Back to Index

Popular reactions to state repression: Operation Murambatsvina in Zimbabwe
Michael Bratton & Eldred Masunungure
September, 2006

Download this document
- Acrobat PDF version (241KB)
If you do not have the free Acrobat reader on your computer, download it from the Adobe website by clicking here.

Abstract
In May 2005, the government of Zimbabwe launched Operation Murambatsvina (OM), a state-sponsored campaign to stifle independent economic and political activity in the country’s urban areas. This article employs a national probability sample survey to analyse the popular reactions of ordinary Zimbabweans to this landmark event. It shows that the application of state repression succeeds at some goals, fails at others, and has powerful unintended effects. We report that the scope of OM was wide and that the main victims of OM were younger, unemployed families whom state security agents saw as potential recruits for social unrest. Whereas OM undoubtedly disrupted the informal economy, we show that it did not succeed in banishing urban dwellers to rural areas or permanently shutting down illicit trade. Moreover, the crackdown thoroughly discredited the police and other state institutions. We also demonstrate that state repression emboldened its victims, deepening polarisation between political parties and fortifying the ranks of Zimbabwe’s opposition movement.

Rulers who gain office through violence are prone to resort to repression; they are especially likely to do so when they run out of options for governing. If they risk losing elections or confront an empty treasury, then the urge to cling to power may easily tempt such rulers to call out armed forces against their own citizens. Yet the application of state violence is an extreme policy choice whose consequences are particularly unpredictable under conditions of political or economic crisis.

Born as a liberation movement, the Zimbabwe African National Union- Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF) government of Robert Mugabe has never shied away from violence. The harsh repression of political dissent in Matabeleland in the early 1980s is only the most blatant example.¹ A quarter century later, ZANU-PF has exhausted its capacity for good governance.² It is now able to extend its tenure only through a series of increasingly disputed elections marred by intimidation, vote buying, and ballot fraud. For abusing its political opponents, the Mugabe government has been driven into international isolation, mainly by the Western powers but also from selected members of the African Union. And, by embarking on an ill-considered and chaotically implemented programme of land seizures, it has turned the country from an agricultural exporter to a needy recipient of foreign food aid. By 2005, as a result of gross economic mismanagement, the government was essentially bankrupt and desperate to gain access to dwindling supplies of foreign exchange.

In May of that year, in the aftermath of parliamentary elections that confirmed that ZANU-PF had lost political control of Zimbabwe’s urban areas, the government cracked down. Its security apparatus launched a massive ‘urban clean up’ campaign called Operation Murambatsvina (OM) that was justified as a strategy to eradicate illegal dwellings and eliminate informal trade. As with earlier attacks on journalists and opposition parties, colonial-style legislation was invoked, in this case to regulate how people could house themselves or make a living. Analysts and observers inside and outside the country commented that the crackdown was performed in an indiscriminate manner and with excessive force. Because it breached national and international laws guiding evictions and undermined the livelihoods of large numbers of people, the operation was broadly condemned as a gross violation of human rights.

This article measures the popular reactions of ordinary Zimbabweans to OM by means of a national probability sample survey. Administered in October 2005 as part of Afrobarometer Round ³ in Zimbabwe, the survey instrument contained a battery of questions about the impact of the OM campaign on the residential and economic circumstances of respondents. These data cast light on important questions: Who were the victims of OM? What hardships did they experience? How did they react to repression? By comparing the economic conditions and political affiliations of Zimbabwean citizens in late 2005 with the results of previous surveys, it is also possible to arrive at conclusions about whether the ZANU-PF government helped or hurt itself by cracking down.

As an instrument of governance, state repression is crude and costly. If the balance of power favours the government, then deployment of the police and army against citizens may achieve certain short-term objectives. For example, the crackdown in Zimbabwe may have temporarily met the primary policy goal of preempting political protest. It may even have had a wider scope of indirect effects — for example, in deepening the psychological trauma of Zimbabwean citizens — than initially intended. But it clearly failed to meet key official objectives. According to our survey data, OM did not lead to a massive relocation of populations from urban to rural areas or to the permanent demise of the informal economy. Most importantly, the use of repression prompted a backlash of unintended consequences. In Zimbabwe, a strategy of coercion ultimately undermined the legitimacy of key state institutions, notably the police force, and boosted overt political support for the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), the main opposition party. It may even have emboldened the populace, particularly the very victims of state repression.

Download full document

1. Disturbing accounts of the human toll are given by the Catholic Commission for Justice and Peace in Zimbabwe, Breaking the Silence, Building True Peace: A report on the disturbances in Matabeleland and the Midlands, 1980 to 1988 (Legal Resources Foundation, Harare, 1997) and Richard Werbner, Tears of the Dead (Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh, 1991). On systematic electoral violence, see Norma Kriger, ‘ZANU-PF strategies in general elections, 1980–2000: discourse and coercion’, African Affairs 104 (2005), pp. 1–34. On the violence associated with land invasions and crackdowns on journalists, see Stephen Chan, Robert Mugabe: A life of power and violence (I.B. Taurus, London, 2003) and Andrew Meldrum, Where We Have Hope: A memoir of Zimbabwe (Atlantic Monthly Press, New York, 2004).
   
2. For an insightful collection of current analyses by a variety of Zimbabwean commentators, see David Harold-Berry (ed.), Zimbabwe: The past is the future (Weaver Press, Harare, 2004).
   
3. ‘Zimbabwe police target minibuses’, BBC News, 24 May 2005.

Please credit www.kubatana.net if you make use of material from this website. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License unless stated otherwise.

TOP