Robert Mugabe is poised to rig a general election once again

Zimbabwe

Mar 23rd 2005 BULAWAYO
From The Economist print edition

There has been less violence than there was in the run-up to the poll five years ago, but there is no chance that the one on March 31st will be free or fair

IN A woodland park in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe's second town, a hundred or so black and white people huddled together in the moonlight, as if at a prayer meeting. Men perched on boulders and bowed their heads, women sat on fold-up chairs, a few devotees waved torches. Many wore bandannas, T-shirts or strips of white cloth signifying support for the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), the opposition party that would almost certainly win the poll if it were allowed to. Posters displayed the party's symbol, an open hand. Burly MDC youths watched out for police. A speaker greeted the group in the local language, Ndebele, then sang out: “A new Zimbabwe!” The crowd shouted back: “A new beginning! Amandla [Power]!” Yet the chances of the MDC guiding Zimbabwe towards that bright new dawn are minimal.

Of parliament's 150 seats, 120 are up for election in single-member, first-past-the-post constituencies; the president, Robert Mugabe, nominates the remaining 30 MPs. Few open-minded people doubt that, if the poll were free and fair, the MDC would romp home. Despite massive intimidation and vote-rigging in the last general election, in 2000, the newly formed party won 57 seats, with 47% of votes cast, against 62 seats for Mr Mugabe's ruling ZANU-PF (to give it its full acronym) which officially took 48.6% of the vote. The MDC lodged complaints about alleged vote-rigging in 37 constituencies which ZANU was adjudged to have won; but the courts, heavily influenced by the president and his friends, have failed in the past five years to deal with a single such case.

Two years later, in 2002, the MDC's leader, Morgan Tsvangirai, a trade unionist, would surely have unseated Mr Mugabe in a presidential election, had the police not beaten up opposition voters, blocked people from reaching polling stations, and let officials declare false results. The opposition is particularly popular in the capital, Harare, in larger towns like Bulawayo, and in the country's southern belt. Several years of economic collapse, hunger, corruption, a spiralling AIDS epidemic and chronic misrule mean that ZANU, itself sharply divided, is widely hated.

But there is little prospect of it being ousted soon. “I won't vote, it's useless,” says a street-trader in Bulawayo. “I voted last time, but not now. The old man [Mugabe] will win, whatever we do.” The city's outspoken archbishop, Pius Ncube, thinks most voters have been bludgeoned into passivity by years of violence. “There is no way for change, because of this rigging. It's likely to be more rigged than the last one. They [ZANU] have learnt a lot of tricks. People just pray that Mugabe should die. I pray for that.”

There are fewer reports of violence this time, partly because groups that used to document it have been forced to give up, though some still operate in secret. This week Human Rights Watch, a New York-based group, reported less violence than before but said that intimidation and partisan laws give ZANU a huge advantage. It enumerates dozens of recent cases of MDC people being beaten, kidnapped and harassed by police and ZANU thugs. Hundreds of local journalists, it says, were arrested last year. Last week a Bulawayo newspaper reported that 40 people had recently been arrested for unspecified “political crimes”.

Mr Mugabe has evidently put out the word that there should now be less bloodshed. During the last general election, thugs and veterans of the independence war were paid to kill opposition campaigners and to invade and take over the farms of MDC-backers. Now, because he wants to avoid shocking observers from South Africa (even though he is letting in only those he thinks most sympathetic), he is adopting subtler rigging techniques.

All the same, most polling stations will be run by soldiers and party agents responsible for the violence last time round: they will hand out ballot papers and tally the results. And there is still the threat of violent retribution after the poll. “People are very much afraid,” says Archbishop Ncube. “No one in Zimbabwe is willing to sacrifice his life.”

Since last time, constituency boundaries have been gerrymandered. A handful of MDC-held seats in populous urban areas have been abolished and new constituencies demarcated in rural areas where land-hungry peasants are friendlier to ZANU. Some urban seats have been merged with neighbouring rural ones, where voters are more pliable and ballot boxes in remote parts more easily stuffed.

