Back to Index

Zimbabwe: The evolving public mood
Afrobarometer
December 30, 2010

Download this document
- Acrobat PDF version (339KB)
If you do not have the free Acrobat reader on your computer, download it from the Adobe website by clicking here.

http://next.pls.msu.edu/index.php?option=com_content&view=category&layout=blog&id=28&Itemid=104

At the end of 2010, Zimbabwean citizens remained broadly supportive of power sharing as an antidote to political crisis. But they were increasingly critical of the halting performance of their country's coalition government. Most people also perceived declining civil liberties and feared resurgent political violence. Yet clear majorities called for constitutional reforms to limit the powers of the presidency and seemingly even for free elections in 2011 to return the country to legitimate rule. These are the major findings of an Afrobarometer survey conducted among a national crosssection of the Zimbabwean adults in late October 2010.

Context

Following a disputed presidential election in June 2008, the former ruling party, the Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF) entered a power-sharing pact with two wings of the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) in September. A Global Political Agreement (GPA) established an Inclusive Government (IG) in February 2009 with Robert Mugabe as President and Morgan Tsvangirai as Prime Minister. In practice, the IG has implemented few of the major provisions of the GPA, in large part because Mugabe and ZANUPF have been unwilling to surrender a meaningful share of executive and military power. By October 2010, the government was essentially stalemated. With a public outreach program on constitutional reform marred by violence, with security forces and ZANU-PF militias redeployed around the country, and with both sides calling for fresh elections, the country risked relapse into another dangerous period of political instability.

Afrobarometer

The Afrobarometer is a comparative series of public attitude surveys on democracy, governance and living conditions in Africa. Each national survey - now conducted in 20 African countries - is based on a randomly selected national probability sample of at least 1200 respondents representing a cross-section of adults of voting age. A sample of this size yields a margin of sampling error of ±3.0 percent at a 95 percent confidence level. All interviews are conducted face-to-face by trained fieldworkers in the language of the respondent's choice. The Mass Public Opinion Institute (MPOI), the Afrobarometer partner in Zimbabwe, conducted fieldwork for the present survey in all ten provinces of the country on 16-29 October, 2010. It was the latest in a series of Afrobarometer surveys in Zimbabwe, with previous studies Zimbabwe: The Evolving Public Mood Copyright Afrobarometer 2 conducted in 1999, 2002, 2005, and May 2009. For the purposes of tracking trends in public opinion since the formation of the Inclusive Government, this report adds data from a survey sponsored by Freedom House and conducted by MPOI in September 2009 that contained many Afrobarometer and country-specific tracking items. Reflecting a worsening security situation in parts of rural Zimbabwe, the target sample in the October 2010 survey fell short by eight interviews (N=1192). Intimidation by ZANU-PF militias forced the fieldwork team to withdraw prematurely from a primary sampling area in Mashonaland Central Province. Since the data from have been weighted to correct for this anomaly, we are confident that the results reliably represent a cross-section of the political opinions of Zimbabwean adults at the time of the survey.

Power Sharing: Popular But Failing

As of October 2010, Zimbabweans continued to place confidence in power sharing as a mode of governance. Some 72 percent agreed that "creating an Inclusive Government was the best way to resolve the recent post-election crisis." This level of popular endorsement represents an increase over time because only 66 percent felt the same way in May 2009. By contrast, just 21 percent in the latest survey regard power sharing as ineffective, believing that "leaders should have found another way to resolve the crisis." At the same time, however, a plurality of citizens in Zimbabwe also regards power sharing as a compromise that falls short of their preferred method of choosing a government.

Download full document

Please credit www.kubatana.net if you make use of material from this website. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License unless stated otherwise.

TOP