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Manuel's outburst misses the point
Peta Thornycroft
August 28, 2007

Trevor Manuel got hot under the collar in parliament last Tuesday, saying the best South Africa could do about the crisis in Zimbabwe would be to encourage its citizens to solve their own problems. Quite.

Then, getting more irritated, he brought Iraq into the debate: "For those who don't understand, I ask that President Bush recruit them and send them to Iraq. Then they will understand what regime change is about." Quite.

But Manuel has a short memory. That is certainly not what Zimbabweans wanted - regime change the George Bush way. They wanted regime change the other way, through the ballot box.

Very, very regretfully, South Africa chose to impede that.

The South African government's election observer group, led by its own election supremo, Brigalia Bam, overlooked overwhelming evidence that Mugabe's 2002 victory in the presidential election was dishonestly won.

The voice of the South African observer group carried the day in Africa. Even worse, South Africa decided at least 10 days before the elections that the poll would be adjudicated as having been "credible and legitimate".

Patricia de Lille was the only election observer in the Harare High Court to witness yet another argument over disgraceful new election laws just 11 hours before polling booths opened.

South African observers saw well-behaved queues of people determined to vote, however long it took, but who would be unable to exercise their democratic right because Mugabe had dramatically reduced the number of polling stations in urban opposition strongholds.

Manuel may have forgotten that Brig-Gen Douglas Nyikayaramba from Zimbabwe National Army headquarters organised the army to run the presidential election of 2002.

He claimed to have retired from the military at the time.

After the poll he was given a previously white-owned farm at Nyabira, 40km north of Harare, and is now commander of 2 Brigade at Cranborne Barracks.

The election machinery which Nyikayaramba controlled also delayed people who eventually got to the front of the endless queues to cast their votes in high density areas. At one queue I watched it took 75 minutes for a woman to vote.

MDC President Morgan Tsvangirai immediately challenged Mugabe's victory in court.

More than two years after the election and seven court orders later, he eventually got access to ballot boxes in 12 constituencies.

The documented results of the search showed that the results announced by the election "command centre" run by the army in Harare did not coincide with the ballot papers in the boxes.

There was also some double voting, 2 000 in one rural constituency, but no ballot box stuffing.

The command centre was off-limits to journalists.

The South African observers certainly did not check out the command centre in 2002, and did not even know there was a command centre in the 2005 general election.

Despite voting delays - tens of thousands in Harare never even got to vote - secret, last-minute voter registration, appalling violence against opposition polling agents, candidates, supporters etc, Tsvangirai actually won the 2002 presidential poll by a small margin.

Mugabe's 15% victory was manufactured by the army in the command centre.

So, Zimbabweans had tried very hard to bring about democratic regime change.

Maybe it is recent events Manuel was thinking about when he became cross in parliament last week: that many Zimbabweans who want democratic regime change have not been doing their cause much favour recently.

The vibrant young MDC had already started sliding into disunity even before the presidential poll, but certainly we, the foreign press, did not know that.

The first known intra-party violence took place in June 2001, when a young woman activist in Harare was beaten up by thugs loyal to Tsvangirai, accused of being sister to Secretary-General Welshman Ncube. She was not his sister, she just shared the same common surname.

There were other violent episodes within the MDC in 2004 and 2005, we later found out. We discovered there were cliques and tribalism and vast sums of money had gone missing.

People were accusing each other of working for Zanu-PF and or President Thabo Mbeki, stealing farms, secretly owning shopping malls, doing secret deals with then British prime minister Tony Blair at the G8 summit in Gleneagles etc.

Tsvangirai violated the MDC constitution over a narrow vote in his sharply divided national executive committee supporting participation in senate elections in 2005.

He also said "so be it" if the MDC split as a result. He also lied to the press about that vote.

His call for a boycott of senate elections in November 2005 was enormously successful.

But there was, as usual, no follow-up, and so the momentum disappeared and Mugabe became the winner as he could use the senate seats further to extend his patronage to a new bunch of Zanu-PF cronies.

And it has been downhill all the way since then. Most civil society organisations dropped their neutrality and supported Tsvangirai after the split and their donors did not seem to mind.

The new umbrella organisation, Save Zimbabwe, which seems to have resources, is largely an extension of the Tsvangirai faction.

Donors chose sides, mostly Tsvangirai's, even if they believed he had failed to provide effective leadership.

Tsvangirai scuppered an election co-operation agreement between the two factions in May after 10 months of negotiations.

The other faction, led by Arthur Mutambara, was exasperated and will field its own candidates in the next polls due in March. At a recent press conference Mutambara lashed out at Tsvangirai, which embarrassed his colleagues.

So the split shows no hope of being papered over in an election alliance, and each faction will put up its own candidates.

The winner will be Mugabe, who may now feel confident that a deeply divided opposition means he does not have to beat people up or cheat to win the elections next March.

Maybe this is what Manuel was thinking about.

He must have forgotten what went on in 2002 when his colleagues chose Mugabe's violence and cheating over the will of the majority of Zimbabwean people. - Mercury Foreign Service

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