Arthur Guseni Oliver Mutambara (born 25 May 1966) is a Zimbabwean politician. He became the president of the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) in February 2006. He has worked as a director and CEO of Africa Technology and Business Institute since September 2003. Under a September 2008 power-sharing agreement, Mutambara served in the government as one of two Deputy Prime Ministers from 2009 to 2013.
Early activism
Mutambara was president of the Student Representative Council of the University of Zimbabwe in 1988 and 1989. He led anti-government protests at the University of Zimbabwe which led to his arrest and imprisonment. He was later educated on a Rhodes Scholarship in 1991, at Merton College, Oxford in the United Kingdom where he obtained a DPhil in Robotics and Mechatronics, and in the United States where he spent time as a visiting Fellow in the same field, including both California Institute of Technology, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Florida State University College of Engineering. He also worked as a lecturer on Business Strategy and as a consultant for McKinsey & Company.
Mutambara criticised government ministers for abusing Zimbabwe's land reform program, engaging in: "monopolistic politics of domination, corruption, and petty bourgeois accumulation."
Mutambara, a self-professed admirer of Che Guevara, has also expressed his intention to visit Cuba to learn more about its "successful resistance" to American sanctions. Mutambara added: "We have a lot to learn from Cuba which started its revolution in 1959, we will continue with our solidarity, continue with the struggle and strengthen our co-operation."
Scholarly output
From March 2002 to September 2003, Mutambara was a professor of Operations Management at the University of South Africa's School of Business Leadership. Mutambara has authored at least two books. His most cited paper, of his at least thirteen papers, is entitled Estimation and control for a modular wheeled mobile robot co-authored with Professor Hugh F. Durrant-Whyte. According to Scopus as of 2013 his h-index was a modest 4.
Movement for Democratic Change
In 2005 the MDC split into two factions following a dispute over whether or not to participate in the March 2005 senatorial election. While MDC leader Morgan Tsvangirai, Mutambara, and others opposed participation, Welshman Ncube and Gibson Sibanda led a faction that favoured participation. Those supporting the senate elections won narrowly against the leader Morgan Tsvangirai's vote. Tsvangirai later overruled and overturned the decision of the plebiscite citing two absent members had sent in postal votes that canceled the slender margin.
In February 2006 at a Congress of the breakaway faction Movement for Democratic Change, Mutambara was elected as president of the party. Commenting on the election, Mutambara said, "My position was that the MDC should have boycotted those Senate elections. I guess then that makes me the anti-Senate leader of the pro-Senate MDC faction. How ridiculous can we get? That debate is now in the past, let us move on and unite our people."
The choice of Mutambara as leader was said to have been inspired by the fact that he is a Shona whereas Sibanda and Ncube are both Ndebele, but realised that only a Shona candidate could win an election across the whole of Zimbabwe. Mutambara is not a member of the House of Assembly.
The faction led by Tsvangirai described Mutambara's election as a nullity. In his MDC faction presidential acceptance speech, Mutambara stated, "We believe that our views on land reform in Zimbabwe are different from those of Western governments. Our approach is not driven by the interests of white farmers, but by those of all Zimbabweans, white and black. While we put the failure of the land reform program squarely on the ZANU–PF government, we also acknowledge the complicity of some Western governments which reneged on agreements, and the inertia of white farmers in seeking pre-emptive solutions." However, David Karimanzira, a leading member of the ZANU–PF, alleged that Mutambara was promoted by the West after Western governments decided not to continue backing Morgan Tsvangirai because the Zimbabwean people had allegedly rejected his party manifesto. He once called the African Union a "club of dictators".