Zimbabwe and ZANU-PF's continuing hegemony: Meet the new boss same as the old boss (original) (raw)

The refrain " Meet the new boss, same as the old boss " , was popularised in African Politics by Nicolas Van de Walle in 2003 to describe the pervasive nature of clientelist politics in Africa despite transitions from authoritarianism to electoral democracy. As Zimbabwean politics enters a new post-Mugabe epoch, whether the new boss is the same as the old boss is the fundamental operational question, on whose answer millions of hopes lie. It is this question that this article mainly grapples with, as Zimbabwe closes the curtain on Robert Mugabe, and begins a new political era with Emmerson Mnangagwa as the ​lead patriarch of the hitherto hegemonic ZANU-PF regime.