Embattled Zimbabweans showed little enthusiasm on Saturday for a new Senate, forming longer lines in some areas to buy scarce food supplies than to vote for a body criticised as a costly ploy to strengthen President Robert Mugabe’s grip on power.
The election has divided the main opposition party, threatening to destroy the only group to have seriously challenged Mugabe’s 25-year rule.
State radio and independent observers reported low turnout countrywide, but did not specify figures.
There were more electoral officials than voters at many polling stations in the capital, Harare. Scores of people lined up to buy sugar at supermarkets in northern and eastern parts of the city — dispersing angrily when stocks ran out at one store, witnesses said. In an adjacent polling station, 13 electoral officials and police officers supervised a single voter casting his ballot.
Previous polls were declared public holidays, but shops and other businesses opened as usual on Saturday. Asked if they would be participating in the election, several people lined up at a cash machine responded: ”What election?”
”It is a non-event,” said a patrolling police officer who demanded not to be identified. Only senior officers are permitted to speak to journalists.
Voting was more brisk in the south-western Harare township of Mbare, where observers from the independent Zimbabwe Election Support Network said about 100 people lined up to cast ballots in the first hours of the poll. But the monitoring group said a controversial boycott call by opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai appeared to be mostly holding in his urban strongholds.
”It is more than apathy and ignorance. People are actively not going to vote,” said Reginald Matchaba-Hove, head of the network.
Tsvangirai argued that participation on Saturday would lend credibility to a vote that was certain to be flawed. But senior members of his Movement for Democratic change rejected his boycott call and fielded 26 candidates.
The split in Zimbabwe’s main opposition party assured Mugabe’s Zanu-PF control of the chamber he abolished in 1990.
The ruling party’s candidates were unopposed for 19 of the Senate’s 50 elected seats. Mugabe appoints six other seats, and 10 are reserved for traditional leaders, selected by the fiercely pro-government Council of Chiefs.
Tsvangirai’s party opposed the Senate’s creation by constitutional amendment earlier this year, saying it would serve only to increase Mugabe’s power to doll out jobs and perks in the ailing economy. The new House has no veto powers over legislation passed by the ruling party-dominated Lower House.
”It’s irrelevant. It does nothing for me,” said vendor Rodrique Bhasera, explaining why he was hurrying to market to try to make a living instead of voting on Saturday.
Many also questioned the cost of adding a second chamber at a time of acute shortages of food, gasoline and other essentials. The government estimates the Senate’s annual costs at about Z$60-billion ($6-million) in a country suffering its worst economic crisis since independence from Britain in 1980.
The often-violent seizure of thousands of white-owned commercial farms, coupled with erratic rains, has crippled Zimbabwe’s agriculture-base economy.
Campaigning for the Senate was muted compared with previous elections, which independent observers said were marred by intimidation and fraud.
About 3,2-million of Zimbabwe’s 12-million population were registered to vote on Saturday. Mugabe did not cast a ballot because the ruling-party candidate in his constituency was unopposed. — Sapa-AP