A hollow victory: the aftermath of the Zimbabwe elections

I had come to find the graves of people who had died from a recent cholera outbreak that then president Robert Mugabe insisted had never happened.

According to Mugabe there was “no cholera” in Zimbabwe even though that same day I spoke with many relatives of those who had died.

Among those that I met was Cecilia, a 70-year old woman who had come for the first time to visit the grave of her 18-year old granddaughter who had died slowly and painfully from the disease.

Cecilia’s family were poor, the sort who suffers most in a country with a crumbling healthcare system, economic collapse, hunger and political oppression. In Zimbabwe at that time under the iron grip of Mugabe’s regime, there was no shortage of painful and often violent ways to die.

Fast forward 10 years and I’m back in Zimbabwe, this time just before the latest presidential elections that have played out so dramatically over the past week. Once again I found myself in an impoverished township, a place called Mbare one of the biggest and oldest in Harare.

Here too poverty is rife, the uncollected refuse, overcrowding, rampant petty crime and widespread health and sanitation problems, all legacies of those years during which the Mugabe regime let Mbare and much of Zimbabwe rot.

But the mood among those Zimbabweans I met this time round has changed. Four months after Mugabe’s 40-year long rule was broken when he was ousted in a coup, people are looking forward to what they believe will be the country’s first free and fair election in decades.

That long-awaited and eagerly anticipated poll was finally run last week, but its outcome has done little to heal the wounds in a country still deeply divided and living in the shadow of its authoritarian past.

After days of bitter claims and counter-claims, incumbent president Emmerson Mnangagwa, the 75-year-old former spy chief, nicknamed ‘the crocodile,’ secured a comfortable victory for his Zanu-PF party, polling 50.8 per cent of the votes.

His main rival 40-year-old opposition leader Nelson Chamisa of the MDC Alliance gained 44.3 per cent of the ballot. Mnangagwa’s majority thus avoided a run-off.

Overall Zanu-PF kept its parliamentary majority with 144 of 210 seats while the MDC won 64.

Voter turnout overall was high at more than 75 per cent, reflecting the hope of Zimbabweans that the election would be fair. Many of those monitoring the ballot, however, believe it wasn’t.

European Union observers cited “misuse of state resources, instances of coercion and intimidation, partisan behaviour by traditional leaders and overt bias in state media”, all to the Zanu-PF’s advantage. Security forces meanwhile raided opposition headquarters and broke up a press conference at a Harare hotel on Friday.

The same day Mnangagwa did his best to sound a conciliatory note after six people were killed in a post-election crackdown by the military. He vowed to be president for all Zimbabweans and declared his rival Chamisa would have a vital role to perform in Zimbabwe’s future.

“To Nelson Chamisa, I want to say: you have a crucial role to play in Zimbabwe’s present and its unfolding future. Let us both call for peace and unity in our land,” Mnangagwa appealed.

But Chamisa in his first public appearance since Mnangagwa was declared election winner early on Friday morning, told reporters Mnangagwa’s ruling Zanu-PF had authorised the army crackdown on opposition supporters because it knew it had lost the election.

“Mr Mnangagwa did not win the election in this country … we won this election emphatically,” Chamisa said. “If you go around the country you will find no celebration. This is a black day for democracy. We are seeing a repeat of the last regime.”

Chamisa went on to insist that he and his supporters would “explore all necessary means, legal and constitutional, to ensure that the will of the people is protected.”

Zimbabwe's constitution does allow for a legal challenge to the results, but Chamisa now has the huge task of proving in court with hard evidence what until now have only been claims and accusations.

In Harare, however, many MDC supporters appeared resigned to the result and unwilling to take to the streets to protest, perhaps fearing another crackdown by the police and army.

Meanwhilethe continuing war of words between the two leaders bodes ill for Zimbabwe’s future political direction, one being watched carefully by its African neighbours and the wider international community.

Hoping to attract renewed investment from the West, Mnangagwa worked during the election campaign to moderate his image with a message that Zimbabwe was embracing democracy and human rights.

Some critics though have seen his election as little more than an extension of Mugabe’s long rule. Mnangagwa, they point out was Mugabe’s right-hand man and behind some of his most repressive policies.

Already the heavy-handed response towards protesters has raised questions over who could have ordered the army on to the streets last week and who is really running the government.

Some election observers say that the army’s deployment and the repression used has shot a hole in the government’s claims that Zimbabwe has thrown off its authoritarian past. Mnangagwa’s government is nothing more than a military junta in disguise some claim. They point to Constantino Chiwenga, the military leader of last November’s coup that ended Mugabe’s rule as the man who is really in charge.

