By Tonde Maruke
President Emmerson Mnangagwa has said he will not seek to extend his stay in power. That many people do not believe him goes to the heart of his legacy as a leader – a crisis of credibility.
Mnangagwa is in China, joining other African leaders at the Forum on China Africa Cooperation. At a meeting with Zimbabweans living in China, a citizen asked him about calls by his supporters for him to remain in office past his legal two terms.
He said: “This question of a third term does not arise, especially under my watch, no. I’m in my second term and I know the date when I will leave office, 2028, I will go home and others will come in.”
This was not the first time. He has said this at least five time before.
On the eve of elections last September, he told ZTN “I am going for my second term, this is my last term”, adding that infrastructure projects would be his legacy.
He then told a state-run magazine that “there is not an iota of evidence where ZANU PF or I, as President, has ever expressed the violation of our Constitution”. Talk of a third term, he said, was all the “imagination” of creative Zimbabweans.
Then in July, he told supporters in Mutare: “I’m into my last five years. Soon, I will go home and rest. You will go to congress and pick a new leader.”
A month later, early August, he gave a speech at Zanu PF headquarters, saying: “Besides being a soldier, I’m a trained lawyer. I’m a constitutionalist. We must abide by the terms of the constitution to the letter.” Previously, he told CNN that he would leave when his time was up.
As if this “assurance” was not enough, Justice Minister Ziyambi Ziyambi chimed in, saying: “We don’t have any legislative agenda to extend presidential terms. We absolutely don’t have those issues on our agenda.”
It is not “easy to just amend the Constitution as constitutional amendments have certain restrictions that were placed on them”, he stressed.
You would think that these assurances would put paid to all the talk. After all, the President has spoken. Yet, nobody believes it. In fact, more importantly, none of his assurances have silenced the calls for “2030”. Each time Mnangagwa has come out to say he is leaving, his allies have followed up, within hours, to chant contrary slogans. A day after Mnangagwa’s latest “assurance”, ZANU PF in Manicaland declared they were “endorsing” him to stay “to allow uninterrupted development”. Has he lost so much authority that his supporters don’t listen to him? No, it’s because even they know he may not mean what he says.
Because he’s not known to stick to his word, many ardent Mnangagwa supporters, who formed an army of backers – from business circles to online – have been frustrated and decided to go silent. They are afraid of defending him; he has left them with egg on their faces too many times.
When nobody, even your own supporters, believes a word you say, it goes down to credibility. Mnangagwa’s administration has a long history of broken promises and flip-flops. Few believe what they say, whether it is about the economy or obeying the constitution.
We shouldn’t need a President to assure us that he is leaving. It should not even be an issue. It should be a given. Getting to that level of confidence is one more legacy that Mnangagwa still has a chance to leave behind. But, for now, Zimbabweans will take everything with large dollops of salt. And that says a lot about Mnangagwa’s credibility as a leader.
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