Zimbabwe | Mugabe faces impeachment as he balks at retiring

Robert Mugabe (center)

Zimbabwean lawmakers are set to begin impeachment proceedings against President Robert Mugabe and vote him out of power within two days after he missed a ruling-party deadline to end his 37-year rule.

“We will move a motion tomorrow, set up the committee tomorrow [today] and on Wednesday it reports back and we vote him out,” the Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front deputy secretary for legal affairs, Paul Mangwana, told reporters yesterday at party headquarters in Harare, the capital.

Mugabe was widely expected to use a televised address on Sunday to announce his retirement so that Emmerson Mnangagwa, whom he fired as vice president this month, could take over. Instead, he delivered a rambling and largely incoherent speech, in which he pledged to preside over a December congress of the governing party, which had dumped him as leader earlier in the day.

Three senior party officials who spoke on condition of anonymity said Mugabe deviated from an agreed-upon text and he’ll now be forced from office by Zanu-PF, which had given him a deadline of midday Monday to quit. All the party’s lawmakers were summoned to a special caucus meeting at its headquarters yesterday, according to two legislators who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

Zanu-PF wrote a letter to Mugabe, 93, telling him to step down after his failure to do so on Sunday, according to a senior party official who asked not to be named.

Read more on how Mugabe lost power in Zimbabwe

The ruling party fired Mugabe as its leader four days after the military placed him under house arrest and detained several of his closest allies — a move triggered by his dismissal of Mnangagwa, 75. The former vice president will be reinstated and be named as interim leader and Zanu-PF’s presidential candidate in elections next year.

Tens of thousands of people took to the streets of Harare and Bulawayo, the second- largest city, on Saturday to celebrate Mugabe’s imminent ouster.

The moves against Mugabe are the culmination of a battle for control of the ruling party between a military-aligned faction that’s coalesced around Mnangagwa and another known as the Generation-40, which wants the president’s wife Grace Mugabe to succeed him.

Mnangagwa, who’s one of the pillars of the security establishment that has helped keep Mugabe in power since white minority rule ended in 1980, emerged as the victor, with the party expelling Grace and her allies.

The political crisis comes as the economy is in free-fall. An estimated 95 percent of the workforce is unemployed, public infrastructure is crumbling and about 3 million Zimbabweans have gone into exile. Bloomberg