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How Mugabe's faithful became the opposition
Tracy McVeigh, The Observer
March 23, 2008

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/mar/23/zimbabwe

A man in his late fifties pushed a homemade bicycle through the crowds gathered for an impromptu political rally in Ebworth, a rural suburb of Zimbabwe's capital, Harare. His shoes were made of strips of rubber tyre, an old skill the fighters learned during the hardships of the independence struggle.

They marked Gibson Nyandoro out as a war veteran as clearly as if he had been wearing a sign around his neck, and as people saw him they stopped singing. Some of the bolder ones began to boo and hiss.

War veterans are Robert Mugabe's faithful, men who have given his presidency and his Zanu-PF party their unwavering loyalty for almost 28 years. They are the ones who, armed with machetes and guns, did his dirty work for him during the violent land seizures of 2000 when white farmers were terrorised and beaten and forced off their land. They are Zanu-PF to the core.

So when, five days ago, Nyandoro, 58, rattled his bike into the centre of the opposition rally - he said later he thought his heart would stop in fear - and told the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) candidate and her supporters that a group of his comrades had sent him to ask if they would be welcome to join, it was an unprecedented act. It was time for a change, he said, to great cheers. 'We don't want this power-hungry dictator any more.

We have lost our dignity through this ruling party and have gained nothing in return.'

Zimbabweans go to the polls on Saturday and they want the unthinkable - the 84-year-old Mugabe gone. But the question is, how will this be achieved? In Harare last Wednesday, as Mugabe's three-helicopter convoy thrashed across the sky, breaking the quiet of an under-worked capital city, the talk was of the President's late-night passing of a new decree - no longer would his police have to remain outside polling stations on Saturday, as stated in law. They would instead be posted inside, ostensibly to help the illiterate or the disabled with their ballot papers. It was the latest in a series of last-minute tinkerings with election legislation by the ruling party.

'It's a disgrace and we will challenge it in the courts,' said the MDC senator Sekai Holland. 'Ordinary people are terrified of the police and many will be deterred from going to vote at all, if not intimidated into voting for Mugabe and Zanu-PF.'

No one knows yet how much of an effort Mugabe may put into trying to rig the election. There are about 68 official election monitors invited in from outside the country and about 11,000 polling stations. The government has refused to make the voters' roll available for inspection to the opposition, but there are claims from government sources that it contains the names of dead people. There are four choices on the presidential ballot paper: Robert Mugabe; the former Finance Minister, Simba Makoni; MDC leader Morgan Tsvangirai; and an unknown independent called Langton Towungana, who seems to have given up before he even started. Under Zimbabwean law, when several candidates contest the presidency the winning candidate must receive at least 51 per cent of the vote, otherwise a second round between the two leading candidates must be held within 21 days.

Whether it goes to a second round or not, there will be two results - he who gets the lion's share of the vote and he who will take power. Many feel they are depressingly unlikely to be the same person. One of the few polls of voters Zimbabwean academics attempted to carry out showed Tsvangirai leading, with Mugabe second and Makoni third. But with more than 20 per cent of people questioned refusing to answer, this can only be seen as the roughest of guides.

There are very real fears that the resultant political discord and outrage at an election seen as unfair will boil over into violence in Zimbabwe's more polarised and volatile areas.

Already last week in Epworth seven people walking home from a rally and wearing MDC T-shirts, including a woman carrying her baby, were attacked and beaten by a gang of young Mugabe supporters. The mother, Vida Tawa, 35, had been smacked in the face with a golf club and her year-old son has a nasty head wound. 'They said to me, "Why do you wear this T-shirt, are you traitors?",' she said. 'No one feels safe here.'

Donald, an MDC campaign worker, told how his whole family had been divided by this election. His brother - a member of the much-feared Central Intelligence Organisation (CIO) - would no longer speak to him.

Lydia, 18, has joined the MDC 'peace units'. 'It is a defence against the Zanu militias who terrorise us,' she says. 'Now I am a fighter.'

But Senator Holland says she is trying hard to stop talk of violence among her own young supporters. 'They're not glorifying violence, they want to defend themselves if it comes. It's unavoidable that the Zanu culture of violence has permeated our whole society.'

In an exclusive downtown Harare hotel last week, Makoni's once unthinkable political campaign was in full swing after months of secrecy and plotting.

Makoni announced his defection from the party on 5 February - Super Tuesday, as his supporters dubbed it - in order to stand as an independent against his former boss, Mugabe.

The hotel's porters were all of a flutter at the sight of the small man in a yellow baseball hat printed with his own name sitting in their foyer, dwarfed by his security man and looking a lot older than the photograph on his posters. When Makoni goes off alone for a meeting elsewhere, the forces behind the campaign retire to the bar to discuss the next day's schedule over cold beer and hot peanuts.

A harried and bespectacled press spokesman is scribbling a timetable in his dog-eared notebook, then scoring everything out as minds change around him.

The most important voice here is that of Dr Ibbotson Mandaza, a former Zanu-PF member, Makoni's number two, and the chief conspirator in the breakaway plot.

'The bottom line is that there are only two candidates, not three: Simba and Morgan. Mugabe is gone,' Mandaza says. 'And Simba is flying.' He says if Makoni wins the presidential vote Tsvangirai can maybe have the vice-presidency, Mugabe can have a quiet retirement. 'Or maybe we'll send him to Surrey, the British and him like each other so much,' he laughed heartily.

