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Zimbabweans vote, desperate for change
New York Times
March 30, 2008

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/30/world/africa/30zimbabwe.html?_r=2&hp&oref=slogin&oref=slogin

Lines were long at the polling stations here well before morning had unscrolled its first light. And when the doors did not open exactly at 7 a.m., voters in the impoverished township of Warren Park rushed the schoolyard gate, most of them desperate to cast a ballot to oust the man who has been president for most of their lives, Robert Mugabe.

"People want him gone, finally and forever gone," said Charles Musonza, an out-of-work tailor and one of those surging toward the front. "Zimbabwe has been ruined by Mugabe. There is no future if he wins."

Mr. Musonza ordinarily considers himself nothing more than a flyspeck within the hinges of power, but Saturday was election day here, the people's day, his day. The voters, he said, held the power now.

Still, Mr. Mugabe is so often accused of stealing the last presidential election that many Zimbabweans scoff at the very notion of a fair vote. In 2002, reported results had challenger Morgan Tsvangirai piling up a big lead. Then, suddenly, the announcements stopped. When they resumed, hours later, Mr. Mugabe was well ahead.

Results from Saturday's presidential race are not expected until Sunday at the earliest. By and large, the vote was peaceful, with the long lines dissipating as the day went on. There were only minor reports of irregularities at the polls.
But questions about a fix — will it happen, how will it be done — hung in the air, so much so that Mr. Mugabe, 84, addressed the matter to reporters as he voted at a Harare primary school.

"We do not rig elections," he said dismissively, dressed, as is his custom, in a finely tailored suit and well-buffed shoes. "We have that sense of honesty. I cannot sleep with my conscience if I have cheated in elections."

He added, "Why should I cheat? The people are there supporting us."

Recently, though, Mr. Mugabe has not enjoyed strong support, particularly in urban areas.

Zimbabwe suffers an inflation rate of more than 100,000 percent, a condition of fiscal entropy so chaotic that a standard calculator has an insufficient number of zeros to figure out a grocery bill. People carry heavy bricks of cash encircled by thick rubber bands. A soft drink costs 30 million Zimbabwean dollars, a chicken 200 million, a tank of gas 1.8 billion.
As a campaign tactic, Mr. Mugabe in the past few weeks tried to win support by quintupling the salaries of public employees. But the pay scales were still so paltry they did not cover bus fare to and from work.

Moreover, the wages were directly deposited in bank accounts, and those who wanted to remove their money before inflation flattened its value were by law restricted to daily withdrawals of 500 million Zimbabwean dollars, about $14. Lines at the banks, as with those for food, have been long.

"We live with shortages of everything: food, medicine, petrol," said Terrence Muti, a Harare businessman who lined up to vote at 4 a.m. "I wanted to be sure I was able to cast my vote against Mugabe."

"This time, he won't win," Mr. Muti added. "The atmosphere is different. Things have been calm. There hasn't been the usual amount of pre-election violence. The opposition has more or less been able to campaign freely."

Those impressions have held true. And some people hope that, like many other things in Zimbabwe, the mechanisms for the rigging of elections have fallen apart from wear. Systematic cheating, after all, requires a tongue-in-groove apparatus within the government's inner circle. But there have been signs of late that this core is no longer solid.

There are two main challengers for the presidency. Along with Mr. Tsvangirai is Simba Makoni, who came from that very circle. He was once finance minister and served in the politburo of the governing party, the Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front. Now he is daring to take on the boss — and he claims encouragement from many of those at Mr. Mugabe's side.

At a joint news conference Thursday, the two aspiring candidates complained that the fix was already in for Mr. Mugabe, with the voting rolls absurdly swollen with the names of fabricated voters living on empty lots. Dead people were listed as living, including some who would roll over in their graves if their votes were miscast. One such name belonged to Ian Smith, the nation's last white prime minister, who led the country when it was still called Rhodesia.

Mr. Mugabe called those allegations lies and once again berated his opponents as puppets of Britain and other Western nations. The president has barred election observers from the United States and the European Union. At the same time, journalists from most Western news agencies, including The New York Times, have been denied credentials.

To win the presidency, a candidate must receive a majority of the votes. If that does not happen, the two top vote-getters will meet in a runoff three weeks from now. Mr. Mugabe dismissed that possibility.

"We are not used to boxing matches where we go from Round 1 to Round 2," he said Saturday. "We just knock each other out."

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