The contest for the presidency in Zimbabwe has begun, with candidates preparing manifestos and travelling the length and breadth of the country to drum up support.
Robert Mugabe
Unlike his opponents, Mugabe can rely on state resources to drive his campaign.
While other people arriving in Beitbridge last weekend had to endure the crumbling highway that leads into the border town, Mugabe and his family were flown in on a special police plane and driven to his birthday-party venue in a 4×4.
His birthday speech, which he used to launch his campaign, was later simultaneously broadcast on the country’s four radio channels and on television.
Mugabe was unforgiving in his attacks on his rivals, saving his choicest insults for Simba Makoni. To illustrate his criticism of what he said was Makoni’s ”naive ambition”, Mugabe said of him: ”He is like the frog which puffed itself up so much, trying to get to the size of an ox. The frog kept doing this until it burst.”
Mugabe is due to launch his campaign manifesto next week at a function in Harare that will be attended by his top officials.
While his rivals’ manifestos are setting up the economy as the central issue of the campaign, Mugabe is unlikely to come up with a substantive manifesto. He told a television interviewer that his job was already done: ”I have given people something tangible,” he said, pointing to farm equipment — from ox-drawn ploughs to tractors and fertiliser — which he has been handing out to rural voters over the past year.
”People look at what you do between elections, not just before elections,” he said.
Analysts agree, saying his ”farm mechanisation” programme is likely to bolster his traditional rural support, despite his own admission that the government’s predictions of a bumper harvest were false.
But poor harvests ahead of elections are always a godsend for Zanu-PF. Now Mugabe can distribute food aid and the grain his government has imported, mostly from South Africa and Malawi, in exchange for votes.
A new ward-based voting system — where voters can only vote within a small radius of their home — will also make it easier for Mugabe to pick out which hungry villages voted against him.
MDC
Morgan Tsvangirai, who leads the larger of the two factions of the MDC, launched his campaign at a rally in the eastern town of Mutare last weekend.
With media focus in recent weeks on new entrant Makoni, the large turnout at his rally will have lifted Tsvangirai’s spirits, and, he told his supporters, his party remained the ”legitimate” opposition in Zimbabwe.
On Wednesday, he went on a ”walkabout” in Harare’s central business district and in some of the capital’s poorest suburbs, meeting supporters without interference from the security services.
But Tsvangirai said the biggest test of Mugabe’s commitment to upholding promises of a free poll will come when the MDC rolls out its campaigns in Mugabe’s rural heartland. Previously, Zanu-PF has declared rural areas ”no-go areas” for the opposition, violently crushing MDC campaigns.
While amendments to security and media laws agreed between Zanu-PF and the MDC sought to create a freer environment for campaigning, there is no real sign the opposition will have it any easier this time round.
Last week, police chief Augustine Chihuri said he had given his officers licence to use firearms against opposition activists he accused of planning ”street protests or Kenya-style riots if the ballot does not go in their favour”.
The same day Mugabe was launching his campaign, two opposition candidates were being held by police in Mashonaland West, Mugabe’s home province, for holding what authorities said were illegal gatherings.
While Zanu-PF officials, including Mugabe himself, have pledged a violence-free election, at least two ruling-party candidates have been accused of torching the homes of rivals over the past week.
Access to public media has also been denied the opposition, despite new electoral legislation compelling the country’s sole broadcaster, the ZBC, to give all parties fair coverage.
Last week, the ZBC banned voter education adverts taken out on radio and television by an independent election monitoring group. Zanu-PF then stepped up its own media campaign.
To hammer home its message that the opposition is foreign-funded, Zanu-PF took out a full-page advertisement in the Herald. The ad featured a banner saying ”Zimbabwe not for sale” and a copy of a letter from British Prime Minister Gordon Brown purportedly confirming his government’s funding of opposition groups.
Simba Makoni
In a suburban house turned into his campaign headquarters, Makoni last week wove between stacks of freshly printed pamphlets bearing his picture and banners carrying his ”New Dawn” campaign slogan.
He chatted to members of his campaign team, many of them in yellow T-shirts, as he prepared for his first foray outside Harare and into Mugabe’s rural stronghold to launch his campaign.
But the frustration and exhaustion of some of the 40 members of the team were visible.
While Mugabe and Tsvangirai have launched their campaigns before large crowds, Makoni’s is still struggling to get off the ground.
After a flurry of media events following the announcement of his bid in early February, the Makoni campaign has fallen off the radar, giving rise to speculation that it is already running low on momentum and funding.
He has also faced a series of setbacks, some of which reveal how difficult it can be to run a campaign against Mugabe’s well-oiled machine — and how hard Zimbabwe’s economic crisis is hitting.
On Monday, the car-hire company that had agreed to supply bakkies telephoned to cancel. The few vehicles Makoni still had at his disposal were out of fuel. On Tuesday, the company that had been printing Makoni’s campaign material called to say it could not continue as it had run out of paper.
Earlier, the Makoni campaign had even struggled to open a bank account as banks had hesitated to take business from Makoni, aware of the trouble this would bring them.
But Makoni’s people insist they can still mount a successful campaign in the four weeks that remain before the elections. Spokesperson Godfrey Chanetsa told the M&G: ”We had not expected some of the bottlenecks, but we are sure we can get over this and get ourselves on the road. We are still confident he will win by a landslide.”