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Local government elections and the Zimbabwe voter
Eldred Masunungure
November 10, 2006

http://www.zimonline.co.za/Article.aspx?ArticleId=438

University of Zimbabwe political studies lecturer Eldred Masunungure says MDC must go back to the drawing board if it is to win back the confidence of the people

Two contending theses stand in opposition to each other in trying to explain the contours and dynamics of electoral politics in Zimbabwe.

One distinguished school of thought has it that Zimbabwean politics is all or largely about ethnicity and ethnic struggles.

The foremost authority on this was the late Professor Masipula Sithole who used the ethnicity framework to account for the dynamics of nationalist politics in his seminal work appropriately entitled: Zimbabwe: Struggles within the Struggle.

At the time of his untimely death, I know he was preparing a sequel to this on Zimbabwe’s struggles after the struggle.

The other and recent explanation is the rural-urban argument according to which ethnicity, even if it were salient at one point, has lost its explanatory potency.

In its place is the rural-urban divide.

The post-2000 binary division of the Zimbabwean electorate into rural and urban is now legendary. This spatial partition corresponds almost neatly to the twofold polarisation of political society in the country.

ZANU PF rules the roost in the rural areas while its eternal rival, the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), holds sway in the urban areas.

The rural local government polls served to confirm the unrivalled hegemony of the ruling ZANU PF and the feeble and shallow presence of the opposition formations in rural Zimbabwe.

Previous national elections have equally affirmed the MDC’s supremacy in the country’s urban centres. Virtually all post-2000 elections have also served to demonstrate the hypnotic hold of the opposition forces in the three Matabeleland provinces, again seemingly confirming the regional/ethnic argument about the enduring salience of primordial considerations in voting behaviour.

The Rural District Council (RDC) and previous national elections also betray Zimbabwe’s fragmented political culture.

Further, the last rural elections have provided more ammunition for the ‘voter apathy’ thesis, a thesis that mistakenly argues that voters shun the polls because they are not interested.

I contest this thesis and interpretation of voter ‘apathy’.

What are the facts about the last slate of elections? The Table below is based on a computation of the results as published in the various media.

Results of RDC Elections

Source: The Herald (1/11/06) and Zimbabwe Independent (3/11/06).

Uncontested Seats: The first level of analysis naturally focuses on the seats won unopposed. ZANU PF won nearly 40 percent of its 1 247 seats unopposed.

Surely there must be something fundamentally wrong about the electoral process and those who participate in it. Could it be that the MDC was disorganised and therefore failed to field candidates in more than one third of the wards in the 59 RDCs?

Or were there ‘intervening’ variables that tilted the scales in ZANU PF’s favour? If the former, then woe betide the MDC for it represents a fatal indictment of its electoral (and political) incompetence.

The 482 seats were won unopposed at the end of nomination on 20 September 2006.

Predictably, the ‘winning’ party was ecstatic with ZANU PF, through its president, Robert Mugabe declaring that the party was in an unchallenged political position: "We are in a strong position because the other parties have lost confidence in themselves and they are desperate. They know the people don’t like them by and large."

President Mugabe then ‘advised’ the opposition to work hard to win the confidence of Zimbabweans. But did the opposition surrender the 482 wards on a silver platter?

The two MDC factions cried foul after ‘failing’ to nominate candidates in these wards, claiming that ZANU PF played ‘polytricks’ with the electoral procedures one of which involved roping in ‘traditional’ authorities to provide or rather deny aspiring candidates ‘clearance’ letters to verify that the candidates were bona fide residents of the wards.

ZANU PF naturally pleads ‘not guilty’ to the charge and points at the MDC’s ignorance of electoral procedures, a position that is supported by the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission.

Even if the MDC claim is correct, it begs the question of where its ‘intelligence’ arm was when all these ‘goings on’ were taking place or being mooted, or does it not have any. Is it not supposed to sniff and ferret out intelligence information on such ‘plots’?

Whatever the validity of the ‘polytricks’ accusation, my informed guess is that the governing party would have genuinely and competitively romped to victory in more than 90 percent of the affected wards.

It would also have had the golden opportunity of testing its real strength in the wards and that of its rivals. If the allegation is valid, then ZANU PF self-destructively denied itself this vital piece of information.

In short, it was neither necessary nor compulsory for the ruling party to go this extra mile. By so doing, it simply betrays its allergy to competitive elections and confirms the residual grip of the one-party mentality.

Contested Seats: The two factions of the MDC only managed to capture 81 (less than 10 percent) of the contested seats but taken as a whole, they won a paltry 7 percent of the total wards.

This is dismal performance by any standard irrespective of the circumstances.