“The government still has a military core and a military ethos,” was how Zimbabwe expert Stephen Chan, of London University’s School of Oriental and African Studies, summed up the situation.

“How can you be so goddam clumsy? You’ve gone to all this trouble to stage manage this stuff and you’ve just gone and shot yourself in the foot,” Chan wryly observed about Mnangagwa’s handling of the election and subsequent protests in Harare last week. Mnangagwa’s spat with Chamisa aside, his victory could prove hollow in other ways too.

As the country’s leader he will have to administer an economy in meltdown after two decades of misrule and corruption under Mugabe and a near bankrupt Treasury that’s unable to service its loans or take out new ones. All this will leave Mnangagwa little scope to improve government services, rebuild crumbling transport links and meet a plethora of other election pledges.

The challenges the president faces are all too obvious to any visitor to the country. Some districts in the capital Harare, a sprawling, run-down city of about 4 million people haven’t had running water for years. Raw sewage leaks from burst pipes that go unfixed for weeks at a time and long stretches of tarmac roads have been reduced to rutted tracks. Harare city council estimates it needs $10 billion to repair infrastructure and attend to its maintenance backlog.

Time and again while in Zimbabwe in the run up to the elections, I listened to government officials repeat the political mantra that Zimbabwe was now “open for business.”

The bad old days of authoritarian rule they insisted were now behind the country.

But on Friday on Harare’s streets it was police officers in vehicles with mounted loudspeakers that toured the city’s streets reassuring shopkeepers.

“Zimbabwe is open for business. We are here to protect you. Feel free to walk and open your business. All is well, fear not,” the officers insisted.

It was all a far cry from the positive tone of the government’s message in the run up to the election.

“This has blown the slogan ‘Open for Business’ into smoke,” Ibbo Mandaza, a political analyst and a former member of the ruling Zanu-PF, told the Financial Times last week.

“The consensus now is that engagement with the west is a very far-off prospect,” he said, citing discussions with foreign observers and diplomats shocked at the violent turn the elections had taken.

Mnangagwa faces no end of other problems too, not least the country’s currency crisis. Some time ago the government introduced bond notes, a dollar-backed quasi-currency, to ease Zimbabwe’s liquidity crisis, but the effect has been marginal.

Today more than 98 per cent of transactions are conducted via bank and other transfers and dollar bills are worth as much as 80 per cent more that their electronic equivalent.

But the financial problems go even deeper. According to research by Bloomberg business news, the government currently has about 350,000 employees whose wages gobble up almost the entire national budget. It also owns about 100 companies, most of which are cash-strapped and dysfunctional.

Zimbabwe is also saddled with $1.7 billion of arrears owed to the African Development Bank and World Bank that it needs to clear before it can tap new loans from multilateral lenders.

“We’ve heard lots of talk about being open for business, but nothing tangible to attract business,” John Robertson, an independent economist based in Harare told Bloomberg. “As things stand, it’s cheaper to import products than manufacture them locally because of the very high production costs.”

All of this is being carefully noted and monitored by current and potential future investors in Zimbabwe.

Earlier this year in Harare, the European Union’s Commissioner for International Development, Neven Mimica, signed an agreement with Zimbabwean officials that saw new EU-funded programmes worth £20 million launched to improve people’s access to health services and enhance their livelihoods.

I asked Mr Mimica at the time whether such future funding might be reconsidered should Zimbabwe’s election fail to be free and transparent and any future administration not live up to the democratic terms laid down as conditions.

“The EU has always been a reliable partner of the Zimbabwean people, and it stands ready to accompany Zimbabwe in its process of change,” said Mr Mimica

“We do not want to be a passive partner in this process,” he added, stressing that the EU and others were watching Zimbabwe’s impending elections carefully and that reforms must be made and checks carried out that such a process is under way for EU financial support to be maintained.

Given events surrounding the election last week Mimica’s words have taken on a fresh and imperative resonance. Whether Zimbabwe is on a genuinely new course remains far from certain. To that end president Mnangagwa will be closely scrutinised by many within the international community.

“If Mnangagwa is serious about reform, he must also repeal laws giving the government power to toss political opponents in jail and crack down on public protests as well as Mugabe-era legislation designed to roll back civil liberties, quash independent journalism, thwart the rule of law, and criminalise speech critical of the president,” observed Siphosami Malunga, executive director of the Open Society Initiative for Southern Africa.

“As long as those statutes are on the books, the government can use them to silence critics and opponents,” Malunga added in an article published just before the election.

Democratic change in Zimbabwe is undoubtedly possible. For the moment though the hopes of ordinary Zimbabweans have been tempered yet again by the forces arrayed against it and the determination of some to hold on to power. The weeks and months ahead will be another uncertain and difficult period for this long-suffering African nation.