe’s governing party on Sunday expelled its leader, President Robert Mugabe, 93, as he remained locked in negotiations at the State House with the country’s army generals about his departure.
The stunning rebuke by the central committee of Mugabe’s party, ZANU-PF, after emergency talks at its headquarters in the capital, Harare, came a day after thousands of Zimbabweans took to the streets to celebrate his continuing fall from power after a military takeover.
The central committee also appointed Emmerson Mnangagwa, the vice president previously fired by the president, as Mugabe's successor to lead the party.
Mugabe then went on national TV and vowed to stay on as president, despite pressure for him to resign.
"The (ruling ZANU-PF) party congress is due in a few weeks and I will preside over its processes," Mugabe said, pitching the country into deep uncertainty.
Zimbabweans had expected Mugabe, 93, to announce his resignation after the army seized power, opened the floodgates of citizen protest and his once-loyal party told him to quit.
But Mugabe, seated alongside the uniformed generals who were behind the military intervention, delivered a speech that conveyed he was unruffled by the turmoil.
Under the constitution, Mugabe remains president, even if in name only. But if he did not resign by noon Monday, the party members said, he would face impeachment by parliament.
Cheers and dancing broke out in the building after the vote to expel the president who had ruled Zimbabwe for 37 years.
“There is a case at the end!” a group of youths chanted after storming an open space outside the ZANU-PF headquarters. They sang phrases that, loosely translated, meant “We lead on while they bark.”
Announcing the expulsion of Mugabe, Patrick Chinamasa, the party’s secretary for legal affairs, said: Mugabe “hereby is recalled as first secretary and president of the ZANU-PF party. He is therefore asked to resign forthwith.
“In the event that the resignation would not have been tendered by midday 20th of November, 2017, the ZANU-PF chief whip was ordered to issue proceedings for the removal of the president in terms of Section 97 of the Constitution of Zimbabwe Amendment Number 20.”
Before the committee’s decision, Chris Mutsvangwa, a war veteran who has led the campaign to oust Mugabe as party leader, said as he went into the meeting, “We are going all the way,” according to Reuters.
He said that Mugabe should just resign and leave the country: “He’s trying to bargain for a dignified exit but he should just smell the coffee.”
Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe, (third from right) meets with Defence Forces generals at State House in Harare on Sunday. As the meeting was under way, members of the ZANU PF central committee fired Mugabe as their chief and replaced him with former vice president Emmerson Mnangagwa. (Zimbabwe Herald via AP)
The central committee also expelled the president’s wife, Grace Mugabe, as head of the ZANU-PF Women’s League. Grace Mugabe, widely viewed as his likely successor, has not been seen in public since Wednesday.
Grace Mugabe, a former typist who had amassed wealth and power in the governing party, was barred for life from the party. So were Jonathan Moyo, Zimbabwe’s minister of higher and tertiary education; and Saviour Kasukuwere, minister of local government, along with several others.
The downfall of the autocratic ruler began with a military takeover Wednesday. Once respected as a liberation icon who went into exile after fighting colonial rule, Robert Mugabe became isolated from fellow party officials. Zimbabwe’s only leader since the country gained independence from Britain in 1980, he previously had faced little opposition from the party rank and file.
But the military placed him under house arrest, saying it wanted to target the criminals around Mugabe who had pillaged the country’s economy.
And veterans of the fight for independence from white-minority rule joined the march Saturday as Zimbabweans poured into the streets and danced, sang and shouted with joy at the prospect of Mugabe’s rule ending.
Mugabe was meeting Sunday for a second round of talks with the very army commander, Constantino Chiwenga, who had placed him under arrest. The president, who has resisted stepping down, was seeking to negotiate a dignified departure, the Zimbabwe state-run broadcaster said.
A Catholic priest, Fidelis Mukonori, was mediating. Others on the negotiating team include deputy director-general for the Central Intelligence Organisation, Aaron Nhepera, and Mugabe spokesman George Charamba.
A local news media reporter later Sunday said that a major announcement was pending from the State House, and Zimbabweans held their breath.
A majority of the party’s leaders had recommended expelling Mugabe - a slap at the man who had controlled the organisation with an iron grip.
In a resolution, party leaders said Mugabe should be removed for taking the advice of “counter-revolutionaries and agents of neo-imperialism”; for mistreating his vice president, Mnangagwa; and for encouraging “factionalism.”
It urged the “immediate and unconditional reinstatement” of Mnangagwa, at least until the national elections scheduled for next year.
On Sunday, the leaders put force behind their recommendations. ZANU-PF’s central committee did not spare Mugabe’s second deputy president, Phelekezela Mphoko, who was also fired after serving as a vice president for three years.
The committee also elevated Mnangagwa to fill the vacancy left after the dismissal of Mugabe as party leader. Mnangagwa was nominated as the party’s sole presidential candidate for the 2018 elections, a position the committee said would be confirmed by the party’s congress in December.
Mugabe had fired Mnangagwa in a move that positioned Mugabe’s wife to succeed him as president. But the firing may have been an overreach by the Mugabes, as it singled out an erstwhile ally with liberation-war credentials and strong support from the military.
The vice president, however, has critics, who accuse him of being politically ruthless. Mnangagwa is unpopular in parts of the country: He lost his parliamentary seat at least twice, once after he was accused of firebombing his opponent’s house, according to an editor of The Zimbabwean newspaper.
In its marathon meeting, the central committee sought to undo recent moves by Mugabe, reversing the firing of several other officials and agreeing that the country’s war veterans should be “placed in strategic positions in the party and government as long as they have the right qualifications.”
The political crisis in Zimbabwe is spreading unease on the continent, and it will be on the agenda for a summit meeting in Angola on Tuesday of four countries in the southern African regional bloc: South Africa, which sent envoys to negotiate with Mugabe on a departure; and Angola, Tanzania and Zambia.