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Vol 55 No 6

Published 21st March 2014


Zimbabwe

Unsuccessful successions

The leaders of the ruling and main opposition parties have something in common: an increasingly noisy campaign to persuade them to go

Managing successions in any political system is tricky while the incumbent is still alive: in traditional Shona culture it has been well nigh impossible. In different ways, President Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF) and Morgan Tsvangirai’s Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) are currently demonstrating this truth. The first obstacle is to convince the disbelieving incumbent, no matter how old he is, that he has made mistakes and outlived his usefulness and secondly, that he can no longer command the external resources and internal authority to deal with the future.

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