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...facing." Tsvangirai was more upbeat. He acknowledged that Zimbabwe's transition was "not an easy one" and said the country was in a "period of uncertainty and anxiety, exacerbated by hard-liners who respect no rule of law and care nothing for the national good, putting personal wealth and power above all other considerations." Nevertheless, he said, change was visible. The economy was reviving. Schools and hospitals had reopened. Now that the Zimbabwean currency had been replaced by the U.S. dollar and the South African rand, inflation has fallen from 231,000,000% to 3%. And while Mugabe and ZANU...
...another murder attempt.) He wants Zimbabweans and the world to rethink how they deal with Mugabe and other African Big Men. Demonizing them may be principled and cathartic, Tsvangirai believes, but it is ineffective. Criticism has done nothing to dislodge Muammar Gaddafi in Libya (in his 40th year in power) or José Eduardo dos Santos in Angola or Teodoro Obiang in Equatorial Guinea (both in their 30th), while Africa's most enduring autocrat, Gabon's Omar Bongo, died in June in his 42nd year in office. Criticism has actually strengthened Mugabe, allowing him to cast himself as a heroic...
...trouble with evolution, as the Prime Minister went on to say, is that it sometimes can be "slow and frustrating." In the interview, Tsvangirai gave himself five years to transform his country. That may be realistic, but the pace can also make Tsvangirai's optimism feel premature. The power-sharing deal set out a timetable for a new constitution by October 2010, but that schedule is already slipping. The more obstacles Mugabe throws in Tsvangirai's way - the latest came on July 13 when protesting ZANU supporters forced the postponement of a conference on constitutional reform - the more what...
...first-generation Toyota Corollas and jukeboxes playing Sade and early Madonna - is stuck in the past. To this day, state newspapers and radio stations lead the news with profiles of ZANU heroes who have been dead for 30 years. Mugabe's men obsessively blame Britain, the old colonial power, for all Zimbabwe's problems today. Mugabe - a man who wears impeccable suits and drinks afternoon tea - is "half African and half British," says his biographer Heidi Holland, "and the two halves hate each other." In a Harare hotel, I meet Christopher Mutsvangwa, a ZANU supporter, businessman and former ambassador...
...years after the party's glory days, ZANU's power is finally waning. Partly this is economic; there are fewer spoils to go around. Tsvangirai told me that when he took office in February, the state's entire resources ran to just $4 million. Last November, several hundred soldiers rioted in Harare over poor pay and conditions. Even if Mugabe called on troops to stage a coup and suppress dissent, it's no longer clear they would obey him. "The emperor is wearing no clothes," says Leonard Makombe, a politics lecturer at the mothballed University of Zimbabwe...