Military Orchestrated Leadership Change in Zimbabwe and the Quest for Political Transition

This chapter discusses the military-orchestrated leadership change that transpired in Zimbabwe in November 2017. The chapter critically examines military interference in the country’s politics and its implications on political transition in the post-Mugabe dispensation. It offers insight into Zimbabwe’s political crises propelled by the lack of a successionSuccession plan. It emerged that the succession battle within ZANU-PF got complicated by the militarisationMilitarisation of factionalismFactionalism. The chapter builds from an extensive review of primary and secondary data sources on political developments before and post-Mugabe era. Vilfredo Pareto’s (1848–18,923) theory on elite circulationElite circulation is deployed herein to explain the absence of a successionSuccession mechanism within ZANU-PF and the militarisationMilitarisation of sociopolitics life in Zimbabwe. The chapter argues that the power wrangling within the ZANU-PF political elites arose from a lack of a clear successionSuccession policy. Building from insights offered by Pareto’s theory of elite circulationElite circulation, it is averred that the removal of Mugabe by the military did not herald any form of political transition but rather a mere power play of one elite replacing one other. In addition, it is argued that the lack of political reform by the Mnangagwa government affirms the position that political elites seek power for personal self-actualisation and not the public good. The chapter concludes that Mnangagwa’s rise to power is nothing but a new elite displacing the old elite structure and does not herald a positive transition and transformation in the politics of Zimbabwe.