'The level of self-interest in the ruling class in getting Mugabe out is huge, he is a useless, deranged old man. And his party is divided, in ruins, immobilised. This campaign crystallised because I was angry at the failure of the politburo guys to force Mugabe out. It became clear to me that the time was right for change. The decision to choose Simba was unanimous, for his clever mind and long experience in the corridors of power.'

But it is hard for Makoni to shake off the fact that he has only just left Zanu despite its years of mismanagement of Zimbabwe. 'Like most of us, Makoni was uncomfortable in government,' says Mandaza, then, irked by the question, he leans forward and glares at me. 'How did you get into the country?'

While Makoni stands for personality change at the top, there is a reluctance to talk about any other change other than 'the policy remains the same'.

Mandaza says Makoni is standing as an independent rather than forming a new party because the decision on a name has been 'deferred'. Many suspect that if he wins he would announce it as a victory for Zanu - a Zanu without Mugabe.

Due to either fear or hedging of bets, only one member of Mugabe's cabinet has so far come out of the shadows. Boasts that the party is split and that big names close to Mugabe are prepared to back Makoni have failed to materialise. In the bar Mandaza and the others are convinced that the next day will see that change and that the 'sleepers' will come forward. 'We have commitments,' says Mandaza.

The hints are heavy that these will be Vice-President Joice Mujuru and her husband Solomon, a powerful former army chief who crucially commands the support of the military. But early the next morning Mandaza receives a 'very disappointing' text and rages to colleagues in his office: 'How can they treat me like this?' Later, the clue to his fury is the story running on the front page of state-owned newspaper The Herald under the headline 'Gen Mujuru disowns Makoni' and quoting Mugabe as saying he had been assured of the general's support.

Whether this can change before election day is unclear; a lot of middle-class and business people are behind Makoni, seeing him as change, but at an acceptable pace.

The populist support commanded by Tsvangirai has too much of a whiff of socialism, with his talk of titles to land for the poor. But the votes of people in the countryside matter, and many people there still do not know who Makoni is or they cannot separate him in their minds from the regime he has just left.

At a Makoni rally in Mabvuku, about 20 minutes' drive from Harare, past the hanging rocks of Chiremba, where MDC activists sacrifice meagre stocks of sugar and flour for the paste to plaster the stones with Tsvangirai posters, several dozen supporters have been bused in to boost the numbers. The local children throw themselves into the spirit of the occasion, grabbing yellow flags and chanting, 'Simba, Simba', but many adults stand on the outskirts, just watching.

Sitting in the sun, one campaign worker says they are desperately short of election agents - party workers who attend polling stations on the day to help and observe. In the constituency she is working in she needs 48. So far she has eight. 'They are all too scared,' she said.

Tsvangirai chuckles when The Observer tells him this story later, in the garden of his modest Harare home. 'Scared or not interested? Zanu defectors are just people who want to protect their ill-gotten gains. We will win.

Mugabe may declare himself the winner whatever, but the people are demonstrating that we will win. You see, Zimbabweans have suffered enough.'

Tsvangirai talks at length of new policies, of land reforms and new links with the outside world. Perhaps most surprising is his talk of reconciliation.

'There cannot be a clean sweep when we get into power. History has taught us that is wrong. We must work together. But we cannot go back on the land reforms of 2000; that would be political suicide, but we also cannot condone what Zanu has done. What will be elected will be a transitional government for perhaps two years until we can have a referendum on a new constitution.'

And, like Makoni, Tsvangirai refuses to consider putting Mugabe on trial for the destruction of his country. 'He is an old man, he can live out his retirement here.' He claims that he may even consider a state funeral when the former hero of Zimbabwe's liberation struggle finally dies.

But Mugabe, who used 28 years of power systematically to ruin Zimbabwe's economy and land, to bring unnecessary suffering to its people and to chase three to four million of its population into exile overseas, is never going to go quietly.

While Makoni may yet pull in the big-name Zanu defectors he desperately needs, and Tsvangirai has managed to mobilise people in the vitally important rural constituencies, no one has yet managed to topple Mugabe.

The only thing that is clear is that, with farms lying idle in the hands of corrupt politicians, with electricity and water supplies unreliable, phone networks intermittent, medicines and doctors unavailable, open sewers running through the suburbs, unemployment at 80 per cent, numbers of Aids orphans multiplying daily, and prices rising so fast and to amounts so huge that even Zimbabweans can find no jokes to lighten the tragedy any more, times have never been so tough.

When Zimbabweans enter the police-manned polling stations, it will only be the tiniest of baby steps at the beginning of the journey to a new Zimbabwe.

From the fading grandeur of a swanky Harare hotel to the unsettled and hungry people struggling to survive from day to day in Ebworth, people want to see change.

The candidates:
Robert Mugabe - Zanu-PF
Once hailed as a model African democrat, the former Marxist guerrilla has held power since winning Zimbabwe's first election in 1980.

Morgan Tsvangirai - The Movement for Democratic Change
Emerged from a trade union background to become a leading opposition activist. The MDC inflicted a stunning blow on Zanu-PF's iron grip on power in the 2000 elections.

Simba Makoni - independent
Served in Mugabe's government for 10 years, most recently as Finance Minister. Supporters say he will reverse economic collapse and end political stalemate.

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