Masvingo South legislator Walter Mzembi said young members like him, Pearson Mbalekwa and Kindness Paradza, had joined Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front to fight from within but were now frustrated because of their lack of influence.
The three told United States embassy officials that everybody was struggling with generational change management but President Robert Mugabe was effectively at the helm because of his masterly exercise of divide and rule.
But the three were convinced that Mugabe would step down in 2008 if he had a politburo he trusted.
The three were speaking after the controversial 2004 party congress at which Joice Mujuru was catapulted to vice-president of the party and six provincial chairmen were sacked for opposition her elevation.
They said that the intense VP contest had left wounds that would take a long time to heal.
The party was in a crisis with some members saying “we’ve had enough” while others were counselling patience.
Full cable:
Viewing cable 04HARARE2001, PARTY CONGRESS EXPOSES ZANU-PF DIVISIONS
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C O N F I D E N T I A L SECTION 01 OF 04 HARARE 002001
SIPDIS
AF/S FOR B. NEULING
NSC FOR SENIOR AFRICA DIRECTOR C. COURVILLE
E.O. 12958: DECL: 11/08/2009
TAGS: PGOV PREL PHUM ZI ZANU PF
SUBJECT: PARTY CONGRESS EXPOSES ZANU-PF DIVISIONS
REF: (A) HARARE 1914 (B) HARARE 1913
Classified By: Ambassador Christopher W. Dell under Section 1.5 b/d
¶1. (C) SUMMARY: ZANU-PF’s Fourth Party Congress reinforced
Robert Mugabe’s unassailable authority atop a ruling party
suffering from roiling ethnic and generational tensions.
Recent personnel changes adjustments to the party leadership
suggest the ascendancy of Mugabe’s Zezuru faction and a
victory of the party’s Old Guard over the Young Turks,
although further adjustments in the coming months may yet
mollify disaffected groups and key individuals. Although the
Congress sounded familiar anti-Western themes, the apparent
political demise of the party’s most rabidly anti-Western
mouthpiece, Information Minister Jonathan Moyo, may
foreshadow a toning down of xenophobic rhetoric from the GOZ.
Nonetheless, the ruling party remains unlikely to undertake
meaningful efforts toward rapprochement with either the
opposition or the West for now. END SUMMARY.
Discord
——-
¶2. (U) President Mugabe,s public criticism of “ambitious”
party members who contributed to party disunity was the most
striking aspect of the Party Congress. To loud but not
unanimous applause at the opening session, he castigated
unnamed provincial chairmen for undertaking efforts without
adequately consulting “the people.” He stressed the
importance of party unity and the need for those who lost
political contests to accept defeat. Expanding on the theme
of loyalty and discipline, Party Chairman John Nkomo’s
address to the opening session emphasized the importance of
deferring to experience and demanded the sanctioning of
unnamed individuals who were contributing to party disunity.
More explicit about intra-party tensions in subsequent closed
session, Mugabe reportedly denounced “narrow-minded” party
members who focused on purported needs for regional and
tribal balance.
Suspensions Precede Congress
—————————-
¶3. (U) On the eve of the Congress, the state media announced
that the Politburo on November 30 had suspended six
provincial chairpersons for six months: July Moyo (Midlands;
also Minister of Energy), Mark Madiro (Manicaland), Daniel
Shumba (Masvingo; also telecom magnate), Jacob Mudenda
(Matabeleland North), Lloyd Siyoka (Matabeleland South), and
Thomas Ncube (Bulawayo). The six had attended an
“unauthorized” meeting organized in Tsholotsho two weeks
earlier by Information Minister Jonathan Moyo, in which
participants reportedly planned to derail the impending
selection by the party of Joyce Mujuru for the party’s vacant
vice-presidential slot. According to the state press, the
Politburo officially reprimanded but did not suspend the
Information Minister and suspended war veterans leader
Jabulani Sibanda for four years. Speaker of the Parliament
Emmerson Mnangagwa, who would have been the principal
beneficiary of the meeting’s designs, had been invited to
Tsholotsho but chose to attend a Politburo meeting instead (a
SIPDIS
meeting at which he was forced to accede to Mugabe’s
instruction that a vice-presidential slot be reserved for a
woman).
