Free elections in Zimbabwe? Not a chance!

In the normal course of life in a democratic society, elections are eagerly anticipated and highly dynamic events. The elections provide an opportunity for those in power to demonstrate how successful they have been in executing the mandate that was given to them by the electorate and, simultaneously, allows the electorate the opportunity to extend or terminate that mandate depending on how they perceive the government has performed. Well it is supposed to be that simple really. In practice it is not always that simple. Take the case of the forthcoming elections in Zimbabwe, for example.

You have a president leading a government that has been in power for 28 years, much of which has been under questionable mandates, seeking an endorsement for a further term of office. Over the period of his reign the national economy has crumbled, the currency of the country has been reduced to worthless paper, people are dying of hunger and disease, many of the citizens have fled to near and far places to seek relief from poverty and suffering. Yet and yet the president believes that he can secure another mandate from the people to continue to preside over the affairs of the state. Someone somewhere is either not being serious or is not being honest or both.

What is obvious to almost everyone, except the few fat cat generals, police chiefs and other beneficiaries of Mr Robert Mugabe’s highly poisonous largesse, is that the man has reached his endgame. The circumstances that have been created by and under his rule makes him unelectable even in a repressed and desperate society such as one Zimbabwe unfortunately finds itself in at the moment. To say that Mr Mugabe is highly unpopular is to be guilty of understatement. What has kept him in power over the past decade or so are repression, violence and electoral fraud. He has become a master at manipulating the machinery of state including the military and the judiciary, desperate party functionaries like the war veterans and traditional rulers to maintain his hold on power. And this has all been at a great cost to the generality of the Zimbabweans.

The elections coming at the end of this month present yet another opportunity for Mr Mugabe to strengthen his hold on power and to inflict further misery on the desperate and abused people of his once proud and wealthy nation. It will be argued, no doubt, that Mugabe is not contesting the elections against himself, that in Morgan Tsvangirai and Simba Makoni, he is facing credible and formidable opponents and that the electorate will, against all expectations, brave the violence and manipulation and vote for his ouster. That is wishful thinking. In my view, Mugabe has six factors in his favour.

The first is the elections administration mechanisms which are highly susceptible to manipulation and subversion. Starting with the so called independent electoral supervisory commission, it is quite evident that other than the name they go under, there is nothing independent about the commission. The members of the commission are picked by Mugabe and this single fact disqualifies them from being regarded as independent. Then you look at the voters’ roll, opposition parties and independent observers have complained bitterly that the voters’ roll is in shambles. This provides opportunity to manipulate the votes through ghost voters, constituency loading (i.e. moving voters from one constituencies of concentrated support to those were support is thin) and ballot box stuffing.

The second factor in favour of Mr Mugabe is the timing of the plebiscite. The elections were called at relatively short notice to catch the opposition off-guard and afford them as little time as possible to organise and campaign. At the time the elections were called there had been anticipation that there would be a postponement of the elections in the spirit of and as an outcome of the Thabo Mbeki mediated reconciliation talks. Mr Mugabe saw the risk of delay and decided it would not be in his best interest to stall the proceedings. He had probably calculated, quite wrongly as it turned out eventually, that the opposition would decide to boycott the elections giving him a free run. Although the opposition did not take the boycott bait they nevertheless had little or no time to organise themselves and establish a strong alliance to challenge him.

The third factor is the rabidly partisan public media which provides highly biased and unbalanced reports and commentaries in favour of the ruling party and against the opposition. It may be argued that the daily funerals of many loved ones taking place in the country, the empty stores and evaporating local currency value are sufficient testimony to the state of affairs and do not need any elaboration from the media. However, the fact is that the public media is being used to mislead the electorate to believe that the opposition and their phantom sponsors in London and Washington are the cause of these problems and the opposition is not being given an opportunity to give their side of the story. With a very limited and constrained independent press, the opposition cannot get their word out to the electorate.

Factor number four is the indifferent and perhaps complicit international community. Mr Mugabe has ensured that there will be no critical and objective observation of the election process by baring all and any countries and institutions that he deems hostile to his intentions and interests. As a consequence, the list of observers reads like a who is who in undemocratic governance – China, Sudan, Cuba and Russia, among others. Countries and institutions that have the experience and credibility of unbiased election observation such as the European Union are excluded from observing the elections. One should ask, what is Mr Mugabe trying to hide and why? Surely, if he intends to play a fair game, it should not really matter who observes the elections because the results will speak for themselves. The fact, however, is that he knows that the elections will not be fair and he needs as little criticism as possible and, even more preferably, blind endorsement of his electoral malfeasance.

Now to the really gory bit - number five is violence, threats and intimidation of the electorate. Mr Mugabe has, in the past, boasted of his degrees in violence and the electorate is already being sadly reminded of the potency and validity of these qualifications. The violence and intimidation ranges from the crude (physical attacks and grievous bodily harm of opponents by Zanu-PF hoodlums and renegade law enforcement and state security elements) to the subtle (threats of a coup or civil war by the army in the event of Mugabe losing the elections, such as were recently issued by the army commander and the police chief) to the sublimely cruel (starving the opposition by withholding food aid and other public services to people who vote against the government).

Lastly and by no means the least, is a thoroughly compromised and discredited judiciary. When all the manipulation and rigging is done, the opposition is supposed to turn to the courts for recourse and relief but, alas, Mr Mugabe has corrupted and compromised the judiciary by forcing out those with independent minds, bringing in his own supporters and bribing the indifferent ones with free farms and other perquisites. Mugabe knows that he enjoys the support and protection of the courts and can thus act with impunity to subvert the will of the people. The judiciary favours Mugabe in two main ways – firstly by delaying the judiciary processes to a point where the outcomes become irrelevant and meaningless and, secondly, by making rulings that are blatantly favourable to the incumbent government.

All the above factors do not potent for free and fair elections in Zimbabwe. For me there is one hope, faint though it is, that the people are now so thoroughly fed up with Mr Mugabe that they will overwhelmingly come out to cast their vote to throw him out regardless of the efforts to rig the results. I am not confident that this will work because in the past, big turnout of voters has been neutralised by very slow and cumbersome voting process to the extent that many people were denied their right to vote. There is also the prospect that the people may do a “Kenya” on Mugabe – go out into the streets and make the country ungovernable. In the circumstances, he may still emerge as the president, but with Mr Tsvangirai as prime minister. What a prospect!