Zimbabwean President Robert
Mugabe's fate hung in the balance on Friday as he apparently resisted
efforts to step down in the wake of an audacious seizure of power by the
army, until this week a key pillar of his 37-year-rule.
The unfolding drama in the capital Harare was thrown
into confusion when a smiling Mugabe was pictured shaking hands with
Zimbabwe's military chief, the man behind the coup, raising questions
about whether or not the end of an era was nigh.
Mugabe unexpectedly drove on Thursday from his
lavish "Blue Roof" compound, where he had been confined, to State House,
where official media pictured him meeting military boss Constantino
Chiwenga and South African mediators.
The official Herald newspaper carried no reports of
the meeting's outcome, leaving Zimbabwe's 13 million people in the dark
about the situation.
The army may want Mugabe, who has ruled Zimbabwe
since independence from Britain in 1980, to go quietly and allow a
smooth and bloodless transition to Emmerson Mnangagwa, the vice
president Mugabe sacked last week, triggering the crisis.
The main goal of the generals is to prevent Mugabe
from handing power to his wife Grace, 41 years his junior, who has built
a following among the ruling party's youth wing and appeared on the
cusp of power after Mnangagwa was pushed out.
Mugabe, who at 93 has appeared increasingly frail in
public, is insisting he remains Zimbabwe's only legitimate ruler and is
refusing to quit. But pressure was mounting on the former guerrilla to
accept offers of a graceful exit, sources said.
Zimbabwe’s former head of intelligence, Dumiso
Dabengwa, was to hold a news conference in Johannesburg at 1200 GMT. A
South African government source said he expected Dabengwa, a close ally
of the ousted Mnangagwa, to discuss the events in Zimbabwe. "It seems
there is some sort of agreement," the source said.
The army's takeover signaled the collapse in less
than 36 hours of the security, intelligence and patronage networks that
sustained Mugabe through almost four decades in power and built him into
the "Grand Old Man" of African politics.
Mugabe is still seen by many Africans as a
liberation hero. But he is reviled in the West as a despot whose
disastrous handling of the economy and willingness to resort to violence
to maintain power pauperized one of Africa's most promising states.
Once a regional
bread-basket, Zimbabwe saw its economy collapse in the wake of the
seizure of white-owned farms in the early 2000s, followed by runaway
money-printing that catapulted inflation to 500 billion percent in 2008.
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