Familiar Themes
—————-
¶4. (U) In his keynote speech on December 2 at ZANU-PF’s
Fourth Party Congress, President and Party First Secretary
Mugabe hit on familiar themes in exhorting his party to
remain united and resist threats from outside and inside the
country. Consistent with the banners announcing the 2005
election as the “anti-Blair election,” Mugabe devoted
considerable attention in his 90-minute speech to Britain’s
purported designs on reversing land reform and effecting
regime change. Noting that 400 British companies continued
to operate profitably in the Zimbabwe, he urged the HMG to
reverse its anti-Zimbabwe posture. He drew parallels between
purported USG and HMG lies about weapons of mass destruction
in Iraq with Western “lies” underlying “sanctions” against
Zimbabwe. He launched into a homophobic diatribe about the
West’s “rottenness of culture and un-Christian example” and
concluded that Africa should be teaching the West about
morality, not vice-versa. The MDC leadership did not figure
largely in the President’s public remarks, other than to be
cast as a British “stooge” and be criticized for courting
opinion overseas instead of at home. The President thanked
regional groupings SADC, the AU, and COMESA for their
friendship and support. He also elaborated on familiar
development-related themes, including anti-corruption efforts
and the importance of addressing HIV/AIDS seriously, and
conceded that the party needed to do more to make land reform
more successful.
Backbenchers Vent With Ambassador
———————————
¶5. (C) At a lunch with the Ambassador on November 24,
ZANU-PF backbench MPs Pearson Mbelekwa (Zvishavane;
Chairperson of the Justice Committee), Kindness Paradza
(Makonde; publisher of the shuttered Tribune), and Walter
Mzembi (Masvingo South; Zvobgo faction winner of most recent
parliamentary by-election) were candid about tensions within
the party over Joyce Mujuru’s selection. They asserted that
the intense VP contest had left wounds that would take a long
time to heal. Speculating that the party might not survive
in its current form until 2008 (the next presidential
election), they described the party as in crisis, with some
members saying “we’ve had enough” while others were
counseling patience. The group and other younger leading
members had joined the ruling party to “fight from within”
and chafed over their lack of influence. Everybody was
struggling with “generational change management,” with Mugabe
effectively atop the party through a masterly exercise of
divide and rule. Nonetheless, they expressed confidence that
Mugabe would step down as President in 2008 — assuming he
had a Politburo he trusted.
¶6. (C) The group was especially distressed over the
exclusion of Karanga (Zimbabwe’s most numerous ethnic group)
representation in the presidium. They asserted that elements
that who had contributed and suffered most in the liberation
effort, including the Ndebele and Manyika, were not being
included sufficiently in the upper echelons of the
restructured party. They made it clear that Mnangagwa was
their preferred choice for the presidium. Mbelekwa, who had
written a stout defense of Mnangagwa in the Financial Gazette
the previous week, dubbed the Speaker “Zimbabwe’s Gorbachev.”
He asserted that Mnangagwa wanted to strengthen relations
with the United States and Britain as well as to refurbish
the country’s tarnished investment climate. He had cordial
relations with the MDC and was responsible for a moderate
approach to land reform in his province, Midlands, that
spared it from the chaos associated with the rest of the
country.
¶7. (C) The group forecast continued jockeying and
intra-party conflict over the appointment of a new Politburo.
They claimed that the Central Committee (expanded by the
Congress from 232 to 240 members) already was “packed” and
offered little appeal as a path of influence in any event.
Cabinet positions in the 40-member Politburo, which usually
were associated with control over resources, were crucial to
factions and aspiring leaders. Parliamentary seats, filled
by genuine contests in which candidates could appeal to the
electorate, were good entrees for the younger generation, and
the Parliament was beginning to assert itself as an
institution. The group suggested that campaigns for the
upcoming primaries and MP elections would revolve around
factional rivalries and local “deliverables” (clinics,
schools, roads) rather than national policy. They lamented
the general “drought of skills” within the party relative to
the government.
