Zimbabwe’s ageing President Robert Mugabe presented a startling sight as he launched his party’s election campaign with a woman’s scarf tied around his head.
The campaign for a parliamentary election that critics have deplored as skewed by repressive laws and intimidation has seen a flurry of measures aimed at uplifting women in Zimbabwe’s fiercely patriarchal society. With little to show for nearly 25 years in power, Mugabe’s critics charge his women’s outreach is just a ploy to burnish his image.
”He is a traditionalist with very little time for women,” said John Makumbe, a University of Zimbabwe political scientist. ”His volte face now is really a gimmick aimed at capturing women’s votes in the face of a persistent opposition challenge that is threatening his government.”
Mugabe does need to get out the vote. His party won just 62 of Parliament’s 120 elected seats in 2000, despite what independent observers called widespread violence and rigging.
He has rallied support since then with an often violent campaign to right colonial-era imbalances by redistributing white-owned farms to black Zimbabweans.
Earlier this month, Mugabe was forced to acknowledge that the former regional breadbasket is no longer producing enough food to feed itself, though he blamed four years of crippling drought for the crisis.
”He has no real achievements around the land issue, so now he has to change his tune,” Makumbe said in a telephone interview from the United States, where he is a guest lecturer at Michigan State University.
Mugabe said he wore the green, black, yellow and red scarf, which belongs to the Zanu-PF women’s league, to remind supporters at last month’s rally that ”if you ignore women, you are gone”.
Women make up 51% of Zimbabwe’s 11,6-million people, but hold just 13 of Parliament’s 120 elected seats and three of the 30 appointed by Mugabe. Women say they also face discrimination in applying for jobs, accessing land and owning property.
In December, Mugabe appointed Joyce Mujuru as Zanu-PF and the country’s first woman Vice-President.
His party has also fielded 30 female candidates in the March 31 election in what it calls a serious bid to bring the country in line with the Southern African Development Community’s goal of filling 30% of leadership posts with women.
The ruling Zanu-PF has trumpeted the moves as a victory for women in Zimbabwean politics.
”For years, women have proved to be consistent and have a track record of hard work,” Oppah Muchinguri, Zanu-PF’s secretary for women’s affairs, was quoted as saying by the state-run Herald newspaper.
”They are the very same ones who have been voting for men who today are in power. Why then should they not unite and claim victory for themselves?”
Others, however, are more sceptical.
Mujuru’s appointment was seen less as an attempt to advance women than a way of excluding her main rival, parliamentary Speaker Emmerson Mnangagwa, who has made clear his ambition to succeed the 81-year-old Mugabe.
”It was an opportunistic political appointment dressed up as a progressive move by a party which has never demonstrated the political will to ensure women are afforded their equal status in society,” said Lucia Matibenga, chairperson of the opposition Movement for Democratic Change’s (MDC) women’s assembly.
There have been few other high-powered appointments. Only one of Parliament’s 15 portfolio committees is chaired by a woman, though it is the important public accounts committee. Three of 32 Cabinet ministers, one of 10 provincial governors and the deputy speaker of Parliament are also women.
Mugabe used the female candidates quota to exclude neatly a number of men — including Jonathan Moyo, the sacked information minister now running independently — who challenged his decision to appoint Mujuru. The dispute pitting party veterans loyal to Mugabe against a new generation of leaders caused the worst split in Zanu-PF since the end of white rule in 1980.
If the ruling party was serious about achieving 30% female representation in Parliament, analysts argue it should have fielded many more than 30 candidates — and placed them in constituencies where they have a chance of winning.
”They are always putting women as candidates, yes, but they put the women where they know they have no chance,” said Fanny Chirisa, programme manager of the independent Women in Politics Support Unit.
Ten of Zanu-PF’s women candidates are running for seats in urban areas, seen as opposition strongholds. Others are contesting more marginal seats.
Chirisa also believes the party is fielding few women ”of calibre” — educated and articulate enough to make women’s issues heard in Parliament.
Other parties aren’t doing much better. Fifty-seven women in all are running in this election, compared with 216 men. They include just 17 from the MDC, eight from the tiny opposition Zanu-Ndonga and two independent candidates. Many of them are running in areas considered as unwinnable as the urban constituencies contested by Zanu-PF’s women.
”Our political parties are not serious,” Chirisa said with contempt, describing their sudden interest in women as ”a campaigning tool”. — Sapa-AP