At a meeting in Harare on Sunday election officials had some bad news for Zimbabwe’s generals: President Mugabe was likely to lose.

The generals, members of the Joint Operations Command (JOC), digested this information and are said to have been the ones to tell Mr Mugabe that the vote against him was so overwhelming that any attempt to rig the results would not succeed.

The top generals in Zimbabwe have always been political animals and are at the heart of the Zanu (PF) party. As such they have enjoyed the choicest fruits of the President’s patronage: they are given the best farms, drive the newest and largest Mercedes and 4X4s, live in mansions and send their children to school abroad. The JOC, which was adapted from the counter-insurgency agency of the old, white minority Rhodesian Government, includes the head of the spy service and has its tentacles at all levels. It exists, or has existed, purely to prolong the rule of Mr Mugabe.

One group, however, led by Solomon Mujuru, a former army commander, has been at the head of efforts to replace Mr Mugabe with a younger leadership for Zanu (PF).

Other members of this powerful group are intensely loyal to Mr Mugabe. These include General Constan-tine Chiwenga, the defence forces commander, who declared that he would not salute Morgan Tsvangirai if he came to power, and Augustine Chihu-ri, the police commissioner, who called the MDC leader a Western puppet.

Many observers believe that the MDC has got so close to victory because it has been allowed to and that it is the internal struggle at the top levels of the military that has stayed the generals’ hands.

Since the first signs of an effective opposition in the late 1990s Mr Mugabe has filled senior positions in the civil service with former top officers.

The first assault by Mr Mugabe on the MDC, in the 2000 elections, was led by the war veterans’ militia – men and women with experience of the guerrilla tactics of intimidation. In the election two years later it was the turn of another semi-military unit he had founded – the National Youth Training Service.

In the past the JOC has used all means to beat the MDC: sabotage, propaganda, surveillance, arrest, torture and, of course, fixing elections.

But as one Western military attaché put it: “The economic disaster became so bad in Zimbabwe that even the generals have been forced to look realistically at their future.”

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