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2008 harmonised elections - Index of articles
Who
can bring Zimbabwe back to its glory days?
Bill Saidi,The Sowetan (SA)
February 22, 2008
http://www.sowetan.co.za/News/Article.aspx?id=711637
Of the three
presidential candidates in the March 29 elections, two are in their
50s and one will be 84 years. The preference is for the young people,
although a logical poser will be: what do they know about running
a country with the highest
inflation rate in the world and a currency so devalued it is
the laughing stock of the entire world? At its independence in 1980,
Zimbabwe-s currency was not at all ashamed or embarrassed
to be standing side by side with that of the former colonial master,
the British pound. If you stood it cheek to cheek with the mighty
US dollar, it managed to keep its upper lip stiff, its chest thrust
out, pugnaciously. It was no pushover. Who of the three candidates
has the foresight, nay, the courage, to bring it back to those truly
good old days when its strength was anchored in the country-s
agriculture and mining?
Today, nearly 28 years
after President Robert Mugabe was sworn in as its prime minister
by Lord Soames, the Zimdollar is worth very little. Mugabe himself,
though maintaining a cocky stance as we go into the elections, knows
his days are numbered, if not by Father Time, then by the winds
of change ushered in by an economic collapse which will probably
deal his ruling Zanu PF a fatal blow to the political solar plexus,
come March 29. Mugabe has said he is "raring to go" into
the contest. He is relying more on his past glory than on any tangible
feats of achievements during the last seven years. His land reform
programme, turned into a political gimmick for the 2000 parliamentary
elections, cost the country its status as the breadbasket of the
region, into simply a basket case. Agriculture, previously the mainstay
of the economy, plummeted in value, followed almost immediately
by a drop in the value of the dollar. The economy went into a tailspin,
shedding jobs like a withered msasa tree shedding leaves in a windstorm.
Millions of citizens fled the poverty and the political repression
that followed the economic collapse.
The competitors for the
top job, Morgan Tsvangirai of the Movement for Democratic Change,
and Simba Makoni of the non-political Mavambo (beginnings) movement
are promising change. For many voters, any change from Zanu PF is
glorious enough, even without the specifics. Yet victory for either
of them cannot be guaranteed: Zanu PF will not lie down and die
quietly. It still has its ace up its sleeve: the fact of being the
ruling party, controlling all the levers of the electoral process,
which it has used in the past to ensure victory. What most analysts
see is the combined electoral clout of the two opposition groups
overwhelming Zanu PF in the elections for the senate, the house
of assembly and the local government. In the presidential stakes,
Mugabe could score big in the rural areas, his stronghold, where
the fear of a return to the guerilla war of the 1970s has always
frightened the voters into preferring Zanu PF to any other party.
But it would seem that a clean sweep by Zanu PF is not in the offing.
What may be difficult to predict is how Zanu PF would react to a
rout. Mugabe has not repudiated his claim to having "many degrees
in violence". Zimbabweans may still be far from achieving the
Zimbabwe they want, the Zimbabwe they lost to Zanu PF...
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