As Zimbabweans go to the ballot on Saturday to elect members to a new and controversial Upper House of Parliament, the buzz is not about the polls but rather on chronic food shortages and the economic meltdown.
Despite radio and television messages exhorting people to vote for ruling-party candidates and news stories about the rift in the main opposition over contesting the polls, there is little excitement about the elections.
President Robert Mugabe’s party, which won a landslide victory in parliamentary elections in March, used its two-thirds majority in the House to approve constitutional changes in August to reintroduce a bicameral legislature abolished in 1990.
”The question is what benefit will I get if I go to vote, and the answer is nothing,” said Ella Tayengwa, a 46-year-old mother of four from the populous township of Tafara in Harare.
Widowed six years ago, she ran a thriving vegetable shop that was razed to the ground during a controversial government blitz on illegal urban structures.
”The Senate is not for us, but rather for Zanu-PF [the ruling party] elite, so I would rather stay at home on the polling day as my way of protest,” she said. ”The majority of us have no food and some who lost their homes are still living in the open, so nobody cares about an election that will not make their lives any better.
”A caring government would have used the Z$90-billion budgeted for the elections to feed its people.”
International aid agencies estimate that about 4,3-million people out of Zimbabwe’s population of 13-million require food assistance.
‘Boycott the elections’
A pamphlet being distributed by Women of Zimbabwe Arise, a pressure group campaigning for a poll boycott, says the ”government is spending Z$90-billion on Senate elections, but many are starving”.
”Do you want senators or your basic right to live with dignity?” the pamphlet says, adding: ”Boycott the elections.”
The country’s major labour movement said the Senate is a waste of scarce money as Zimbabwe is in the throes of its worst economic crisis to date.
Zimbabwe’s economy has been on a downturn over the past six years, characterised by triple-digit inflation, more than 70% unemployment and chronic shortages of basic goods such as sugar, cooking oil and fuel.
”The Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions [ZCTU] would rather have billions budgeted for the Senate being channelled towards the improvement of salaries for teachers, police, soldiers and nurses in public hospitals,” the ZCTU said in a statement on Sunday.
”The president should do away with this practice of accommodating his few cronies at the expense of the majority of Zimbabweans,” it said.
But political analyst Augustine Timbe said the Senate is necessary ”to engender public confidence in our lawmaking process”.
”We have gone past that phase in our history when it was necessary to rush laws through Parliament to satisfy urgent needs such as the land reforms,” Timbe said.
”Governance issues can now be handled in a cool and calculated manner, and this will retain the confidence in our lawmaking process that was lost when laws were quashed by the Supreme Court,” Timbe said.
Critics of the Senate said it is a ploy by Mugabe to appease ruling-party members who lost in the March parliamentary elections.
Others say it is aimed at further buttressing the stranglehold Mugabe’s party has on the legislature.
The Senate has caused a split in the main opposition Movement for Democratic Change party after 26 party members defied a call by their leader, Morgan Tsvangirai, to boycott the polls.
Tsvangirai argued that the Senate was a waste of money, especially at a time of acute economic distress. — Sapa-AFP