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Mugabe 'wants to step down within 18 months' The Sunday Telegraph, 20 April 2008 by SPECIAL CORRESPONDENT in Harare and GETHIN CHAMBERLAIN ROBERT MUGABE is planning to step down from power within 18 months if he is eventually declared the winner of Zimbabwe's bitterly contested presidential election, say senior figures in his party. Colleagues say he is tired and had wanted to hand over the leadership before the election, but decided to fight on to rally support for his Zanu-PF party. He is said to have chosen a long-time ally, Emmerson Mnangagwa, as his eventual successor. Three weeks after Zimbabweans went to the polls, Mr Mugabe appears increasingly determined to cling to power until a time of his own choosing, refusing to concede defeat either in the presidential vote or in the parliamentary elections which his party lost to its main rival, the Movement for Democratic Change. Yesterday election officials began recounting votes in 23 out of 210 constituencies, amid fears that Mr Mugabe's party was attempting to overturn the result. The recount was staged as violence against opposition supporters continued, with unconfirmed reports of 10 murders over the past week and allegations from a human rights group that a network of "torture camps'' had been set up. Human Rights Watch claimed that supporters of Mr Mugabe's party set up the camps "to systematically target, beat, and torture people'' suspected of voting for the opposition in last month's elections. Former United Nations Secretary General, Kofi Annan, yesterday urged African leaders to do more to address the crisis in Zimbabwe, claiming the "dangerous situation'' could have an impact beyond the country's borders. Yesterday the Foreign Office cautioned Britons not to travel to Zimbabwe unless it was essential, "due to the tension surrounding the election and the deployment of uniformed forces and war veterans across the country''. Influential members of Zanu-PF said that a deal to agree the hand-over of power from Mr Mugabe to Mr Mnangagwa, the minister for rural housing and social amenities, was hatched during talks in Harare last month. "Mugabe will hand over power to Mnangagwa within 1½ years,'' one said. "In one meeting, Mugabe said he was tired and wanted to step down. But his fear was that if he stepped down before the elections, [MDC leader Morgan] Tsvangirai would trounce a Zanue_SNbhPF candidate because there were divisions in the party. Mnangagwa has been picked as the successor. He has been going through a grooming programme in the past three months.'' Mr Mnangagwa was head of Zimbabwe's feared intelligence service in 1981, during the civil war which followed independence and at a time when about 20,000 of the minority Ndebele population were slaughtered. Mr Mugabe chose him to head Zimbabwe's delegation at talks in Lusaka last week on the crisis. "Mnangagwa is running the party,'' said a Zanu-PF source.
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