Barely a year after winning the 2002 presidential elections which extended his term of office to 2008, pressure began to mount on President Mugabe to go. The pressure came from the opposition Movement for Democratic Change which claimed Mugabe had stolen the election and was challenging the result.
Pressure also came from within his own party. His lieutenants felt he should go but no one dared say this except Eddison Zvobgo, the man who had crafted the constitution that made Mugabe executive president and made his succession so vague that anyone could replace the president provided that that person stood in an election 90 days after the president’s departure.
Whispers said that the Harvard-educated Zvobgo had deliberately crafted the succession clause this way so that he too could contest because he had presidential ambitions but was not in the top five of the party. He was very popular in Masvingo and his Karanga sub-group constituted a third of the population.
Another source of pressure was the Western governments, especially Britain and the United States which were piffed by Mugabe’s fast track land reform programme in which he had expropriated nearly five million hectares of land from mainly white farmers without any compensation.
The United States was now funding several non-governmental organisations to speak out against Mugabe. It also launched Studio 7, a broadcasting arm of the Voice of America, which beamed to Zimbabwe in all three of the country’s major languages- English, Shona and Ndebele.
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