Efforts by Zimbabwe’s government to rebuild its international image in upcoming elections are likely to fail, largely because the ruling party has already rigged the voting, fearing it will lose power if it does not, regional political analysts said Wednesday in Johannesburg.
Parliamentary elections, set for March 31, “can never be considered to be free and fair,” said Trevor Ncube, a Zimbabwean journalist who now runs the Mail and Guardian newspaper in South Africa. By barring opposition rallies, refusing to publish voter rolls, banning opposition advertising, intimidating rivals and denying observers entry to the country, Zimbabwe’s government has ensured that “the playing field is far from level,” he said.
“An election is not a one-day event,” he said.
Ncube said the Zimbabwe government’s actions in recent months mean the elections are “already rigged.”
Zimbabwe’s longtime ruling party, stung by international condemnation and sanctions after it tampered with 2002 presidential elections to hold on to power, has in recent months waged a concerted campaign to repair its image and show that this time it is meeting international standards for free and fair elections.
Government’s best face
Last month it appointed a new, purportedly independent commission to oversee the upcoming polling and to bring its policies in line with standards of the African Union and the Southern African Development Community, the region’s main oversight body. A delegation of SADC lawyers last week visited Harare to check Zimbabwe’s compliance with the rules and is expected to issue a report within weeks.
But opposition leaders and international analysts insist Zimbabwe’s changes amount to little more than window-dressing.
The new election commission, they charge, is stacked with ruling-party supporters. Government-controlled media have refused to carry stories about or accept advertising from the opposition Movement for Democratic Change, or MDC, they say, and the government has shut down most private media outlets. Draconian security laws also now require any political discussion involving more than 10 people to be approved by the police, who have refused to grant the opposition authority to hold campaign rallies in most parts of the country.
Opposition officials have been refused permission to see the country’s voter rolls, reportedly stacked with dead voters, analysts say. And Zimbabwean traditional chiefs, charged with overseeing voting and government food distribution in rural areas, recently have seen their salaries doubled and have been given the right to a government car in an effort to ensure their loyalty to the ruling ZANU-PF party, Ncube said.
Perhaps most telling, however, is that Zimbabwe’s government has refused to issue invitations for election monitors and on Wednesday turned back at the airport a delegation of South African trade union leaders who had arrived to meet with their counterparts in Zimbabwe.
Such rebukes have led to stepped-up pressure on Zimbabwe from the government of neighboring South Africa, which up to now has insisted on sticking to its much-criticized and largely ineffective policy of “quiet diplomacy” with the government of Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe.
South Africa’s ruling African National Congress for the first time said last month that Mugabe’s mistreatment of the opposition meant free and fair elections there were unlikely. Specifically it called on Zimbabwe’s government to allow the opposition to campaign, to give the MDC access to state media and to ensure that the country’s police, implicated in widespread beatings, rapes and arrests of opposition figures, act in “an impartial manner.”
Opposition threatens boycott
The MDC, which has threatened to boycott the elections if it is not given a fair chance to compete, has not decided whether it will run candidates.
Forced to choose between losing a rigged election or not running at all, the opposition “appears to be damned if it does and damned if it doesn’t,” said Greg Mills, national director of the South African Institute of International Affairs, which played host to a roundtable on Zimbabwe’s elections Wednesday.
The opposition party won nearly half of Zimbabwe’s parliamentary seats in 2000 elections that stunned Mugabe and set in motion his rigging of the 2002 presidential elections and his confiscation of the country’s white farmland in an effort to win back popular support.
But the opposition movement has been paralyzed by new security laws and by its own failings to lead an effective and organized peaceful campaign against Mugabe’s government, analysts say.
Meanwhile, Mugabe’s mismanagement has sent the once-prosperous country into an economic tailspin. Inflation was 400 percent last year, the number of formal sector jobs has shrunk 40 percent since 2002 and millions are hungry in a nation that once was a major food exporter for the region.
Prices of staple foods such as cornmeal are now beyond the reach of many families, and the government has driven out private aid organizations and limits distribution of government food aid to its political supporters.
