BY PATRICK BOND
HARARE — Zimbabwe's President Robert Mugabe, who led the national liberation fighters to win independence from the white Rhodesian colonists in 1980, is facing a presidential vote in March. His main opponent is the Movement for Democratic Change's Morgan Tsvangirai, who led the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions from 1988-2000. The confused, radical rhetoric associated with Mugabe's Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front's dying nationalism is contrasted with the confused "good-governance"-plus-neo-liberal economic program of the MDC.
Hopes that Mugabe's repressive streak would fade after the June 2000 parliamentary elections have proved unfounded. According to a report by the Amani Trust, a reputable monitoring group, "27,633 people have fallen victim to human rights violations in Zimbabwe and 20,853 have been forcibly displaced by violence" between January and October 2001.
State harassment has worsened since then: one day it is absurd (arresting Tsvangirai for not having a walkie-talkie licence), the next comic (labelling any anti-government provocation as "terrorist" in lip-synch with Bush's rhetoric), the next tragic (periodic murders of opposition party activists, frame-ups and intensifying paramilitary activity), the next counterproductive (having the Malawi secret police arrest government opponents visiting a Southern African Development Community meeting on Zimbabwe's crisis) and the next ominous: the warning on January 9 that the military will commit insubordination if Tsvangirai is elected president.
That threat came from a motley junta-in-waiting led by Zimbabwe Defence Force commander Vitalis Zvinavashe: "The security organisations will only stand in support of those political leaders that will pursue Zimbabwean values, traditions and beliefs for which thousands of lives were lost, in pursuit of Zimbabwe's hard-won independence, sovereignty, territorial integrity and national interests... The highest office in the land is a straitjacket whose occupant is expected to observe the objectives of the liberation struggle. We will not accept, let alone support or salute, anyone with a different agenda that threatens the very existence of our sovereignty, our country and our people."
In response, Tsvangirai stated that "it would seem ZANU-PF is running out of legitimate ways to perpetuate its misrule. The party itself acknowledged this when it sent the top brass of the military to give some bizarre advance notice of a coup d'etat when they lose".
Carrots
Panic is in the air at ZANU-PF's Harare headquarters. According to a reliable press account, a "confidential [ZANU-PF] central committee report" in December 2001 included "a submission by the party's security department which warned: 'Corrupt leaders within the party are seriously endangering and eroding the party's fortunes in the forthcoming presidential election".
A variety of overlapping strategies, combining carrots and sticks, have came into play to prevent what would seem to be a certain Mugabe loss in a free and fair poll. Voter registration has been limited to Zimbabwe residents (no absentee ballots will be permitted). Everything possible is being done to dissuade urban residents from registering, while ZANU-PF aligned rural chiefs and headmen are permitted to vouch for "their" constituents during registration.
Government vote-buying has also begun in earnest. Price controls were applied late last year. State patronage was stepped up. Urgent work orders were given so as to show the electorate some progress by March.
In December, the Supreme Court reversed earlier rulings so as to support Mugabe's "fast-track" (but by all accounts chaotic) land acquisition program. Mugabe's ally, chief justice Godfrey Chidyausiku, replaced Anthony Gubbay, a white judge who resigned last year under threat of violence from war veterans responsible for occupying more than 1000 farms owned by wealthy whites since February 2000.
Mugabe now claims dramatic land reform successes: 250,000 households resettled in recent months, compared to the total of 70,000 families who gained land during the previous two decades. But although any improvement in access for the landless masses is to be applauded, independent media investigations found these statistics to be wildly inflated. Moreover, land minister Joseph Made is maintaining the two-decade-old practice by allocating the best farms to top government and ZANU-PF officials.
Likewise, to curry favour with his most vital constituents, Mugabe offered security personnel a 100% pay rise, the same as the inflation rate; most workers had to settle for increases closer to 50%.