It is thus difficult to appreciate the jubilation expressed by the Tsvangirai-led MDC spokesman, Nelson Chamisa who reportedly remarked: "While we are certainly disappointed by the Kadoma loss, we are nonetheless ecstatic that we managed to win some wards in the rural areas" and that "now we have pockets of councillors in and around Zimbabwe."

An aspiring governing party should never celebrate winning just "pockets" of wards particularly after fielding as many as 680 candidates and winning in only 40 wards (a 6 percent success rate).

Eleven of the seats were actually won in one RDC, Binga. Later, Chamisa was close the mark when he commented that "Apathy won the polls because the electorate no longer has confidence in the electoral system and its outcome."

Commentaries on the outcome of the local government elections have ranged from harsh to pessimistic with The Herald editorial (04/11/06) dismissing the MDC factions as "a bunch of immature political upstarts who have no vision to take this country to the Promised Land" and ‘advising’ the two MDC factions to "just shut up!"

The Zimbabwe Independent offered a pessimistic diagnosis: "Results of rural district council elections held last weekend have illustrated that opposition parties still have an uphill task to weaken the chokehold ZANU PF has on rural voters. Statistics also paint a picture of an opposition struggling to convince rural voters to take them seriously as a challenger to ZANU PF."

Meanwhile, in urban Kadoma, the MDC was also trounced in a low voter turnout. Incumbent Mayor Fani Phiri of the ruling ZANU PF attracted 4 614 votes against the 2 491 for his MDC challenger, Jonas Ndenda.

With only just over 7 000 voters bothering to go to the ballot box out of a registered voter population of 42 000 (i.e. only about 17 percent voter turnout) then surely there is something gravely wrong. The crucial question then is: what is it that is wrong?

Towards an Explanation: The first and most common ‘explanation’ is that of voter apathy. This is the orthodox explanation and the line of argument taken by Ellen Kandororo-Dingani in her contribution entitled "Voter apathy dilutes value of democracy" in the Zimbabwe Independent (3/11/06).

This was a critical expose more of what is wrong with the institutional and legal framework governing elections than an insight into the thinking processes going on in the voter’s mind.

The problem with voter apathy arguments is that they fail to distinguish, as Professor Sithole did, between voter apathy and voter boycott.

Apathy means lack of interest or concern; it means indifference bordering on the "I don’t care". Thus defined, "voter apathy" means lack of interest or concern by the voter about how he/she is governed.

It is indifference to how and who conducts public affairs. To this extent, Zimbabweans are like ‘sleeping dogs’!

A "stay away", on the other hand, is a "boycott"; it is a clear but unspoken statement or an expression of disapproval; it is a deliberate political statement.

Defined in this way, in a voter stay away, the voter is protesting against something in the electoral process, particularly it’s legitimacy, and efficacy - whether the voter can change anything through the electoral process.

In a boycott or stay away, the citizen is communicating something to authorities; it is a deviant or perhaps unorthodox way of speaking truth to power.

I submit that what happened in Kadoma and the RDC elections was more of a voter ‘boycott’ than voter ‘apathy’. I maintain that Zimbabweans – both elite and masses - are rational political actors that know which side of their bread is buttered.

Voter apathy suggests some fatalism that then clouds one’s logic and rationality. In other, words, an apathetic voter unconsciously does not vote. On the other hand, a poll boycotter consciously and therefore rationally decides not to vote after engaging in cost-benefit analysis of the act of voting.

If, in his/her calculation, it does not pay to vote, the prospective voter does other ‘productive’ things but does so knowingly. Enough on this.

The second possibility that accounts for the low voter turnout is that the Kadoma and RDC elections were not regarded, by the discerning multitude of voters, as ‘critical elections.’

Critical elections are those that produce major or fundamental shifts in policy and therefore where, citizens, through the electoral process, produce fundamental changes in public policy.

From this standpoint, the Kadoma and RDC elections did not pass the ‘critical elections’ acid test. Nothing dramatic or spectacular could be expected from those elections, the rational voter concluded, and accordingly abstained from voting.

The third possibility is more complex but crucial in explaining the MDC’s dismal performance, especially in Kadoma. A political party can be said to be composed of two groups of supporters: active or core party supporters; and passive party supporters.

Their propensity to vote can be speculated to take the following lines: core supporters will almost always vote and take part in campaigning for that vote; passive supporters will sometimes vote but rarely take part in electoral campaigns.

Passive supporters are a group in transition and potentially very malleable i.e. their allegiances are unstable. Depending on a particular configuration of events, passive party supporters can either ‘graduate’ into its core supporters or even slide into passive party opponents.

