A coup by any other name spells trouble for Zimbabwe

What you need to know:

As the shock wears off, Mnangagwa’s supporters and the military will find it more difficult to realise whatever plan they may have had than they initially thought.

In Zimbabwe, there has been a coup d’état that nobody is calling a coup d’état. Yes, President Robert Mugabe and his notorious wife were “detained” and yes, the military took over the capital and the state media.

But no, there was no announcement of an ouster of the president. Nor was there an announced suspension of the Constitution or a declaration of martial law.

The initial statement from the Southern African Development Community was anaemic. Despite the quick dispatch of two SADC envoys to Zimbabwe from South Africa. That statement was followed by an equally anaemic statement from the African Union Commission.

The Zimbabwean opposition was oddly silent too.

It was left to Zimbabwean civil society to provide direction. No fewer than 115 Zimbabwean organisations — including human rights, media and women’s organisations— finally gave the rest of the continent what it had been holding its breath for. A set of demands that made it clear that this wasn’t a transitional moment, but one that could potentially allow a transition.

Zimbabwean civil society was uncompromising. It wants a return to the constitutional order and a transition based on the participation of all stakeholders. For that to happen, it demands that the (93-year-old!) president step down.

That the military respect the Constitution and set out a roadmap for the return to a constitutional order — meaning elections as anticipated by mid-next year.

That parliament gets with the programme and enables a credible election by addressing repressive legislation to do with elections, public order management, access to information and privacy, cyber-security, the independence of the judiciary and civil service neutrality.

And that SADC do its duty to the country with the same alacrity as the Economic Community of West African States does its duty towards those wayward countries in its ambit.

What will the military, parliament and SADC do? What will the AU do if SADC doesn’t do the necessary under the principle of subsidiarity? As we wait to see, some reflections are in order.

As borne out by the flurry of events over the past week, transition in Africa is less about democratic consolidation than authoritarian breakdown.

Agency matters — in the sense that internal divisions within ruling parties can come to a head over matters like succession. It is telling that former vice president Emmerson Mnangagwa’s main obstacle to succession was the president’s wife.

But structure and institutions matter too. Hence the repeated reference to the institutional constraints posed by the Constitution. This is why the coup d’état couldn’t be called a coup d’état and had to be done in as non-coup d’état-y way as possible.

As the shock wears off, Mnangagwa’s supporters and the military will find it more difficult to realise whatever plan they may have had than they initially thought.

Finally, as Kenyans know only too well, transitions are non-linear and their outcomes are uncertain. Transitions can serve less to usher in new elites and more to legitimise old elites.

The detention and possible (diplomatic) removal from the scene of the president and his wife will do nothing except remove the most extreme representation of Zimbabwe’s problems.

L. Muthoni Wanyeki is the Africa director of the Open Society Foundations. [email protected]