Photo: IRIN

Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai and President Robert Mugabe.

President Robert Mugabe this week (8 February 2012) hastily swept under the carpet his ongoing conflict with his partners in Zimbabwe's three-party government - apparently to head off a tongue-lashing during a scheduled late-February meeting with SADC facilitator and South African President Jacob Zuma.

Zuma is meeting the three political principals - Mugabe, Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai and Industry Minister Welshman Ncube, head of the smaller of the two MDC parties in the government - to pressure them to complete a new constitution and fulfil other clauses in the Global Political Agreement (GPA) to clear the way for internationally recognised elections.

The constitution-drafting teams are two years behind schedule and it is now unlikely Zimbabwe will hold elections before the constitutional cut-off in mid-June 2013. Although Pretoria has already informally provided for a delay by quietly raising the possibility of a GPA-2 agreement, Zuma's major concern lies outside the drafting process: achieving the political stability necessary for free and fair elections. Obstacles to this have mainly been thrown up by Mugabe, although Tsvangirai's inept handling of interaction with Mugabe's minority Zanu-PF have contributed significantly.

Zuma remains unfailingly proper, but pulls no punches in closed-door SADC engagements with Zimbabwe's political leaders - as he demonstrated in Livingstone and Sandton last year (Vol 29 No 13 and No 18).

After nearly four months of stalling - and several actions clearly breaching the GPA - Mugabe convened Thursday's meeting to develop a counter to the stalling charges he believes Zuma way make.

The composition of the meeting and a statement afterwards demonstrates the still-effortless ease with which Mugabe continues to out-manoeuvre Tsvangirai.

The meeting was attended by Mugabe, Tsvangirai and Deputy Prime Minister Arthur Mutambara, the original signatories to the GPA. Mutambara was replaced as leader by Ncube at a congress of the smaller of the MDCs last year. Zuma refuses to meet him, insisting instead on meeting Ncube with the other two inclusive government principals. But Mutambara's isolation, and consequent vulnerability to Mugabe, makes it convenient for the wily 87-year-old president to insist, in Zima's absence, that the individuals who physically signed the GPA in 2008 are its principals.

In Ncube's absence, the principals agreed:

• That Mugabe's re-appointment of police Commissioner General Augustine Chihuri, in blatant breach of the GPA, would be downgraded to an acting appointment - but not on any deadline for a full appointment, over which Mugabe must secure Tsvangirai's agreement. Chihuri, one of Zanu-PF's most extreme hardliners, can thus remain in the acting position indefinitely.
• To implement reforms of the Zimbabwe government's massive broadcasting and print media empire, and to reverse the blatantly anti-GPA approval of two private radio licences last year to Mugabe allies. This is not ideal for Mugabe, but gives him months (or years) breathing space before it begins to affect the Zanu-PF propaganda barrage.

Importantly, the decisions were announced by Tsvangirai and Mutambara in Mugabe's absence - apparently to allow Mugabe to use the agreements to rebut criticism from Zuma, but to deny them thereafter.

Mugabe appears to believe this will give him the breathing space to proceed to manoeuvre - and, ideally, to provoke a Tsvangirai walk-out of the inclusive government, allow him to call early elections controlled by his Zanu-PF.

He is lobbying hard to win support from SADC member states and other African countries to support his 2012 agenda.

Zanu-PF has worked consistently to undermine the GPA, which marks its third anniversary on Monday (13 February 2012), to the extent that it is more in breach than in compliance.

Before elections, the GPA requires completion of a new constitution endorsed by a referendum and voted in by Parliament; the amendment of electoral laws; and the establishment of a new Human Rights Commission.

At present Zanu-PF is working hard to delay finalisation of the constitution by placing bureaucratic and administrative obstacles in the way of further progress.

Zanu-PF wants elections before the adoption of a new constitution and reformist legislation: to ensure victory, it needs to control the running of the election - it would lose in a fair poll. It also needs elections as soon as possible because it has no candidate but Mugabe, who is frail, ill and will be 88 on 21 February. If they succeed, the current constitution allows Zanu-PF to retain the presidency for five years, even if he dies in office.

The constant refrain of Mugabe and his hardline colleagues - including the securocrats - is that the constitution is bogged down irrevocably, the inclusive government has not "worked", and Zimbabwe needs decisive government.

But despite the obvious problems, there have been improvements in the day to day lives of Zimbabweans. The health and education sectors have revived, if not recovered; and the country is living within its means.

Would the MDC even take part in a poll unilaterally declared by Mugabe? Despite its lacklustre performance as a political party since the inclusive government, and its diminishing support, the MDC would be tempted. Tsvangirai, despite his manifest failures, still has far more support than Mugabe - down from the 2-1 peak in 2009-2010, but still by a comfortable majority.

Mugabe's increasingly concerted drive to derail the GPA and hold Zanu-PF controlled elections this year is causing mounting alarm in both MDCs and among opposition formations and NGOs, compounded by a slackening of South Africa's hands-on facilitation of implementation of the GPA in the last months of 2011. Zuma's international relations adviser Lindiwe Zulu acknowledges this, citing other, more immediate, domestic and international commitments.

The recent decision by Tanzania not to appoint a monitor to the GPA oversight structure, the Joint Monitoring and Implementation Committee (Jomic), alongside South African and Zambian monitors, is a consequence of this - and a clear victory for Mugabe's diplomacy. Dar es Salaam has agreed with Zanu-PF that such monitoring would be equal to interference in national sovereignty.

Zimbabwean opposition circles are also concerned that recent remarks by Zambian president Michael Sata to the London-based Daily Telegraph that Tsvangirai is "pro-Western" and unreliable are part of a broader trend within SADC towards supporting Mugabe and his go-it-alone plans.

But just as former South African president Thabo Mbeki seemed always to underestimate Mugabe who consequently often outmanoeuvred him, Mugabe seems now to be underestimating the politically astute Zuma.

Zuma has yet to lose an exchange with Mugabe. Mugabe's crushing humiliation last March at Livingstone, Zambia at the hands of the SADC Troika on Politics, Defence and Security was just the first of a string of bruising engagements. In June SADC solidly backed Pretoria at an extraordinary summit in Sandton, South Africa, repeating its position in Luanda in August (Vol 29 No 21), while Mugabe had little success in drumming up sympathy at the AU summit last month.

However much SADC leaders may dislike Tsvangirai - and many do, in part because of his consistent failure to develop a strategy that does not require further SADC involvement in Zimbabwean affairs - they have Zimbabwe-fatigue: they want it removed as the primary obstacle to a focus on economic cooperation and development. And they recognise that internationally approved elections are the only way to achieve this. Anything else will leave US and EU sanctions in place, casting a shadow over the region as an attractive investment destination and distracting SADC.

Zulu has acknowledged that Pretoria will be intensifying its - and SADC's - mediation this year. And Pretoria last year re-formulated its Zimbabwe strategy (Vol 29 No 28) to include a more consistent diplomatic push to lock SADC governments into actively driving the Zimbabwe process towards free and fair elections, creating a cordon sanitaire around the three governing parties.

To deny Mugabe the leverage of a looming 2013 deadline to justify unilateral elections, it has also quietly posited the idea of a GPA-2 - a second period of compulsory governing coalition. This would presumably be arranged more equitably than the current GPA, taking account particularly of Tsvangirai's manifest inability to manage Mugabe.

Zuma's scheduled meeting with the principals will be the first test of Pretoria's new strategy - and of Mugabe's under-the-carpet sweeping.