Mnangagwa can and should impeached but will never happen whilst dictatorship rules the roost W Mukori

Can the President of the Republic of Zimbabwe, Emmerson Dambudzo Mnangagwa be impeached? 

On paper, yes he can be impeached. 

A complete list of all the articles of impeachment against Mnangagwa in his two years in the presidency will fill a number of pages. I will just confine to just two high treason charges 

1. In plotting and executing the November 2017 military coup and then afterwards getting Chief Justice George Chiweshe to falsify declare the act “legal, justified and constitutional”. Whilst some have argued with some justification that it was the only way remove the dictator Robert Mugabe. The fact remains that it was nonetheless unconstitutional and threatened to throw the nation into even greater instability and chaos as, indeed, happened in this case. There is no denying the 2017 coup removed one dictator only to replace him with another.

1. In failing to implement any meaningful democratic reforms necessary for free, fair and credible July 2018 elections, blatantly rigging the said elections and then imposing himself as the legitimate president and government. 

Mnangagwa can and, indeed, should be impeached but he will not be impeached because Zimbabwe is not a health and functioning democracy. The horse, the treasonous president, has already bolted. 

“A president “might pervert his administration into a scheme of peculation or oppression,” James Madison (one of America’s founding fathers) said of the need for an impeachment clause (in USA constitution). “He might betray his trust to foreign powers.”

“Madison and his fellow framers understood that elections — which, under normal circumstances, are the essence of democratic self-government — could not serve their purpose if a president was determined to cheat to win,” explained New York Times, in its editorial.

“As the constitutional scholar Noah Feldman testified before the Judiciary Committee last week, “Without impeachment, the president would have been an elected monarch. With impeachment, the president was bound to the rule of law.”

By successful rigging elections for these last 39 years Zanu PF leaders have systematically eroded the democratic right of the people to a meaningful vote. Instead of the people holding those in power to democratic account it is the people who are now at the mercy of the ruling elite, especially the rural voters who have been reduced into medieval serfs beholden to the Zanu PF landlords! 

Instead of the people electing the MPs and thus the people exercising power over the MPs; it is Mnangagwa and the select few manning the party’s vote rigging machinery who elect the MPs and thus control them. In Zimbabwe Mnangagwa enjoys absolute power he controls the electorate and the MPs. 

In Zimbabwe it is the tail, the president, that wags the dog, the nation, parliament and all the state institutions. 

The only way Mnangagwa can be impeach is at gun point - as happened to Mugabe. 

The November 2017 coup removed one dictator but only to replace him with another dictator, this was not the political change the nation has been dying for - removing the dictatorship and replacing it with a democratic system of government. 

We should focus all our time, energy and sweat on getting Mnangagwa and Zanu PF to step down on the grounds the party does not have the mandate to govern since last year’s elections were rigged. This will create the political space to appoint a body that can be entrusted the task of implement the democratic reforms necessary for free, fair and credible elections. 

Once the democratic system in established, one only hopes that the people will be vigilant and alert and not lose it as easily as they did in 1980!

Those calling for Mnangagwa to be impeach, as long as the Zanu PF dictatorship remains strong, they are wasting their time.