Sticks
Worse state repression was also threatened when laws were introduced in parliament in January to tilt the electoral balance in Mugabe's favour. The laws would: bar election monitors and ban distribution of leaflets and posters; impose absurd new security restrictions, including making it an offense to criticise the president; shackle the media by imposing licensing requirements, barring foreign journalists and making it illegal to publish news that would "cause alarm and despondency"; and to repress the labour movement by denying rights of assembly and to strike.
Under these conditions, there is no way that any observer can legitimately call the coming presidential election "free and fair." Virtually all political unrest is being catalysed by informal ZANU-PF militias. The threat by Mugabe to make "real war" — made at ZANU-PF party congress in December — is being taken seriously by his loyal cadres.
The misery of the masses has been amplified by a rash of shortages of maize, cooking oil, sugar, fertilizer and even milk in some places.
Are shortages the result of hoarding by mainly white wholesale firms, as Mugabe regularly alleges? Or does scarcity logically follow the widespread imposition of strict price controls? Officials point to the consistent availability of cheap bread (the regulated price per loaf was lowered from the equivalent of US$0.16 to US$0.13 a few months ago). However, private suppliers of many other price-controlled essentials can't keep up with demand, given the shrunken and in some cases negative profit margins. ZANU-PF isn't ready to try either nationalisation of these suppliers or provide sufficient subsidies to cover the gap.
The economy continues to decay, with output down more than 15% over the last two years. Mugabe announced in his December 2001 state of the nation address that "US$150 million of privatisation proceeds will go towards repayment of the external debt" and allocated scarce foreign exchange the equivalent of US$259.9 million to pay South Africa to cover "supply arrears and service debt" of Zesa, the country's electricity company.
Sanctions debate
After the Southern African Development Community's summit in Malawi in January failed to generate sufficient pro-democracy rhetoric, Tsvangirai angrily told the BBC that he expected far more from South Africa: "The threat to undermine the elections by the military ... should send shock waves to South Africa... [Pretoria should say] under those circumstances, we are going to cut fuel, we are going to cut transport links. Those kind of measures, even if they are implemented at a low level, send the right signals."
South African deputy foreign affairs minister Aziz Pahad quickly dismissed Tsvangirai's request.
Will Tsvangirai's call for more seriously targeted sanctions from Pretoria backfire?
Zimbabwean democracy activists are debating this because Mugabe will use tightened sanctions as an excuse for his economic mismanagement and, while ZANU-PF can retain power through its monopoly of military might, sanctions will mainly disrupt the white-owned business sector, which supports the MDC financially and employs most of the party's core working-class loyalists.
These points are valid. Yet at some stage in a struggle for political justice, a people must decide what kind of pressure they are willing to ask those acting in solidarity to impose upon their enemy, even if there are detrimental side-effects.
Did Tsvangirai's call for South Africa to seriously consider sanctions flow from a full-fledged debate among Zimbabwean democrats (or even among MDC leaders)? Was the decision arrived at with as much reflection and consensus as is required? Apparently not.
Yet the need for the MDC to ratchet up the pressure on Mugabe is obvious, especially if Mugabe illegitimately clings to power or Zvinavashe carries out his threatened treason. The mass of Zimbabweans need all the support that they can get under such circumstances, including sanctions if popular organisations advocate them following mass consultations.
What remains the most important variable is the independent critical capacity of the progressive labour, residents' associations, human-rights advocates, left-leaning churches, women's groups, the National Constitutional Assembly and many others which attended the National Working People's Convention three years ago.
After nearly 15 years working in and around the beleaguered Zimbabwean left, the question remains: can enough ordinary people align with progressive civil society to challenge both ZANU-PF's repression and the MDC's neo-liberal economic policies, to make a real difference to their country's future? Or are radical rhetoric and ideological confusion associated with the exhaustion of African nationalism and Zimbabwe's capital accumulation cycle going to close the current window of opportunity for social change?
[With Masimba Manyanya, Patrick Bond is co-author of Zimbabwe's Plunge: Exhausted Nationalism, Neoliberalism and the Struggle for Social Justice which will be released in February (details from <pbond@wn.apc.org>). A longer version of this article is at <http://www.zmag.org>.]
From Green Left Weekly, February 6, 2002.
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