First, apologies are in order. This blog has been silent for a while because I have been away for three weeks on a long delayed holiday and to catch up with some pressing personal and domestic commitments. I did have a conversation during the period with one regular reader of the blog and I assured him that I was alive and well and had not been picked up by Mr Robert Mugabe’s feared secret police. For a writer and political commentator I had, perhaps, chosen the most inappropriate time to be away from the “desk” because it was a time of very promising and exciting developments.
The elections in Zimbabwe did hold on 29 March as decreed by Mr Mugabe and I have it on very good account, that the voting process itself went very well – peaceful, free and fair. The day after the elections I met some folks who had participated in the historic event and noted how delighted they were to have made their say on the ballot paper. One of them was even involved as a returning officer at one of the polling stations in Harare and had witnessed the early results emerging. There was a high sense of expectation and drama. The air was pregnant with anticipation that something good was finally about to emerge from the once beautiful country.
On the Sunday following the voting, rumours began to swirl that President Mugabe and his ruling Zanu-PF party had suffered a humiliating defeat at the hands of the opposition MDC led by the brave and indefatigable Morgan Tsvangirai. The only thing about which the rumours were not in consensus was the margin of victory with early indications giving an even wider winning margins to the opposition. Mind you, this election was different from all other previous elections held in Zimbabwe. This was the first election which was held on the basis of the election guidelines of the Southern Africa Development Community (SADC) meaning that the counting of the votes was done at the polling station immediately following the closure of the polling and the results were posted outside each polling venue. So everyone had access to the results as soon as the counting was completed.
The quick witted gathered what results they could, extrapolated the numbers and declared who the winners were. However, the wait for the official announcement of the results would prove to be lengthy and frustrating. One started getting a sense that something was terribly amiss when the parliamentary results were being announced piecemeal with the main contestants acquiring equal number of seats with each batch of results released. The announcement of the parliamentary results took the best part of a week and both parties were still running neck to neck. Many a time, our people have been taken too much for granted and this weird election outcome proved this to be cruelly true yet again for the long suffering Zimbabwean people.
I mean can you tell me where you have the two leading contestants in a national election splitting votes and sharing seats right down the middle? I am not sure about the statistical probability of that happening, much less am I sure that the results which were being announced were indeed accurate and not being manufactured by a compromised and cowed electoral commission. Be that as it may, people were quite prepared to live with the results, defective as they may be because the real big prize, the real telling story was not with the parliamentary election. The big prize was the presidential election result and, as it turned out, the election officials were not in a hurry to release the results.
By the end of the first week and without the official announcement of the results, the clever ones who had done the extrapolations and calculations and the not-so-clever ones who merely listened to what was being said in the media and on the streets had all come to one inescapable conclusion – Robert Mugabe had lost the election. What remained in debate was the margin of the loss and this was a very important issue. Was the margin sufficiently wide to avoid a run-off election or was it too narrow? Two weeks after the elections, the answers to this question is still pending. And as I write this piece there is no sign yet that results of the presidential elections are about to be announced. In fact, the offices of the electoral commission have been reportedly closed.
This weekend, the SADC heads of state are meeting in Lusaka, Zambia in an emergency session to review developments in Zimbabwe. As with previous summits of the SADC, much would not have been expected to emerge from this august gathering but this time things may just be different. For the first time the SADC heads of state are facing a situation where they all know, without any shadow of doubt, that their colleague has lost a free and fair election and thus cannot claim any longer to be legitimately representing the people of Zimbabwe. The SADC leaders should not and cannot be seen to be aligning themselves with and propping up a failed and discredited dictator. Fortunately, by turning down the opportunity to attend the summit and present his own case, Mugabe has shown that even at home he has lost control.
What has become quite clear in the past two weeks is that Mugabe has not just lost the election but he has also effectively lost power. He may still be the nominal head of state but he is now under the direct control of a cabal of power brokers comprising senior army and police officers and political and economic chiefs who are calling the shots. These de facto rulers of Zimbabwe did not trust the 84 year geriatric to be able to adequately defend the status quo when faced with more sceptical and critical SADC colleagues. So they stopped him from going to Lusaka. Even if Mugabe is not there the summit could achieve a lot to stop the madness going on across the Zambezi River. In my view, there are three options to resolve the Zimbabwe problem.
The first is to use diplomatic pressure. The SADC heads of state must state in unequivocal terms that they will not accept the subversion of the democratic will of the citizens of a member state. Such statement should not be based on just diplomatic and humanitarian sentiments but should be grounded in the many protocols and conventions of the SADC, the New Partnership for African Development (NEPAD), African Union and United Nations, which Zimbabwe is now in breach of. Such statement must be supported by additional diplomatic pressure such as suspension or expulsion of Zimbabwe from SADC or suspension of diplomatic relations with Harare. Of course it is not realistic to expect that all this should be done or accomplished at once. At a practical level, diplomatic pressure will have to be applied incrementally but consistently.
If diplomacy fails, the second option is armed resistance by Zimbabweans against Mugabe’s government. There are millions of Zimbabweans now outside the country and these can be easily and quickly mobilised into a fighting force to go in and topple Mugabe. But as was the case when Mugabe was fighting the racist regime of Ian Smith, the new liberation army will require training, ammunitions and bases and SADC should be prepared to provide these. The downside of this option is that such armed resistance tend to metamorphose into really ugly blood-lets as has been seen in countries such as the Democratic Republic of Congo, Sudan, Rwanda, etc. It may certainly not be the preferred option but nonetheless it remains one to be considered in the medium to long term.
The last option is for external forces to invade Zimbabwe and topple Mugabe, Saddam style. There are several precedents in this regard. One can recall how Tanzania went into Uganda in 1979 to topple the murderous regime of Idi Amin and, more recently, South Africa’s (under SADC auspices) foray into Lesotho in 1998 to restore law and order following disputed elections. It is also common knowledge that the Rwandan army were the chief architects of the overthrow of Mobutu in the then Zaire. So with all these precedents it is not unrealistic to expect outside military intervention to remove Mugabe from power. If the SADC cannot accomplish this feat, they should perhaps let the Brits and Yankees do the dirty work. I suspect that the people of Zimbabwe have suffered too much pain for far too long to really care how the job is done and by who.
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