Political Leadership in Zimbabwe in the Aftermath of the Military Coup. Change Without Change?

Washington Mazorodze ()
Additional contact information
Washington Mazorodze: University of Zimbabwe

A chapter in Military, Politics and Democratization in Southern Africa, 2023, pp 53-81 from Springer

Abstract: Abstract Leadership is one of the most contentious issues in Africa. Leadership is about influencing people to accomplish certain goals and objectives shared by the leader and his or her followers. Many scholars have attributed the debilitating state of affairs in Africa to the leadership crisis on the continent. As a result, there are calls across the continent for change not merely in leadership, but also the adoption of leadership styles which are proactive and developmental to the needs of the African people. It is expected that where there is a change in leadership, there is improvement in the general socio-economic conditions of ordinary people. However, experience has shown that even in those countries where there have been changes in leadership, such as South Africa, Zambia, Malawi, Nigeria, Kenya, among others, the fortunes of the ordinary people have not been transformed for the better. If anything, the conditions have worsened. The new leaders have failed to break from the past practices of violence, human rights violations, election rigging, use of state resources as campaigning tools, corruption and politics of exclusion, culminating in a phenomenon where there is change without change. Could it be the same situation in Zimbabwe, which changed its leadership from Mugabe to Mnangagwa in November 2017? This chapter analyses the extent to which the new leadership in Zimbabwe which described itself as a ‘New DispensationNew dispensation’ changed in reality and substance, the extent to which it was divorced from the old Mugabe regime. This chapter is grounded in Paul Collier’s greed–grievance theory, which explains the causes of rebellionRebellion in Africa. A ‘coupCoup’ that was staged in November 2017 to remove Mugabe can be explained in terms of greed–grievance theory in which the coup plotters staged a coupCoup because of their greed for power and exploitation of the country’s resources for their own selfish gains, yet they hoodwinked the people that they were removing criminals around the former president. A qualitative methodology was used to collect data with interviews, secondary sources of data such as newspapers, articles, books and other existing literature used as data collection methods.

Keywords: Coup; New dispensation; Lacoste; Revamp; Re-engagement; Harmonised elections; Revamped; Chinhu chedu (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:aaechp:978-3-031-35229-4_4

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/9783031352294

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-031-35229-4_4

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Advances in African Economic, Social and Political Development from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().