¶8. (C) The group asserted that 80 percent of the MDC were
Karanga, many of whom would be inclined to link up with
ZANU-PF’s Karanga faction under the right circumstances.
Remarkably, one suggested that the MDC would win a majority
of contested seats in the upcoming election if the opposition
was given even four weeks of free and fair access to the
electorate. Another conceded that the ruling party’s record
of failure left it nothing to run on but an “anti-Blair”
platform.
Mnangagwa Down But Not Out
————————–
¶9. (C) Mnangagwa remains a pivotal figure in Zimbabwean
politics and Mugabe reportedly met with him at length after
the party’s nomination of Mujuru. Notwithstanding his loss
in the Veepstakes and the displacement of many of his key
supporters, Mnangagwa remains the leading exponent of Karanga
interests in the GOZ. Mnangagwa also has garnered
significant support among the party’s Young Turks, as
evidenced by the Ambassador’s exchange with the backbenchers.
Always a careful balancer of factional interests, Mugabe can
be expected to take steps to appease Mnangagwa and his
supporters. Indeed, many of Mnangagwa’s supporters were
named to the new Central Committee, and Mnangagwa himself,
despite his association with the Tsholotsho group, so far has
retained his positions as Parliamentary Speaker and Party
Secretary for Administration. An additional possibility
SIPDIS
would be his assumption of the office of Prime Minister,
which is expected to be created via constitutional amendment
should ZANU-PF win a 2/3 majority in Parliament in March as
expected.
Moyo Down And Out?
——————
¶10. (C) The Tsholotsho imbroglio was driven not just by
Mnangagwa opponents but also in large part by a widespread
impetus within the party to rid itself of the mercurial Moyo,
who was pilloried for organizing the meeting. The knives
have long been out for Moyo, who had deployed the state media
in vitriolic attacks against VP Msika and Chairman Nkomo,
among other party potentates. Their successful casting of
such attacks and the Tsolotsho meeting as disloyal to the
President and undermining of party unity was sufficient
pretext for the President to clip his wings. Moyo was not
named to the Central Committee, reportedly has had to cede
some of his control over the state media, and is not expected
to retain his position as Information Minister in a new
Cabinet. His political survival, at best in significantly
diminished status, may depend on his ability to win the
Tsholotsho parliamentary seat. After dispensing large
SIPDIS
amounts of GOZ largesse on the district, Moyo had been
favored in the run-up to the Congress, but his prospects have
dimmed considerably.
Comment
——-
¶11. (C) The flap over the so-called Tsolotsho Declaration
and related suspensions speaks volumes about the extent of
ZANU-PF’s internal democracy and Mugabe’s control over the
party. Reprising a sequence last year when Mugabe invited
discussion over succession and then slapped down those who
took him up on it, Mugabe in recent months publicly and
privately emphasized that the contests for party leadership
slots were to be open and real. Indeed, Mugabe’s instruction
for a female VP did not identify who the female was to be and
he allowed the contest to proceed. The Tsholotsho meeting
was part of a VP selection process that was engineered to
appear genuinely competitive right up to the weekend that the
the provincial executives made their VP nominations (ref A).
However, the true Mugabe view reasserted itself in the final
stages of the process when a near hysterical Mugabe
reportedly told the Politburo that he was boss, he made all
the decisions, and any questioning of his views was
tantamount to treason. One can only assume that the wily
Mugabe had all along prepared just such a scenario in order
to smoke out and then crush any and all opposition within the
party. His successful positioning of Joyce Mujuru gives him
the ideal putative heir for now: a popular figure nationally
who boosts his party’s image and who will be difficult for
critics inside or outside the party to attack effectively,
but one who has shown little overt ambition for senior
leadership (her tendered resignation for family reasons some
years ago was refused by the President) and who is fully
beholden to him.
DELL
(78 VIEWS)
