Zimbabwe's election challenge

PhD student Moses Chikowero (Danny Abriel Photo)

Zimbabweans continue to wait with trepidation into the third week for the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission (ZEC) to confirm what has already become common knowledge: that Robert Mugabe and his ZANU (PF) party have lost the presidential election.

The Morgan Tsvangirai-led opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) resorted to the ‘parallel market’ to tally and declare its victory last week, thanks to an amendment to the electoral law that allowed results to be posted outside polling stations. Meanwhile, the ZANU (PF)-appointed ZEC continues to talk about “logistical” problems that are preventing it from confirming what the world already knows now, namely the end of Mugabe’s 28-year stranglehold on power.

The ‘parallel market’ has disabled ZANU (PF)’s hands to prevent unmitigated rigging of the results, even though there still is widespread suspicion that ZEC manipulated the results to allow the MDC only a small margin in its parliamentary victory, finally announced after another suspiciously long silence by ZEC. To ice those suspicions, ZANU (PF) has now logged court challenges accusing the MDC of stealing more than two dozen and half of the parliamentary seats, which the (combined) MDC won, 110 to ZANU (PF)’s 97. Considering that ZEC is a ZANU (PF)-appointed body, the party’s charges that the MDC bought off some ZEC officials to ‘miscount’ ballots can only be disingenuous and frivolous. They are also demanding a total recount of the presidential ballots before the results are even announced, undermining the MDC’s own court application lodged at the end of last week to compel ZEC to release of the results. ZEC officials are ZANU (PF) appointees and their conduct has already demonstrated how thoroughly compromised they are.

Confirming that ZEC has been having Nicodemus consultations with ZANU (PF), the latter has been talking about a run-off against Tsvangirai since last week, which a demoralized Mugabe will likely undertake under duress from his securocrats. Mugabe has become a puppet of his ministers and military cabal, who clearly won’t have a life after him. The law requires a run-off within 21 days of the first elections.

Meanwhile, diplomats in Harare and at the UN say Mugabe is planning to use the Presidential (Emergency) Powers Act to declare a 90-day delay to allow his party to regroup and reintroduce the militia edge that helped to controversially hand him victories in previous elections since 2000. Tsvangirai was able to exploit the relative absence of state violence to penetrate the rural areas and demystify Mugabe’s myth that these are his strongholds. But now Tsvangirai is rightly worried and reluctant to participate in a run-off that everybody knows will be determined by violence.

Already, the feared veterans of the independence war, who were used in the past to beat up opponents, marched through Harare last Friday, and reports indicate that several militia bases are being set up throughout the country. Opposition party offices have been raided and foreign journalists accused of reporting without government accreditation have been detained since last week. At the same time, ballot boxes have been seized in some parts of the country amid ZANU (PF) allegations that some ZEC officials have confessed to rigging the election in favour of the MDC.

While Zimbabweans await the outcome of the MDC’s High Court application to have the presidential results released, the latter has yet to rule whether the application itself is really urgent! The legal route is muddy, considering that the MDC’s court challenges against ZANU (PF) electoral fraud in previous elections were all rendered meaningless by subsequent elections while the courts sat on them.

The MDC has demonstrated total commitment to peaceful means against ZANU (PF)’s obduracy, but some sections of Zimbabwean society are now growing increasingly impatient. Millions of people of the Zimbabwean diaspora – most of them victims of Mugabe’s torture or economic mismanagement – have lost faith in the language of peace. They talk now Chimurenga – the need to forcibly remove the political dinosaurs.

The trouble is that ZANU (PF) also thrives on violence. In fact, the regime’s suspected directive to ZEC to withhold announcing the presidential election results may well be a calculated strategy to provoke Zimbabweans to erupt onto the streets, so that the government could use that as a pretext to both annul the difficult-to-rig results and impose undisguised military rule. The language of coups dominated the run-up to the election, with Mugabe’s military and police appointees announcing that they would not “salute anybody without liberation war credentials,” in apparent reference to Tsvangirai.

Any talk of a military invasion would be music to Mugabe’s party, which has fought its elections on a manifesto of guarding the country’s hard-won sovereignty. Mugabe’s party regards the MDC as puppets of western governments, particularly of the former colonial power, Britain. It is in this light that the British government’s rumblings last week about a military invasion and a ready economic aid package for an MDC government make unfortunate reading. They feed into Mugabe’s anti-colonial rhetoric to justify an intensified repression of genuine grievances and distract Zimbabweans’ imminent victory over the illegitimate regime. Zimbabweans are unlikely to tear each other apart; they know their common enemy. Yet ‘democracy’ delivered Iraq-style won’t help them either. Rather, a full-out diplomatic offensive as suggested by Tsvangirai will likely bring down the lid on the rejected Mugabe era.   

Zimbabwe native Moses Chikowero is a PhD candidate at Dalhousie University.

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