Opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai thought 15 years ago that President Robert Mugabe would not last six months because of the economic crisis that the country was facing.
He told a visiting United States delegation in December 2002 that Mugabe’s regime would not be able to last another six months.
“How can a government function, he asked, with no foreign exchange, with a worthless currency, and with an inflation rate predicted to rise soon to 500 percent?” the United States embassy quotes Tsvangirai as saying.
US ambassador Joseph Sullivan said senior ZANU-PF insiders had made the same 6-month prediction to him of the government’s demise, if the country continued on the same path.
Welshman Ncube, then secretary of the Movement for Democratic Change, did not see things the same way.
He said that those with influence in ZANU-PF were hardliners who were convinced they can run the country ‘through propaganda’. Those in control were simply not interested in dialogue.
Ncube said ZANU-PF’s infamous ‘retribution machine’ has kept ZANU-PF moderates toeing the party line.
ZANU-PF MP’s often agreed in private with their colleagues across the aisle, but they were not willing to express that agreement in public because they were afraid of what their own party might do to them.
Ncube was closer to the truth than his boss as Mugabe is still in power 15 years later.
He survived a worse economic crisis during which inflation officially exceeded 500 million percent.
Now 93 going to 94, Mugabe intends to contest yet another election though it seems the hardliners are now fighting a tough contest with Young Turks going under the name of G40.
The G40 is allegedly led by Mugabe himself though most people are trying to push his wife Grace to succeed her husband.
The military seems to be against the First Lady and is allegedly behind Vice-President Emmerson Mnangagwa who suddenly fell ill on Saturday after suspected food poisoning and is reported to be in a hospital in South Africa.
Mnangagwa’s close ally Shuvai Mahofa died this morning. Like Mnangagwa, she was allegedly poisoned at the ZANU-PF conference in 2015 and never fully recovered.
Below are the first 140 of 726 Wikileaks cables on Tsvangirai.
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