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Zimbabwe's political watershed
Paul T Zeleza, Pambazuka News
April 08, 2008

http://www.pambazuka.org/en/category/comment/47203

Paul T Zeleza looks at the long road that might yet see Mugabe's downfall and calls for a democracy that ultimately serves the Zimbabwean people through political and economic enfranchisement

As of now, results for the presidential elections in Zimbabwe have not yet been declared, five days after the elections were held last Saturday, March 29. In the meantime, the results of the parliamentary elections, which had been announced at snail's pace by the Electoral Commission over the past few days are now complete. They show that President Mugabe's ruling party, ZANU-PF, has lost its parliamentary majority. The opposition party, MDC, has won 99 to ZANU-PF's 97 out of 210 parliamentary seats. Eleven other seats were won by an MDC splinter group, and one by an independent candidate. Thus the opposition has won 110; three seats remain to be contested in by-elections because they were postponed following the death of opposition candidates. The ruling party's loss of its parliamentary majority represents a shockwave in Zimbabwe's post-independence political history.

But the real earthquake would be President Mugabe's downfall. Thus, as crucial as the parliamentary elections are, it is the results of the presidential elections that everyone is waiting for with mounting anxiety. The Electoral Commission is appealing for patience and blames logistical problems in releasing the results. But all the evidence including the very delay in the announcement of the results indicates that the irascible octogenarian dictator, President Mugabe, is, at the very least, trailing the veteran opposition leader, Mr. Morgan Tsvangirai. In previous presidential elections (which were held separately from parliamentary elections) the predictable (the opposition would say predictably rigged) outcome was announced with a lot more alacrity and fanfare. Even more likely is the probability that President Mugabe has lost and his regime is trying to rig the elections. Outright rigging of the results will be difficult, but not impossible, because of a pre-election agreement among the parties that results should be posted outside each polling station: the opposition insisted on this to avoid blatant rigging that it suspected robbed it of victory in previous elections.

In the immediate ecstasy of the elections, the MDC claimed outright victory, that Mr. Tsvangirai had decisively beaten President Mugabe by 60% to 30%. Perusal and sampling of 435 of the 9,400 polling stations by the Zimbabwe Election Support Network, a coalition of civic groups, projected a more modest victory by the MDC leader. It indicated that Mr. Tsvangirai would receive between 47-51.8 percent to President Mugabe's 39.2-44.4 percent. In its latest announcement the MDC claims its leader has won 50.3 percent of the vote to President Mugabe's 43.8 percent. This is crucial figure: to avoid a runoff, the winner has to garner more than 50 percent of the popular vote. While conceding that the President failed to win 50 percent of the vote, for the first time in his twenty eight year reign, the government mouthpiece, The Herald, insists neither did Mr. Tsvangirai, thus making a runoff election later this month inevitable (according to the law, a runoff election has to be held in 21 days).

Zimbabwe and the wider southern African region, not to mention the rest of the continent and the so-called international community, are watching this unfolding political drama with intense interest and growing trepidation. In the absence of the presidential results, rumors are rife: about the shock and tensions within the ruling party with some of his lieutenants reportedly ready to ditch him, that there are negotiations between the opposition and the embattled president's advisors to ease him into resignation and retirement, and about the unpredictable machinations and loyalties of the security chiefs.

Expectations that the despised autocrat was too humiliated to stay are now giving way to fears that he will hang on and fight in the runoff election. Many political commentators believe that he will be trounced in a new election that is free and fair. That is the big question: will the mortally wounded tyrant be allowed by his security forces and political cronies who are running scared of losing their ill-gotten wealth built on the carcasses of deepening poverty of millions of workers and peasants, not to mention the immiseration of significant sections of the middle classes, to unleash the wrath of state power to terrorize the opposition into defeat?

