The findings of the main observer groups in the March 31 Zimbabwe general election — the South African and Southern African Development Community (SADC) delegations — stand discredited, mainly due to the two organisations’ apparent willingness to arrive at the twilight of the poll, well after all the electoral logistics were almost in place.
Although Zimbabwe was expected under new SADC guidelines on democratic elections to invite the two observer bodies, as well as any other observer missions, 90 days before voting day, there was very little pressure from the region to ensure the Harare authorities’ compliance with the condition.
To many neutral observers, therefore, the failure by the South African government and the SADC to press Harare to follow this requirement was a deliberate ploy to stay away from Zimbabwe for as long as possible.
Had the observers arrived in the country early, it would have been difficult for them to support the defective electoral framework crafted by the ruling Zanu-PF, starting with the appointment of the docile Zimbabwe Electoral Commission (ZEC).
The dilemma of the South African and SADC observer missions is not difficult to understand. Long before the election, the Zimbabwean government belittled the SADC guidelines on democratic elections, saying they are voluntary and, by inference, not binding. The country could therefore selectively implement what was appropriate to it.
As Zanu-PF chairperson and Lands Minister John Nkomo noted in a local weekly, The Standard: “It is up to the individual member countries to find ways of implementing the [SADC] guidelines by taking into account the situation on the ground.
“We [Zimbabwe] are a member of the SADC but remember, we got our independence in a different way from how other member countries became independent. We are called Zimbabweans and other members have their own different names.”
Besides, though the greatest expectation from the guidelines was the freeing of the democratic space in Zimbabwe, nothing of the sort happened, as the few electoral changes made in the country were rendered useless by Zimbabwe’s repressive media and security laws, such as the Public Order and Security Act and the Access to Information and Protection of Privacy Act.
The South African government has previously acknowledged the repressive nature of these laws. For example, though the government begrudgingly proclaimed the 2002 presidential election in Zimbabwe as an expression of the will of the people of Zimbabwe, the country — in chorus with other international observer groups such as the Commonwealth observer group and the SADC parliamentary forum — criticised the public order Act, saying it “severely restricted the opposition’s right to campaign effectively”.
In addition, after the election, the Pretoria authorities are on record as having made representations to their Harare counterparts over their promises to revoke both these Acts.
So what has changed?
The South African observer mission simplistically based its approval of the recent election on the fact that there was less violence this time around than during the 2000 or 2002 elections.
However, it conveniently ignored reports — largely by civic society — that invisible, low-intensity violence, mainly political arrests and harassment, continued unabated.
In fact, the observer mission failed to acknowledge that besides some tinkering here and there, the same defective legal and electoral infrastructure that they criticised in the 2002 election was not only still in existence, but had actually been strengthened.
For example, just as in 2002, the Zimbabwe police continued to use the public order Act to break up or to prevent the opposition’s meetings and rallies before March 31, and only relaxed them when observer groups started to arrive.
This partly explained why the ruling Zanu-PF held 1Â 699 rallies (66%) against the opposition Movement for Democratic Change’s (MDC) 866 (34%) out of the 2Â 585 rallies the parties had held by March 30.
The police’s selective application of the country’s tough security laws was aptly demonstrated by the way it cancelled a workshop the MDC organised for its candidates at the Sheraton hotel in Harare on February 16, on the pretext that it had not been sanctioned by police.
It was in this context that those following the Zimbabwe crisis were greatly surprised by comments made by the head of the South African observer mission, Minister of Labour Membathisi Mdladlana, soon after his arrival in Zimbabwe that he saw nothing that would compromise a free and fair poll.
What those who criticised Mdladlana, including the MDC, failed to see, though, was that the minister was being honest, to a certain extent. By the time he and his delegation conveniently arrived, open hostilities by Zanu-PF towards its opponents had been minimised, at least in public.
And to put a semblance of respectability to its purported adoption of the SADC guidelines, Zanu-PF had capitalised on its majority in Parliament to hand-pick a toothless ZEC whose ex-soldier chairperson, Justice George Chiweshe, had just moved seats held by the opposition into Zanu-PF strongholds in the delimitation process.
Mugabe cynically proclaimed Chiweshe had been appointed to head the ZEC because of the experience he had gained during the delimitation process. The MDC’s protests that the demarcation of the new boundaries should have been left to the ZEC were brushed aside as its usual whimpering.
Apart from the controversial selection of the ZEC, Mugabe gave the commission little time to take full charge of the electoral process, as its January 20 appointment gave it only 10 weeks to organise the election.
The condemned voters’ roll compiled by the discredited Office of the Registrar General was, therefore, not addressed. And despite calls that only one body should run the elections, the ZEC operated alongside the registrar general and the shady national elections logistics committee, whose role in the elections is yet to be fully explained. The committee was made up of local government authorities and secretaries of various government ministries.
The regional observer groups also made no attempt to analyse Harare’s compliance with the regulations demanding equal coverage of contesting parties on public media during the campaign. Throughout the campaign period, the Zimbabwean public broadcaster gave the ruling Zanu-PF more than 80% of the coverage, while other contesting parties, including the MDC, shared the rest. To make matters worse, most of the airtime devoted to the MDC was used to vilify the party as a stooge and a puppet of Western imperialists.
In fact, its biased stance was more evident in its coverage of the Zanu-PF manifesto launch, which was given four hours of live coverage on television and some radio stations. In contrast, the MDC’s launch was given slightly more than two minutes during the main news bulletin.
Zimbabwe’s public newspapers refused to even take paid advertisement from the MDC, and the leading daily paper in the stable, The Herald, proclaimed in a comment that it had no obligation to cover all contesting parties.
Like its broadcasting counterparts, the public press barely covered the opposition during the campaign period, except where there were negative stories concerning opposition candidates or their leader, Morgan Tsvangirai.
The 2005 general election was, therefore, held in an environment that Zanu-PF, with the able assistance of the now-deposed information minister Jonathan Moyo, had carefully created long before the proclamation of the Mauritius declaration.
If the SADC observer mission were sincere in its assessment, it would have addressed these issues from start, and not just looked at the period it arrived in the country up to the polling day.
And so, as I and fellow local observers trooped out of polling stations after the counting, we knew the regional observers who had been so visible in Harare hotels and eating-places would not have found anything wrong by the time they arrived.
The chiefs had already been given their cars, and most had already been promised or had electricity connected to their homes, and had expressed the expected gratitude to the government and ruling party by coercing their subordinates into voting for Zanu-PF.
Those who were suspected of supporting the opposition MDC were being denied food.
The voters’ roll was complete but individuals and politicians could not access it, except at exorbitant prices. And above all, the brutality waged by Zanu-PF in the past five years had instilled fear in the electorate, who were told of retribution that would befall them if they voted for the opposition. There was no way they could have voted freely.
So to most of us, South Africa and the SADC did not want to subject the Zimbabwean electoral process to scrutiny anyway, but gave Mugabe the legitimacy he badly needs. For how can such a deeply flawed election, whose conduct brazenly violated the spirit and letter of the SADC electoral guidelines, pass the democratic test?
Mandla Mpofu is a Zimbabwean-based media consultant and worked as an election observer during the Zimbabwe elections