/ 17 June 2008

‘Zanu-PF is going for broke’

Mugabe’s party has dispensed with its
democratic facade and declared war on the opposition, writes Jason Moyo.

As in other places in Zimbabwe, the mood outside the Aids hospice was swinging between anger, patience and dogged determination.

It’s a cold Monday night and a dozen people wait quietly outside a small home in Belgravia, Harare. They have just been asked to leave; the doctors are not coming today and there will be no treatment or drugs this week. Perhaps not even next week. There are grumbles, but still the group waits.

”The truth is we have had to stop until the elections. But who knows what will happen after the elections”, Conrad Makonese, who helps run the centre, told the Mail & Guardian.

As President Robert Mugabe tightens the noose on the activities of his opponents, even sending field workers out to monitor people on anti-retroviral treatment would get Makonese jailed. A blanket ban on aid work has added to the despair caused by worsening pre-election violence and the sharpest ever price hikes.

The consequences of the ban are dire, says James Elder, Unicef spokesperson in Zimbabwe: ”Unicef alone was reaching hundreds of thousands of children with health, nutrition and education — and they haven’t received any of that for the past four days and they won’t until the government reinstates all these NGOs.”

Two weeks ahead of the polls, sentiment on the streets is a mix of dejection and determination. In the long bank queues tempers boil over easily and there is robust political debate, yet people wait patiently for hours, determined to withdraw salaries, which now come in hundreds of billions.

The only clear signals are coming from Zanu-PF; Mugabe’s party has made it plain it no longer feels it has anything to lose: ”The comrades are at their most dangerous,” one Zanu-PF official told the M&G.

The broad sentiment within Zanu-PF is that its reputation has been soiled so badly in the months since the first round of the presidential election that it has no image left to defend. Reflecting this, the state-owned Herald daily published an opinion piece at the weekend urging an even tougher response to dissent, including from foreign diplomats, whatever the consequences. ”We have hit the bottom, we should not fear to fall,” the article said, ”what the heck.”

Zanu-PF is going for broke, shedding all its inhibitions and all the pretences to democracy it showed ahead of the March poll. Its most senior officials now go on television to openly declare war if Mugabe loses. ”Voting for Tsvangirai is to vote for a return to war,” Hubert Nyanhongo, a deputy minister, told a rally in a Harare slum. ”So to prevent a war that will kill you and me, let’s vote for President Mugabe.”

Zanu-PF had hoped violence would numb the opposition. But although MDC leaders deny it publicly, opposition supporters are organising and retaliating. In Manicaland and Masvingo provinces, areas that once staunchly supported Zanu-PF but which voted MDC in March, the opposition has been fighting back. While this has encouraged MDC supporters elsewhere, retaliatory attacks raise the spectre of a rapid escalation of violence.

Few are safe. After diplomats from the United States and United Kingdom were involved in a high speed car chase and a tense standoff with police last week in Mashonaland Central, diplomats too have seen their immunity to the violence disappear.

Mugabe has closed down all the space he had allowed the opposition in the run-up to the March elections. Police have banned MDC rallies, defying court orders declaring the bans illegal. ”The run-up to March 29 had represented real progress. All of that has been more than reversed,” an African diplomat said.

In this campaign the MDC has been denied even a fraction of the airtime it had been allowed in the public media in the first campaign. The head of the Zimbabwe Broadcasting Corporation (ZBC), the public broadcaster, has been sacked and eight of his most senior journalists suspended. Their crime was to follow legal requirements — and SADC election guidelines — compelling public media to grant access to all parties. Regular programming on television has now been suspended, with the prime-time staple now a diet of lengthy talk-fests featuring pro-government commentators.

But Morgan Tsvangirai still believes he can defeat Mugabe.

”I’m encouraged by the people’s determination and their desire to ensure that we finish it, that we dismiss hunger, poverty, loss of dignity and suffering on June 27,” Tsvangirai said on Tuesday.

Observers, however, doubt Tsvangirai’s chances. Eldred Masunungure, a professor of politics at the University of Zimbabwe, said a free election is impossible.

”The chances are very slim for an MDC victory.” And Simba Makoni, a former Zanu-PF official who came third in the presidential election, said ”in the current situation, there is no hope that a free and fair election can be undertaken”. He again urged talks between the two sides.

But as tensions rise, calls for a negotiated settlement are being drowned out. Tsvangirai said he would not negotiate with Mugabe before the election, while Zanu-PF insiders also say they would only negotiate ”from a position of power” once they had ensured Mugabe’s re-election.