I would suggest that the trick lies in the mix of the political stratum that a party is able to capture. Ideally, and at a minimum, any party should be able to maintain its base of core supporters while also retaining and/or enlarging the frontier of its passive supporters.

A party should start to be deeply worried when its core support base is thinning while its passive supporters are also melting away. I suspect that this is what is happening to the MDC.

Where are the MDC’s hard core supporters, that is, those who support the party through thick and thin and "till death do us part"? A low voter turnout is essentially a battle between the core supporters of the competing parties or candidates.

The Kadoma elections clearly reveal that the MDC’s core supporters are dwindling; they are melting away. This suggests an unstable or shifting core supporters’ base while that of the ruling party remains intact or stable.

What appears to be happening is that the MDC’s core supporters have transmuted into either passive supporters or parochials or even passive opponents. If this is the case, then the MDC surely has a case to answer.

What accounts for this transformation? What is the MDC not doing that allows this attitudinal metamorphosis in allegiances? Is the party sleeping on the job? If the latter, what accounts for this delinquency?

Are its supporters taking the exit option and if so, why? Let me pursue the latter question.

I see two dimensions of the exit option, both arising from a rational calculation by the Zimbabwean voter. The first is psychological and it entails the psychological ‘migration’ of the voter from being an active or core supporter to become a passive supporter and from being a passive supporter to a parochial.

The golden moment for the MDC (1999-2002) was when multitudes of passive supporters became active supporters. Circumstantial evidence suggests that the reverse process is taking place.

If indeed this is so, then again the MDC has a case to answer for ‘allowing’ this transmutation to proceed unhindered. Why is it ‘allowing’ this ‘support drain’?

The second dimension of the voter’s exit option is physical and involves the MDC supporters physically leaving their constituency. Though there is no hard, systematic evidence, anecdotal evidence indicates that the typical MDC supporter is a highly mobile person, almost always ‘thinking’ of leaving his/her place of abode for ‘greener’ pastures, often outside the country.

The typical MDC supporter was originally a middle class person who possessed less of the material property and more of intellectual property. This supporter could easily ‘persuade’ himself/herself to physically migrate with his/her intellectual property and without risking loss of much material property.

In short, the MDC supporter has nothing or little to lose by taking the physical exit option. In the context of the on-going economic meltdown, the incentive to stay is very low, if what you possess is more of intellectual than material property.

This is for the simple reason that the hyperinflationary economic environment results in a staggering devaluation of intellectual property in the open market while simultaneously overvaluing material property.

The intellectual property owners have little stake in remaining in the country and no doubt largely explains the country’s brain drain. These people are or were more likely to be the MDC’s support base.

The import of this is that the physical exit option, courtesy of the rapid devaluation of intellectual property (itself courtesy of the deepening economic malaise) represents a grave threat to the support base of the MDC in the short and medium term.

Further, it is my submission that the physical exit option is a predominantly urban phenomenon while the psychological exit option is more of a rural tendency.

In the rural areas, the ruling party is able (albeit with increasing difficulty) to maintain its core and passive support base partly (if not largely) via the patronage governing modality in the form of food aid, heavily subsidised grain sales, food for work, land resettlement and provision of other valued services like agricultural inputs (fertiliser, maize seed, etc).

Under such circumstances, even the hardcore MDC person is tempted to psychologically either desert the party (in typical rational response to the first law of survival – self preservation) or migrate from active to passive support.

Either way, the MDC suffers, more fatally so in the first scenario. The difficulty the MDC faces is its incapacity to socially reproduce its active support base, especially in the rural areas.

In short, while the MDC is losing its core support base, ZANU PF has been able to retain its own. In Kadoma, the MDC’s core supporters (who are more inclined to vote) are now in the minority.

The MDC support base is now overwhelmingly composed of passive supporters (who are less inclined to vote) who were either once active supporters or have no incentive to be active supporters.

And to the extent that passive supporters vote only sometimes and not always, this is a big electoral loss for the party. Here lies the challenge for the MDC and its allies.

What strategies and tactics will arouse (or rather re-arouse) the passive supporters to take part in the electoral race? Though the ruling party may face the same problem, it is of a lower magnitude in that it has managed, through fair and foul means, to keep its active support base.

Overall, in the interests of electoral democratic development, both the MDC and the ruling ZANU PF – and indeed civic society – must craft appropriate and effective arousal strategies and techniques to excite the Zimbabwean masses in things political.

Otherwise, Zimbabweans are in danger of becoming less and less of political animals and more and more of politically parochial animals.

*Eldred Masunungure is a lecturer in the Department of Politics and Administrative Studies at the University of Zimbabwe.

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