The Challenge to Mugabe

Abstract

HARARE, Zimbabwe Africans prefer participatory democracy to autocracy and honest leadership to corrupt cronyism - those are two of the lessons that can be drawn from Zimbabwe's recent electoral rebuke to President Robert Mugabe's long-unchallenged and economically and politically disastrous rule.

Zimbabwe has been bleeding its coffers to pay for this intervention while Mugabe and his associates have been accused of profiting from Congolese diamond concessions and cadmium mining. In addition, a number of big construction contracts have been funneled to consortiums led by Mugabe's nephew.

Although Mugabe's Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front, or ZANU-PF, gained a narrow majority in last week's parliamentary voting, the brand-new Movement for Democratic Change, or MDC, surprised Mugabe by winning 57 of the 120 open seats in the 150- member Parliament. One of the open seats was won by a small party from the eastern corner of the country, and the other 62 were won, some very narrowly, by ZANU-PF. (Thirty more members are presidential appointees.)

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