The Zimbabwean government announced this week that the run-off presidential election between opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai and President Robert Mugabe will take place before the end of July. In a special edition of the Government Gazette, published on Wednesday, it announced that the election will take place in 90 days.
Shortly after the gazette was published, Zanu-PF announced that its election campaign will kick off on Friday. ”We are more than prepared. We are going to launch our campaign on Friday,” Justice Minister Patrick Chinamasa told the Mail & Guardian.
The announcement comes as Morgan Tsvangirai, leader of Zimbabwe’s opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) makes plans to return home this week for the first time since the March 29 presidential poll. Tsvangirai is looking to the Southern African Development Community (SADC) to provide him with bodyguards and vehicles to ensure his safety once he arrives in Harare.
SADC, which has often been seen as pro-Mugabe, has conceded that Zimbabwe might not be ready yet for elections.
Tsvangirai has had to seek assurances of his personal safety. But Bright Matonga, Zimbabwe’s deputy information minister said this week that: ”Tsvangirai is free to return to the country and he has nothing to fear.”
Since the March 29 election, Tsvangirai has been racing around the region seeking support for his party. But much has changed and the MDC will need to review its strategy for what will be a very different and much tougher campaign ahead of the run-off election. Tensions are already rising. This week police announced a ban on public meetings in response to a planned Tsvangirai rally on Sunday.
Zimbabwe Lawyers for Justice added a new twist to the already tense situation this week by calling on Mugabe to declare a state of emergency, which would increase police powers, allowing them to detain suspects for more than 48 hours and declare curfews.
SADC executive secretary Tomaz Salomao was quoted this week saying the regional grouping felt it could not yet declare ”that the political playing field is safe or will be fair” for the poll.
He added that the SADC would deploy double the number of observers for the run-off it deployed during the first round.
The MDC spokesperson, Nelson Chamisa, said the main challenge facing the MDC was how to deal with the violence, which it said, has claimed at least 30 of its supporters. ”Our single biggest challenge now is dealing with the state-sponsored terror.”
Mugabe has made sure that his opponents will find it hard to get their campaign off the ground.
The Zimbabwe Peace Project (ZPP), a group documenting the violence, reported that thousands might be unable to vote after they were displaced from their homes and had their identity cards were destroyed or seized. ”… this will be a ward-based election, so when you are displaced and are unable to return to vote in your ward, you are disenfranchised. Others lost their IDs when their homes were burned,” ZPP director Jestina Mukoko said.
Amid intimidation and the erosion of public confidence in the electoral process, caused mainly by a two-month delay in the release of the full results, Tsvangirai will need to weigh his response to these events.
His radical advisers want him to take a tough stance on the attacks. But Chamisa told the M&G that any call for self-defence or retaliation would be taken as ”a call to war and we do not want that”.
”[Tsvangirai] will instead continue to call upon the police to do their job and to call on the international community, including South Africa, to rein in Mugabe.”
MDC insiders said the results of the first round stripped Mugabe and Zanu-PF of their image of invincibility. But they conceded that to take advantage of this, Tsvangirai needs to reorganise his party. The MDC has looked rudderless since the poll, outplayed by Zanu-PF’s fight-back campaign headed by Emmerson Mnangagwa, Minister of Rural Housing and former minister of national security.
There will also be the task of facing up to pressure from players inside Zimbabwe and the region to reach out to Mugabe. Radicals on both sides continue to urge their leaders to resist calls for either a unity government or some kind of transitional authority.