The full story of what is going on in Zimbabwe
Allister Sparks
The original plan to bowler-hat Mugabe and put Emmerson Mnangagwa in charge of Zimbabwe has been stymied because the opposition MDC won’t play ball as the ANC wanted, but the plan may now be implemented unilaterally with the Commercial Farmers Union in the token partnership role
The first indication that Robert Mugabe might soon cease to be Executive President of Zimbabwe came last November when a Catholic priest, Fr Fidelis Mukonori, who is close to Mugabe, called on the leader of the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), Morgan Tsvangirai, to say the President wanted to meet with him outside the country. The priest hinted that Mugabe was thinking of retiring.
In the event, nothing came of this, but a few weeks later a former Rhodesian army officer now living in South Africa contacted Tsvangirai, whom he knew, to say that Colonel Lionel Dycke, a former colleague who had stayed on to serve in the Zimbabwe army where he gained the confidence of the ruling ZANU-PF party, wished to meet with the MDC leader. Soon afterwards Dycke turned up at Tsvangirai’s Harare home accompanied by the ex-Rhodesian. So began a series of proximity talks that have brought the Zimbabwean crisis to a watershed point.
Just what prompted Dycke to play the role of political intermediary is not quite clear. Dycke himself has gone to ground and failed to return my calls during a week of investigation into events in Zimbabwe. But before he did so he told journalists in Harare that as a concerned citizen - he is also a wealthy businessman who specialises in the removal of landmines world-wide - he wanted to try to bring about a settlement that would stop Zimbabwe’s catastrophic economic meltdown.
Four months of secret talks