ZANU-PF will become irrelevant as soon as Robert Mugabe leaves the scene, either through death or retirement, the United States and German ambassadors to Zimbabwe agreed at a meeting in December last year. The ambassadors said it was therefore important to identify the next generation of the country’s leadership and begin the process of influencing them.
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President Robert Mugabe is fixated on land reform and sanctions and is almost trance-liked in discussing these subjects, United States ambassador to Zimbabwe Charles Ray said in his cable to Washington the very day he presented his credentials to Mugabe on December 9 last year.
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James McGee, the United States ambassador to Zimbabwe during its turmoil from 2007 to 2009, seemed to be observed with the country’s diamonds from Marange because he believed they were being used to prop up Mugabe’s patronage system.
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Central bank governor Gideon Gono was cut out of the Marange diamonds when the military moved in in November 2008, according to one of the United States embassy cables released by Wikileaks. One of Gono’s chief buyers Tendai Makurumidze, known as Gonyeti, was arrested and three of his vehicles were seized. Trading which had been dominated by Gono who was bringing freshly printed Zimbabwe dollar notes shifted to foreign currency.
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South Africa’s Minister for International Relations and Cooperation Maite Nkoana-Mashabane has made headlines for calling President Robert Mugabe “the crazy old man” but what seems to have gone unreported is that her host United States ambassador to Pretoria Donald Gips seems to have thought very little of her strong statements on Zimbabwe and Mugabe. In the comment to his cable following his meeting with the minister on November 2, last year Gips wrote: “The Foreign Minister made strong statements on Zimbabwe and Robert Mugabe, but our sense is that her department does not have the lead within the SAG (South African government) on the Zimbabwe agenda.”
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