Whatever happens next, it is not hard to explain the defeat of ZANU-PF and President Mugabe in the recent elections. A government that has impoverished its population as spectacularly as President Mugabe's inept dictatorship has done cannot maintain popular support. Zimbabwe's descent into the economic abyss has been staggering for a country not at war: inflation has apparently risen to a mindboggling rate of 164,900 percent, life expectancy has nearly been halved, and between a quarter and a third of the population has fled to neighboring countries and overseas. In this election Zimbabweans have shown that they have had enough of the Mugabe government's bankrupt stewardship of their well-being.

Predictable as it may seem from afar and in hindsight, what explains the opposition's victory is that support for President Mugabe's government finally collapsed in the rural areas, its political backbone since the liberation war from settler colonialism. It was in the enduring interests of repossessing land stolen by the European settlers under colonial rule and in the endearing name of the peasantry that the liberation war was fought and the violent land seizures embarked upon from the late 1990s after the British government reneged on the Lancaster House agreement and as the Mugabe government lost became increasingly unpopular thanks to its embrace of structural adjustment and abandonment of radical development policies including land reform. Yet, the peasantry benefited little from either, whose principal beneficiaries were functionaries of the political class. The urban working classes had long grown disenchanted with the tired socialist rhetoric of ZANU-PF which promised broad-based development but delivered unfettered neo-liberalism that benefited the elite that fragrantly flaunted its affluence as the country has sunken deeper into economic decline.

The rural peasantry did not simply catch up, as it were, with the urban working classes. Rural discontent has been growing. Indeed, the rural areas bore the brunt of economic decline and political terror as the regime sought to shore up its dwindling legitimacy and tattered revolutionary credentials by tightening its grip on the peasantry, its symbolic and substantive basis of power. The costs of the economic crisis, as manifested in food shortages and the politicization of food relief efforts, finally broke the proverbial patient backs of the peasantry.

Connecting the two, the peasantry and the working classes, the rural and the urban areas, and the country's other spatial and social divides, including the ethnicized divisions between the old Mashonaland and Matabeleland, which the Mugabe regime had manipulated to weaken the opposition and maintain its iron grip on power, was the draconian "Operation Murambatsvina", officially translated as "Operation Clean Up", but literally translated as "getting rid of the filth", through which the government sought to drain the cities including Harare, the capital, of political opposition. The operation was launched in 2005 and affected more than two million people. The bulk of the MDC's parliamentary seats from previous elections were located in the cities. This criminal evacuation program, which was widely condemned within Zimbabwe and internationally including by the United Nations, led to the destruction of the informal sector in the cities and the displacement of hundreds of thousands of people many of whom flocked to the increasingly destitute rural areas. This not only exacerbated rural poverty, but also helped dissolve some of the social and political boundaries, both real and imagined, between the rural and urban areas and dwellers, which raised national consciousness and reinforced opposition to the former liberation heroes turned into predators in power.

If we are indeed witnessing the death throes of the Mugabe dictatorship, the full credit for this goes to the long-suffering people of Zimbabwe, not the so-called international community, neither feeble regional organizations like SADC nor imperious western powers such as Britain or the United States who have little moral credibility in Africa's protracted struggles for democracy. It is also a testimony to the transformative power of the ballot box.

But as we have seen across Africa and elsewhere where dictatorship have fallen, the electoral process offers, at best, minimal conditions for democracy; full democracy, which is still a work in progress globally notwithstanding the conceit of the so-called mature democracies, must entail political and economic enfranchisement for all that goes beyond ritualized certifications of fractions of the political class every four or five years. And that requires eternal vigilance by civil society, continuous struggles against the self-serving political class. This is to suggest that sustaining and expanding democracy in Zimbabwe will be as hard as getting rid of the Mugabe dictatorship.

Given its social composition and the present regional and global conjunctures, the MDC will not, if and when it takes power, magically turn Zimbabwe around into a developmental democratic state and society: that will require building and sustaining cultures and communities of accountability.

* Paul T Zeleza is editor of The Zeleza Post.

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