President Robert Mugabe is insisting he remains Zimbabwe's only legitimate ruler and balking at mediation by a Catholic priest to allow the 93-year-old former guerrilla a graceful exit after a military coup, sources said on Thursday.
A political source who spoke to senior allies holed up with Mugabe and his wife, Grace, in his lavish "Blue House" 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.
The priest, Fidelis Mukonori, who has been mediating between Mugabe and the generals who seized power on Wednesday in a targeted operation against "criminals" in his entourage, had also made little headway, a senior political source said.
The army appears to want Mugabe, who has led Zimbabwe since independence from Britain in 1980, to go quietly and allow a smooth and bloodless transition to former vice-president Emmerson Mnangagwa.
Still seen by many Africans as a liberation hero, Mugabe 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's economy collapsed 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. Most went to neighbouring South Africa, where an estimated 3 million still live, despite a brief economic revival under a 2009-13 power-sharing government.
