HARARE: President Robert Mugabe is insisting he remains Zimbabwe’s only legitimate ruler and is refusing to quit after a military coup, but pressure is mounting on the 93-year-old former guerrilla to accept offers of a graceful exit, sources said on Thursday.

A political source who spoke to senior allies holed up with Mugabe and his wife, Grace, in his lavish “Blue Roof” Harare compound said Mugabe had no plans to resign voluntarily ahead of elections scheduled for next year.

“It’s a sort of stand-off, a stalemate,” the source said. “They are insisting the president must finish his term.” The army’s takeover signalled the collapse in less than 36 hours of the security, intelligence and patronage networks that sustained Mugabe through 37 years in power and built him into the “Grand Old Man” of African politics.

A priest mediating between Mugabe and the generals, who seized power on Wednesday in what they called a targeted operation against “criminals” in Mugabe’s entourage, has made little headway, a senior political source told Reuters.

Opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai called for Mugabe’s departure “in the interest of the people”. In a statement read to reporters, Tsvangirai pointedly referred to him as “Mr Robert Mugabe”, not President. The army appears to want Mugabe, who has ruled Zimbabwe since independence in 1980, to go quietly and allow a smooth and bloodless transition to Emmerson Mnangagwa, the vice president Mugabe sacked last week triggering the political crisis.

The main goal of the generals is to prevent Mugabe from handing power to his wife Grace, 41 years his junior, who has built a following among the ruling party’s youth wing and appeared on the cusp of power after Mnangagwa was pushed out.

The last of Africa’s state founders from the heyday of the struggle against European colonisation still in power, Mugabe is still seen by many Africans as a liberation hero. But he is reviled in the West as a despot whose disastrous handling of the economy and willingness to resort to violence to maintain power pauperised one of Africa’s most promising states.

Once a regional bread-basket, Zimbabwe saw its economy collapse in the wake of the seizure of white-owned farms in the early 2000s, followed by runaway money-printing that catapulted inflation to 500 billion percent in 2008.

Millions, from highly skilled bankers to semi-literate farmers, emigrated, mostly to neighbouring South Africa, where an estimated 3 million still live.

After a brief revival under a 2009-13 power-sharing government, when Mugabe was forced to work with the opposition, the economy has once again cratered, with dollars scarce, inflation surging, imports running out and queues outside banks.

A fighter, both literally and figuratively during a political career that included several assassination attempts, Mugabe now appears to have reached the end of the road.

With the army camped on his front door and the police — once seen as a bastion of support — showing no signs of resistance, force is not an option. Similarly, he has no popular backing in Harare, where he is widely loathed, and his influence in the ruling ZANU-PF party is evaporating.

ZANU-PF youth leader Kudzai Chipanga, a vocal Mugabe supporter, publicly apologised for opposing the army after being marched by soldiers into the state television headquarters to read out a statement, sources at the broadcaster said.

He was then taken back to the army’s main KGVI (pronounced KG Six) barracks in Harare, where Finance Minister Ignatius Chombo is also being held, an army source said.

Video footage obtained by Reuters from the houses of two key allies of Grace Mugabe — cabinet ministers Jonathan Moyo and Saviour Kasukuwere — indicated that the army was also prepared to use force if necessary.

Moyo’s front door was blown open with explosives, scattering glass across the entrance hall, while the inside walls of Kasukuwere’s house were pocked with bullet holes.

The pair managed to escape on the evening of the coup and make it to Mugabe’s compound, where they remain under effective house arrest, one political source said.

Zimbabwean intelligence reports suggest Mugabe’s exit was in the planning for more than a year.

Mnangagwa, a former security chief and life-long Mugabe confidant known as “The Crocodile”, is the key player.

According to the files and political sources in Zimbabwe and South Africa, once Mugabe’s resignation is secured Mnangagwa would take over as president of an interim unity government that will seek to stabilise the imploding economy.

Fuelling speculation that this plan might be rolling into action, 65-year-old Tsvangirai, who has been receiving cancer treatment in Britain and South Africa, returned to Harare late on Wednesday.

Published in Dawn, November 17th, 2017