New voter statistics out in Zimbabwe this week showed the urban centres will be a major battleground in the elections in two weeks’ time.
Harare and Bulawayo, the two largest urban centres in the country, now account for a combined 20% of the total voter count of 5,5-million.
In previous elections, the share of urban voters was lower, allowing Mugabe to throw all his resources into the rural areas to secure his rule. This time he might have to do better if he is to fend off his two challengers, Morgan Tsvangirai and Simba Makoni.
After a weekend in which both candidates attracted large crowds to their rallies in Bulawayo and the Midlands — areas already largely pro-opposition — there are questions about how the urban vote might be split between the two, and whether the split will be enough for Mugabe to retain control.
Ibbo Mandaza, a senior Makoni adviser, said on Tuesday that whoever does well in Harare and Bulawayo this time has a good chance of going all the way.
But Tsvangirai dismissed suggestions that Makoni has been chipping away at his traditional urban support. He said this week that he merely saw Makoni as a faction of Zanu-PF, and that voters, too, would see the new challenger as such.
”To me this is a split in Zanu-PF. It has nothing to do with the MDC. You have two candidates that I am contesting with from Zanu-PF; Robert Mugabe’s faction and Simba Makoni’s faction. That’s what I can read and for me that is where it ends,” Tsvangirai said.
But analysts believe Makoni will feed on the disillusionment among urban voters over Tsvangirai’s failure to lead a united opposition into the election.
Mugabe himself will be watching the urban count more closely than he would normally. Zimbabwean electoral law requires the winner of the presidential race to gain a clear majority — more than 50% — to avoid a run-off with the second place candidate. Mugabe will therefore be hoping that Makoni and Tsvangirai split the urban vote and leave his rural support intact.
”As long as Makoni is fishing from the same pond as Tsvangirai, there is no chance of a run-off,” said analyst Gordon Moyo.
Supporters of Tsvangirai believe Makoni is likely to attract much of his support from traditional Zanu-PF supporters, who still back the ruling party but are angry at Mugabe’s refusal to hand over power to a younger leadership.
Mugabe is yet to hold an urban rally, and at all his rallies in rural areas, he has largely ignored Tsvangirai, pouring most of his vitriol on Makoni and those he believes are opposed to his continued hold on the party.
Meanwhile, João Miranda, the Angolan Minister of Foreign Affairs and head of the Southern African Development Community (SADC) observer mission to the Zimbabwean election, says he believes free and fair elections are still possible, even as opposition groups raised fresh protests over the government’s conduct ahead of the polls.
Miranda, who is also head of SADC’s organ on politics, defence and security, said in Harare this week the regional body would have 120 observers on the ground by next week. Fifty SADC observers are already on the ground.
But there are concerns that SADC will arrive too late and will not have sufficient opportunity to observe the pre-election conduct of the various parties, in particular Zanu-PF supporters who have been involved in acts of intimidation against the opposition.
Miranda, however, insisted that SADC could still effectively observe the electoral process even with only two weeks of campaigning left before the March 29 election date.
”The number of observers is enough to cover all constituencies. We think we have enough time to observe this election. Even if we had two, three days, it would still be sufficient to complete the mission,” Miranda said on Wednesday. ”We need to believe in the capacity of the mission to do the job.”
He said he believed a transparent election was possible, and that all parties ”must have the capacity to accept the outcome of the elections. This is what we expect of all the people of Zimbabwe, all the candidates, and the political institutions of this country.”
But opposition groups this week accused Mugabe of taking yet another step to give Zanu-PF an advantage.
A list of polling stations published by the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission this week showed that there would be up to three times as many polling stations in Mugabe’s rural strongholds as there would be in urban areas.
The Zimbabwe Election Support Network, the largest local observer group, said the distribution of urban voting centres was such that, in one district of Harare, if all registered voters were to vote in the allotted 12 polling hours, each voter would have a maximum of nine seconds to cast a vote.