It’s the legitimacy, stupid!

I have just finished playing a round of golf with a colleague who asked me whether there is an end in sight to the crisis (what crisis?) in Zimbabwe. He is a foreigner who confesses to be an avid fan of President Robert Mugabe because he has been able to stand up to the western imperialists. I responded that I, like many other people, I suspect, did not quite know how this political impasse is going to be resolved. It’s likely to be some time before the whole drama fully plays out.

But this tête-à-tête got me thinking about what it is that got us in this mess in the first place. Barely ten years ago things were still relatively good or absolutely heavenly by today’s standards. Everything worked well. There was electricity all if not most of the time, the shops were full of goods, the cost of goods was reasonable, the farms produced enough food for the population, fuel was available at most service stations and the local currency held its own against most of the foreign currencies. But all that has vanished in less than a decade and the country has been reduced to a basket case much worse than the many neighbouring countries which had been considered as poor cousins. What tsunami could have hit the country? Or was it a meteor from a far off galaxy?

The simple answer is that President Robert Mugabe and his government lost legitimacy and this has been the main, if not sole, cause of the difficulties which the country has been experiencing in the past decade. Even before the loss of legitimacy, the signs were not good. The payout to the former freedom fighters in 1997 had badly dented the national coffers but the damage was repairable. The ill-advised intervention in the war in the Democratic Republic of Congo had also taken its toll on national resources but the country would have survived the foolish misadventure. The abortive constitutional reform process of 1999 flattered a little only to deceive when the majority of the citizens rejected the draft constitution. But the country could and should have survived that setback as well.

The real problems for Zimbabwe started in after the 2000 general election which heralded the arrival of the MDC as a genuine contender to the throne of power in the country. The official results showed Zanu-PF scrapping a narrow win over the MDC a party which had been established less than one year previously. However it is widely believed that the MDC won that election because apart from sweeping almost all the sits in the major cities across the country, the party also picked up some votes in rural constituencies in almost all the provinces of the country. Zanu-PF victories were confined almost exclusively to rural areas in Mashonaland and Masvingo.

It is alleged that Zanu-PF employed widespread intimidation of the voters and, in addition, rigged the results to secure the win. Two years letter, Zanu-PF employed the same tactics to secure a win for Mr Mugabe in the presidential contest against Mr Morgan Tsvangirai. And the same was said of the 2005 parliamentary elections. In all these instances, there were loud cries of foul by the opposition and some international observers. Whether the allegations of rigging were true or not, what they did was to raise questions on the legitimacy of the Mugabe government. Therein, I submit, is the root of Zimbabwe’s problem.

The world community has always been divided into those who believed that Mr Mugabe is a legitimately elected leader who is being victimised for his principled stand against white imperialists and for his noble quest to give land to the majority of his poor people. To this lot, Mugabe was and is a black nationalist hero who fought for the independence of his people, defeated white oppression and has fought to correct historical imbalances in land allocation in his country. There are threads of truth in some of this and so one can understand the reluctance of the generality of the African leadership to condemn Mr Mugabe for any of his misdeeds.

There is the other group who believe that Mugabe and his government have consistently stolen elections and their tenure in office is not mandated by the people through free and fair democratic processes but is a result of shameless manipulation and disregard of political will of the people. While this group is mainly comprised of those from the so-called western democracies as represented by Great Britain and the Unites States, the strongest core of this group is made up of the millions of Zimbabweans who have lost faith in the Mugabe government and have felt violated, humiliated and disenfranchised everytime Mr Mugabe “stole” their votes. Many of these millions have voted with their feet by leaving the country and settling elsewhere in the world and have vowed not to return until the status quo in the country has changed.

To many of these people, Mr Mugabe and his party lack the legitimacy to be president and government in the country. This is and has been the problem. Its hypocritical and plain wrong to blame Zimbabwe’s economic woes on Europe and America for imposing targeted sanctions against Mr Mugabe and his kith and kin. The real big and telling sanctions against Mr Mugabe have been imposed by his own people who have withdrawn their skills, labour and patriotism from the country and taken them elsewhere. This emigration has, more than anything, undermined the legitimacy of the Mugabe leadership and of his party’s government.

The 2008 harmonised elections presented a major opportunity for Mr Mugabe to put to rest, once and for all, all the questions about his legitimacy. The elections process, up to and including the balloting, were relatively fair and peaceful and it was expected that the results emanating from this would be both credible and acceptable. But as we all now know, that was not to be. It took more than five weeks for the presidential results to be announced and, when eventually they were, they attracted the sort of derision and scepticism that rendered them not credible. So even if there is a run-off and, against all odds, Mr Mugabe secures a victory he will not gain any legitimacy.

Without legitimacy, Mr Mugabe and his government will never receive international recognition and support which it badly needs to recover the economy and improve the welfare of its people. He will always be fighting for his survival and this will place significant constrains on his ability to act rationally and in the best interest of the country and its people. Mr Mugabe and his supporters should appreciate that it’s not just about securing an electoral victory, as they are trying to do. Much more importantly, it is about securing the victory in a manner which will ultimately result in him and his government regaining the legitimacy which they have lost so far. So far they seem not to understand this or to care.