For once in our region – in the case of Zimbabwe – journalists’ taste for hyperbole and doomsday simile appears justified. Our neighbour’s future is, indeed, on a razor’s edge.
It will require cool, canny and courageous heads to relieve its critical predicament, and to avoid its descent into large-scale violence and failed statehood.
If the winner of this weekend’s election is incumbent President Robert Mugabe, Zanu-PF’s candidate, the evidence of recent weeks suggests this will have been the result of violent intimidation, of massive procedural gerrymandering and of ballot fraud. A majority of Zimbabweans – who support the opposition, according to opinion polls and focus groups – will then justly feel cheated. If, on the other hand, notwithstanding Mugabe’s deceit and thuggery the winner is Morgan Tsvangirai, the candidate of the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), Mugabe’s allies, who dominate Zimbabwe’s security forces and control much of the countryside, have warned they will not accept the outcome. This poses the danger of serious bloodletting – even of civil war.
In these circumstances, we cannot proclaim either of the main candidates for the presidency the antidote to Zimbabwe’s crisis. What we can do, however, is make two points. The first is that Mugabe and Zanu-PF have had their chance. They have had 22 years in government and they have made a mess of it. The economy is on the brink of collapse, famine threatens and the country is bitterly divided and wracked by violence. Moreover, for as long as Mugabe or his cronies are in power, no international investor or donor is going to contribute the millions of dollars the country needs to rebuild itself.
These alone are grounds for saying: give the other lot a chance; let the MDC have a go. But there are further grounds. The MDC has explicitly committed itself to democracy and political pluralism. It has sought to unite all Zimbabweans – Shona and Ndebele, and black, white and Asian. It has developed economic policies which – even if they are likely to cause Zimbabweans further pain in the short term – offer a way to reverse the country’s decline.
Perhaps most important, the MDC does not share the bizarre belief held by Mugabe and Zanu-PF that they rule by some sort of divine or historical right: that they have been entrusted by the supernatural or by destiny to guide Zimbabwe’s future. This underlying conviction – commonly held in former national liberation movements, including our own African National Congress – has severely retarded democracy and renewal in countries across Southern Africa.
This leads us to conclude that, for democracy to win in this election, the MDC must win. That said, the MDC will, if it wins, face daunting difficulties and problems. Not least among them will be actually taking power. For the MDC to do so it is likely to have to find a core of democratic senior and middle-ranking officers in the security forces willing to stand up and let it be known that they will not tolerate interference with the popular will. It may require the MDC to seek an alliance with rational elements within Zanu-PF such as Finance Minister Simba Makoni. And it seems likely that it will also entail having to find retirement homes abroad for Mugabe and his more unreconstructable cronies, where they can live out the rest of their lives.
The MDC’s difficulties, however, will not end there. The party will have to impose painful economic measures that will hurt its own political base the most – workers and urban dwellers. Thousands of bureaucrats on whom it will have to depend to carry out its policies will also probably have to suffer cuts in jobs and conditions. And Tsvangirai and his ministers will have to engage with the huge hunger for land among the peasantry that Mugabe and his party addressed so opportunistically and irresponsibly.
But matters may never get that far. A refusal by Mugabe and his security forces to hand over to a victorious Tsvangirai, or a Mugabe victory resulting from electoral irregularities and violence, will mean a crisis not just for Zimbabwe but also for South Africa and the entire region.
It will not be easily addressed. There is no sign of any clarity of judgement or purpose on Zimbabwe among leaders in our subcontinent. Regional presidents have equivocated cravenly for two years on the unfolding crisis in the country. There is not a cool, canny, courageous head evident among the lot of them. If – as we fear – their feebleness is contagious, we may not get even a credible or clear judgement on the fairness of Zimbabwe’s election from monitors in that country.
The prognosis is not good. But South Africans should draw on their own experience in hoping for – and facilitating – a miracle
The devil in Daryll
With South Africa staring down the barrel of the worst humiliation in its cricket history, the last thing required was an avaricious, childish tantrum from the man many had turned their gaze to in desperation.
History will record that, at the hour that the enemy sharpened their knives to gut his country, Daryll Cullinan chose to quibble about a contract.
Cullinan has never been the most stable of characters, but we hope he never claims the devil made him do it.