/ 20 December 2010

Zim faces ‘tensions’ after Mugabe poll boost

Zim Faces 'tensions' After Mugabe Poll Boost

Zimbabwe faces renewed political and economic turmoil as President Robert Mugabe’s push for polls next year and threats to kick out Western firms are sending the nation backwards, analysts said on Sunday.

The veteran leader, who has been in power since independence from Britain in 1980, was on Saturday endorsed by his Zanu-PF party to contest a likely fierce election battle against the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC).

Mugabe is expected to face MDC leader Morgan Tsvangirai, the current prime minister and his long-time foe, in a presidential vote, after he said an almost two-year power-sharing arrangement between their parties would end in February.

However, Mugabe’s quest for polls and bombastic, hard-faced rhetoric that he could nationalise British and American companies risks unravelling progress made since 2009 that saw hyperinflation end and a sense of normality return.

“We are our own worst enemies because we let politicians craft the agenda of the nation,” Calisto Jokonya, a business executive and past president of the Confederation of Zimbabwe Industries, told Agence France-Presse (AFP).

“The economy had started to pick up as a result of the GPA [Global Political Agreement] between Mugabe and Tsvangirai,” he said.

“Now that is being lost because of the impending elections. No one wants elections, no one knows the outcome,” he added.

Economic abyss
Hyperinflation — which started to soar towards world record levels in the wake of Mugabe’s confiscation of white-owned farms a decade ago — marked Zimbabwe’s slide towards the economic abyss.

In March 2008, Tsvangirai won a presidential vote defeating Mugabe, but he fell short of the required majority resulting in a run-off ballot months later that the MDC leader refused to take part in and Mugabe won unopposed.

The two men formed the compromise administration in February the following year and the worthless Zimbabwean dollar was abandoned in favour of the South African rand and US dollar. Inflation now stands at a more acceptable 4,2%.

Eric Bloch, a renowned Zimbabwean economist, said Mugabe’s threats to take over foreign firms if travel and financial restrictions against him and his inner-circle are not lifted would deter investors from coming into the country.

“Just by making those statements, they are very, very harmful to the economy,” said Bloch, from the country’s second city, Bulawayo.

“He is making comments on sanctions to deflate the real causes of economic collapse,” he added.

Rights groups say hundreds of MDC activists were killed during Zimbabwe’s last presidential election, a chaotic outcome that the British ambassador to Harare warned last month could be repeated if polls happen too quickly.

Although the MDC conceded for the first time on Saturday that a presidential ballot could take place next year, it ruled out parliamentary polls until 2013. Mugabe and his party want both elections to take place on the same day in 2011.

‘Period of conflict’
“We are headed for a period of conflict that will again be characterised by tensions,” Lovemore Madhuku, chairperson of pro-democracy group the National Constitutional Assembly of Zimbabwe, and closely linked to the MDC, told AFP.

“Zanu-PF will push for those elections no matter what,” he said, dismissing any weight that the Southern African Development Community (SADC), the regional bloc which helped strike the 2009 power-sharing deal, could bring to the dispute over a parliamentary election timetable.

“SADC always plays second fiddle to Zanu-PF,” Madhuku added.

John Makumbe, a political science lecturer at the University of Zimbabwe, said the country was headed for another electoral crisis.

“It will be another election which will result in a tug of war,” he said. “Zanu-PF wants to push ahead with these elections at any cost.”

Makumbe, however, dismissed Mugabe’s threats to nationalise British and US companies. “He is just politicking — in real terms he will not do it.”

Mugabe, who at 86 is Africa’s oldest leader, could stay in power until well into his nineties if he wins another presidential term. — AFP