In addition, the smaller number of outside observers will be more stretched to watch every ballot box and monitor the count in 8,000-plus polling stations across the land—a vast increase on the past. This time, the ballot papers will be counted where they have been cast, rather than at central counting places. Moreover, villagers are being told that ZANU agents will know, by looking through the transparent new boxes, who has voted for the MDC.

Vote for me—or starve

And ZANU people say bluntly that only their supporters will get government food aid. Farming has collapsed, a drought is now parching the southern half of the country, most aid from outside the country is blocked, and AIDS is rampant. Last month the Johannesburg-based Famine Early Warning System Network, estimated that 5.8m Zimbabweans, in a population of around 11.5m, desperately need food aid—or they could starve. So voting the “wrong way” looks to many of them like a death-sentence.

Furthermore, the ZANU-appointed electoral commission is happy to use an out-of-date voters' roll. This, along with ballot stuffing, could be ZANU's single biggest vote-rigging advantage. A full register has never been disclosed. A partial audit of the roll by the MDC in Bulawayo shows why. Of a sample group of 500 voters, barely half were listed correctly. Nearly a fifth of those named were dead; officials ensure that such “ghosts” are loyal ZANU voters. The South Africa-based Zimbabwe Institute, which advises the MDC, reckons that this probably gives ZANU an 800,000-vote bonus in a voting population of around 5.3m. In addition, the 3m-odd Zimbabweans, most of them very likely MDC backers, who have been driven into exile by economic collapse or government repression, are barred from postal voting.

Few of the observers from abroad seem likely to complain about this patent skulduggery, since most of those let in are from countries whose governments are friendly to Mr Mugabe. The Commonwealth, the European Union and the United States have not been allowed to send observers. Independent-minded African watchers, such as the parliamentary group of the Southern African Development Community (SADC), the Electoral Institute of Southern Africa and South Africa's trade union body, COSATU, have been barred.

South Africa's official observer delegation is the key. Recent comments by President Thabo Mbeki and the leader of his observer mission, Membathisi Mdladlana, the labour minister, suggest they have already made up their minds to declare the election free and fair. The MDC is appalled by Mr Mbeki's partiality, fearing that his team will make much of the quieter mood this time round. Almost all of SADC's 13 member-governments (Mauritius and Botswana are possible exceptions) sound inclined, in a show of regional solidarity, to fall in behind Mr Mbeki.
Hoping to take advantage of the comparative calm, Mr Mugabe has now decided to let in many foreign journalists, after years of excluding nearly all of them, and the MDC and Mr Tsvangirai are being given a few minutes of air time on the state television news (followed, of course, by an hour or so of Mr Mugabe and other ZANU leaders). But Zimbabwe's most independent newspapers, notably the Daily News, remain closed, and ZANU virtually monopolises radio broadcasts.

Mr Mugabe seems determined, this time, to win two-thirds of the seats, so he can then change the constitution. Among other things, he might scrap a provision that requires an election soon after a president steps down. That would make it easier for Mr Mugabe, now 81, to handpick and then impose a successor, probably the new vice-president, Joyce Mujuru, known during the liberation war as Comrade Spill Blood, wife of a former head of the armed forces and defence minister.

It is just conceivable that an MDC majority of votes will be too big even for Mr Mugabe's crooked officials to fiddle away. Or, if the result is rigged as expected, it is possible that demonstrations in Harare will be too big for Mr Mugabe and his soldiers to face down. But that does not seem likely. Mr Tsvangirai and his friends know from experience that Mr Mugabe is not averse to cracking a lot of heads. After being battered by several years of repression, the MDC does not look like having the stomach for a revolution on the streets.

Copyright © 2005 The Economist Newspaper and The Economist Group. All rights reserved.