Robert Mugabe will be hoping to seize the initiative from his opponent Morgan Tsvangirai when the Zimbabwean president launches his campaign on Sunday.
Mugabe has invited 2 000 supporters and campaign leaders to a launch rally at his party’s headquarters in Harare. The event will cap nearly a month of strategic work by his top advisers to reverse his first-round loss to Tsvangirai, leader of the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC).
Since the March 29 elections the party has sought to drain Tsvangirai’s momentum.
Now Zanu-PF feels it has done enough groundwork to reverse Tsvangirai’s gains in the five weeks before the June 27 run-off.
Mugabe insiders claimed credit this week for hobbling Tsvangirai’s campaign by ”selling his people enough rotten intelligence”, as one Zanu-PF source suggested to the Mail & Guardian.
The source was referring to Tsvangirai’s claim that there is a government plot to wipe out the MDC leadership. Tsvangirai had said he would return to Zimbabwe last Saturday after six weeks abroad but stayed away after his party said it had ”credible intelligence” that the army had deployed 18 snipers to kill him and his top officials.
Zanu-PF denied the claims and the party official’s comment suggests that the information might have been planted. However, the MDC insists its information was provided by ”well-placed” sources in ZimbabÂÂwean military intelligence.
Tsvangirai rejects criticism, much of it from his allies, that his continued absence from Zimbabwe is hurting his chances.
”He is doing the right thing. He has to make sure he is protected to complete the struggle, so that the people of Zimbabwe are freed from this tyranny,” his spokesperson, George Sibotshiwe, said.
Nelson Chamisa, the MDC spokesperson, said Tsvangirai was not ”on a luxury holiday” in South Africa, but has been building worldwide pressure on Mugabe. A rally attended by thousands in Bulawayo last Sunday shows that the MDC has lost none of its energy, party officials say.
But as Mugabe gathers his forces and rolls out his campaign, Tsvangirai’s most ardent backers fear the MDC leader risks losing ground.
In the opposing camp Mugabe confessed his fears of a defeat. In his first major speech to senior party officials since the March 29 election last Friday he told the ZanuPF central committee that it would mean the end of the party.
”If we allow ourselves to go, we are gone. We have enough examples all around us to draw useful lessons on the fate and aftermath of strong liberation movements and their anti-imperialist governments once they are ousted,” Mugabe said.
He admitted that the electoral losses were linked to divisions within Zanu-PF over his succession. Hoping to unite lieutenants behind his campaign, he warned them that his defeat would also mean the end of their political careers.
”Today the hope of your future political career lies in Zanu-PF winning the presidency. Let us go back to work,” Mugabe said
Key to his re-election will be a strategy to bring out the vote and to rush food aid to poor rural voters. ”Most people stayed at home and that sleeping vote is what we must target and arouse,” Mugabe said.
He said he lost because ”people were hungry when they went to the polls”. Mugabe has set up a committee to speed up the delivery of grain to starving villagers, a move that the opposition says is a blatant vote-buying tactic.
His defeat, Mugabe said, would spell the end of Zimbabwe’s independence: ”The fall of Zanu-PF is the fall of Zimbabwe as a sovereign nation, indeed the displacement of our people’s interests by those of imperialism. We have to be alive to our responsibilities as leaders of a party of liberation.”