/ 24 March 2005

Opposition not the only loser

Six days before Zimbabweans go the polls, it is safe to predict that Robert Mugabe’s Zanu-PF will take the election — despite the Movement for Democratic Change’s (MDC) spirited, if belated, campaign. Even the MDC seems to have accepted the inevitable, as suggested by the party’s T-shirt slogan: “Tsvangirai for president in 2008”.

The Zimbabwean Constitution determines that voters elect only 120 of the 150 parliamentary seats, while Mugabe handpicks 30. This means that the task of winning a simple majority — arduous enough given the years of government hate-speech, intimidation, harassment and legislative repression — is rendered almost impossible.

But the MDC will not be the only loser in this election; much else has been lost. Zimbabwe has moved backwards since independence in 1980. Once the region’s breadbasket and a shining example of all post-independence Africa could be, it has failed to sustain both a viable economy and a democratic order.

Zimbabweans are starving, and hunger — belatedly acknowledged to exist by Mugabe — has become the election’s dominant motif. The country’s brightest have left, again negating a key post-independence gain. Zimbabwe’s education system was once held up as a continental leader.

Democracy has been lost too, sacrificed by both the South African and Zimbabwean government. In its place, there is a slavish adherence to democratic forms without its substance. Both governments harp on about Zimbabwe signing the Southern African Development Community’s (SADC) electoral protocols. But they say little of the manifest ways in which the commitments to the freedom of association, the media, the judicial separation of powers and other democratic rudiments have been systematically eroded over the past four years.

South Africa has lost the moral high ground. Initially, the government’s policy of quiet diplomacy may have been strategically palatable. At its core was the view that Mugabe could be persuaded to make an early exit from the Zimbabwean political stage through backroom negotiations — President Thabo Mbeki staked his international reputation on this when he told United States President George W Bush that Mugabe would be out of office by last year.

The policy has manifestly failed — yet South Africa clings to it like a drowning man to a straw. As late as last week, the guileless Minister of Labour Membathisi Mdladlana said after talks with the Zimbabwean government that he saw no reason for anything but a free and fair election. International and domestic scorn was heaped on him, in a climactic demonstration of how South Africa has lost face.

The new Africa — represented by Mbeki’s New Partnership for Africa’s Development and a revitalised African Union — is another loser. Central to it was the concept of a peer review system as the driver of African resurgence — a muscular way of keeping one’s brothers on their toes would triumph over the outdated policy of non-interference and overweening respect for sovereignty.

The policy is working in West Africa, where a power grab by Togo’s Faure Gnassingbe was recently thwarted by the Economic Community of West African States. But on the southern tip it remains an elusive ideal.

It is one of his tragedies that Mbeki, the intellectual architect of new Africa, has allowed this to happen. Of course, he has an eye on how regional forces are stacked in Mugabe’s favour. But one would have thought he has sufficient international standing to go out on a limb, leading the region in a tougher and more rights-based approach.

Instead, South Africa has often frustrated regional initiatives: last month the Department of Foreign Affairs intervened to stop a SADC fact-finding mission to Zimbabwe.

There is a growing suspicion that Mbeki and Foreign Minister Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma’s stubborn support for Zimbabwe’s government is linked to South Africa’s desire for a seat on a restructured United Nations Security Council. If this is so, an ironic consequence could be that South Africa’s prospects have been damaged. There can be little doubt that Mbeki’s support for Mugabe has hurt his international reputation.

With so much lost, what can possibly come of next week’s election but a democratic façade? Given the likelihood of a Zanu-PF win, it has been suggested that the best outcome would be a two-thirds majority, so that Mugabe can hold a constitutional referendum and step down from the political stage.

But it seems far more likely that he will linger on, finally bequeathing the leadership to one of his acolytes, rather than a dynamic young politician of independent mind.

So the hope of sustained and far-reaching change also seems lost. South Africa has failed and it is fanciful to believe change can come from the top. In the end, the only solution for Zimbabwe is the slow organisational grind that will rebuild people’s power at the grass roots.