Zim poll – stakes are high and it’s a close race
Zimbabwean President Emmerson Mnangagwa and the ruling Zanu-PF hope a credible victory in the July 30 election will legitimise the power (both party and state) they gained from the “soft coup” that toppled Robert Mugabe last November.
With victory, they say, the donors and dollars will flood into the country they have resurrected from nearly two moribund decades. Zimbabwe is now “open for business” and will thrive. Zanu-PF’s resurrection will thus be complete.
But a new survey suggests Zanu-PF should stall any premature celebration plans. The latest one showed that, in the space of one month, Nelson Chamisa’s MDCAlliance has closed the gap with Zanu-PF. The surveys are conducted by Afrobarometer and its Zimbabwean partner, Mass Public Opinion Institute, a non-profit, nongovernmental research organisation.
If the respondents were to cast their ballot now Mnangagwa would take 40% of the votes and opposition leader Chamisa 37%. The still undecided or not-saying potential voters are at 20%. Split that and you get a 50/47 race.
The numbers are very close indeed. If not a victory for the MDC-Alliance, this looks like a presidential runoff. The MDCAlliance has a 49% to 26% lead in the cities and towns. In the countryside the figures are 30% for the opposition to Zanu-PF’s 48%. In parliament Zanu-PF would get 41% to the MDC-Alliance’s 36. This is a big change from May’s survey.
Given the MDC-Alliance momentum, the post-Mugabe Zanu-PF’s hopes of a resurrection may be dashed. A great deal hangs on both parties’ ability to manage this interregnum.
Big trade-offs will be negotiated – from coalition governments, which the poll shows are backed by 60% of respondents, to amnesties for the chief crooks and killers.
Striking deals might indeed lie at the centre of whether or not the election is a success. That’s because this election is about grabbing back the core of hard-won democracy from a military dominated regime. It’s about cleansing out generations of fear.
That is a hard task at any time – harder still when it took a coup to retire its prime source. Mnangagwa has been spectacularly unsuccessful at winning past elections in his own constituencies, standing for parliament three times and losing twice.
The factions in Zanu-PF that squared up against one another prior to the coup – the Generation-40 group that supported Grace Mugabe for party and state president and Lacoste, which supported Mnangagwa – are still battling along lines more ethnically drawn than ever. Some losers in the Generation-40 group have left the party to form the National Patriotic Front.
Although the perpetrators have not been found, the blast at Zanu-PF’s Bulawayo rally in June that killed two people and narrowly missed a whole stage of luminaries, could suggest the party’s wounds have yet to heal.
And the soldiers are not of one mind. If the military side of the somewhat shaky postcoup pact in Zanu-PF fears losing an election, and thus access to more of the wealth more power can bring, the free and fair dimensions of the electoral contest will be drastically diminished.
Would a repeat of mid2008’s post-electoral mayhem, when at least 170 people were killed and nearly 800 beaten or raped, ensue?
To make matters more complex, there are no guarantees that hungry, angry junior army officers would follow their seniors’ attempts to alter the peoples’ will.
Mnangagwa could be at some of the soldier’s mercy. Some suggest that Constantino Chiwenga, the mercurial vicepresident and defence minister – unconstitutionally – might be among them.
Others argue that the two leaders need each other if the régime is going to deliver on promises of a clean election
And as George Charamba, Zimbabwe’s permanent secretary for information, put it: “This election is about restoring international reengagement and legitimacy…. It must be flawless, it must be transparent... free... fair, meet international standards, be violence free and therefore universally endorsed because it is an instrument of foreign policy… It’s about reengagement and legitimacy; we are playing politics at a higher level.”
This is a clarion call for a free and fair poll. If the election fails to meet these expectations and its results are tight, legitimacy could be maintained with carefully calculated deals. Perhaps the unity government widely expected during the coup could reappear.
Chamisa and the MDC (the alliance is made up of seven parties, most having split from the late Morgan Tsvangirai’s MDC), appear to be building on the momentum they seem to have gained by challenging the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission’s management of the contest. The alliance has challenged the ZEC’s neutrality and raised concerns over the accuracy of the voters’ roll.
Not all its allegations necessarily stand up to scrutiny. The 250 000 alleged ghosts may be a canard, but as Derek Matyszak, the Institute for Security Studies man in Harare, argues, the roll was not released in time for the primaries so no candidates are constitutionally valid.
Emboldened by the lack of police, thousands of protesters led by the MDC-Alliance marched to the commission’s headquarters on July 11, showing no fear. If this impetus keeps building over the next week, a victory is conceivable. So is a presidential run-off. To be sure, the ruling party might win fairly, but the opposition will have to be convinced of that. The mode of politics for the next round should be peacemaking, not war.
The bars are low – “the West”, led in this case by the UK, seemed happy with the winners of the coup, perhaps hoping for a renewed Zanu-PF. Perfidious Albion (Treacherous England) could end its schizophrenic career in Zimbabwe with a whimper about the end of a liberal democratic dream. But for Zimbabwe the stakes are high: far higher than the reputation of a minor global power past its glory. The people of Zimbabwe face much more than reputational damage: maybe the former colonial power will have a Plan B that helps more than hinders.