Assessing the 2008 Zimbabwean elections.

A roller coaster ... a precipice ... Zimbabwe on a razor edge: just some of the metaphors describing the 2008 election of delays. The elections were held against the backdrop of complete economic disintegration with Zimbabwe suffering from the world's highest inflation rate (the official rate at the time of writing stands at around 2.2 million per cent rendering the Zimbabwean dollar worthless), chronic shortages of food and fuel, 80 per cent unemployment and an HIV/AIDS epidemic that has contributed to a steep decline in life expectancy. People survive in part through remittances sent by the four million Zimbabweans who have fled the country.

The Background to the Elections

The expectation in the lead-up to the presidential and parliamentary elections on 29th March was that Zimbabwe would witness another election typical of the late Mugabe period, namely, one characterised by the now familiar blend of state intimidation, the sub-contracting of violence to party 'militias' and wholesale electoral fraud. The latter at least was rendered more difficult to achieve by the concessions wrested from the ZANU-PF regime in late 2007 by Thabo Mbeki, the President of South Africa, acting in his capacity as the region's mediator in the negotiations between the ruling ZANU-PF and its opponents in the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC). It is true that the talks eventually collapsed, with the ruling party refusing to implement an agreed new constitution or abrogate repressive media laws. It then unilaterally announced a date for the election but, interestingly, it did not formally repudiate the concessions it had made on the actual mechanics of the voting process. The MDC was concerned lest it should once again fall victim to the familiar syndrome of 'winning the vote but losing the count' and the concessions made by the regime at the negotiations made this less likely, although hardly impossible.

Robert Mugabe, Zimbabwe's President, has been in power since independence in 1980, first as Prime Minister and since 1987, when the position of Prime Minister was abolished, as President. Mugabe, who is now 84, has been accusing the West of sabotaging Zimbabwe's economy (with its so-called 'smart' sanctions) and rejecting allegations that he had rigged earlier elections in 2002. He had been prevented from postponing the elections for two years, and even prominent members of his own ZANU-PF party had sought unsuccessfully to persuade him to retire. He and the party were shocked when about a month before the election a former cabinet minister, Simba Makoni, put his name forward as one of the presidential candidates. Makoni's candidacy has been the subject of some conjecture among Zimbabwe watchers with opinion divided as to whether this was a genuine break with Mugabe, one symptomatic of wider convulsions within the ruling party which would damage him at the ballot box, or whether it was a ZANU-PF approved operation to draw votes away from the MDC candidate Morgan Tsvangirai.

Parliamentary Elections

The shift of electoral power (one of the concessions from the Mbeki negotiations) from the Registrar General's Office to the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission (ZEC) seemed to ZANU-PF to be a move without risk. After all, they had appointed the commission themselves and George Chiweshe, the chairman, was a reliable party loyalist. In fact the commission insisted on the counting taking place and results being posted at the individual polling stations. This enabled the MDC to photograph the returns and so have an independent tally of the results thus making vote rigging a much more problematic enterprise. The electoral commission was apparently told to give Mugabe an outright victory but it pointed out that with the counting taking place at the individual polling stations this was not possible. The posting of tallies at polling stations would subsequently prove to be a double-edged sword, however. In the aftermath of voting it allowed the regime to explicitly identify those individual areas that had defected to the opposition. These were the areas which were then prioritised for 'reorientation'-a euphemism for beatings, torture, rape and murder-by ZANU-PF militias ahead of the second round in late June.

Free and Fair?

Official results were still to be announced centrally leaving officials some scope to tamper with the overall tallies. Nevertheless, even in the absence of anything approaching a level playing field-for example, the ruling party's exclusive access to the state media-the MDC still managed to achieve a clear victory such was the widespread popular revulsion at the prospect of the continuation of ZANU-PF's misrule. The two factions of the MDC-the larger led by Tsvangirai, the smaller by Arthur Mutumbara-had a combined 105 seats in the 210-member house of assembly, with ZANU-PF on 93 and one independent. Nine members of the ZANU-PF politburo lost their parliamentary seats. The Ministers of Women Affairs, Agriculture, Justice, Legal and Parliamentary Affairs, the party's vice-president, and Ministers of National Security and Land Affairs, Defence, Energy and Power Development and Information were all deposed.

Even Mugabe's former strongholds rejected him. 'It's a tsunami for MDC' was a phrase frequently repeated. The party had not only swept most of the big cities like Harare and Bulawayo, where it was previously strong, but it had also won in Masvingo and Bindura and dozens of other places it had never won before. It had also clearly penetrated rural areas hitherto considered as core ZANU-PF supporting constituencies.

ZANU-PF pressed for a recount in 16 parliamentary seats and, if successful, this would have been enough for it to regain its parliamentary majority. In fact, those recounts failed to change any of the results. More lethal, however, was the immediate upsurge in post-election violence which sought to erode the MDC's notional parliamentary majority through the abduction, killing or arrest of its MPs. Tsvangirai himself had left the country shortly after voting to mobilise African support for the prompt release of the results of the presidential poll. As the delay in releasing that result dragged on without explanation, the entire election process was brought into disrepute. The ZEC was clearly traumatised by what it knew to be Mugabe and ZANU's rejection by the Zimbabwean electorate but it had no clear idea how to proceed and in these fraught circumstances it continued to stall.

The Response

The Southern African Development Community (SADC) mission chairman Jose Marcos Barrica of Angola endorsed the election's credibility and Marwick Khumalo, from the Pan-African parliament, said the elections themselves were free, fair and credible overall. On 1st April the African, Caribbean and Pacific observer team also endorsed the polls. However, the most sinister response came from the regime itself. On Sunday, 30th March the Joint Operations Command (JOC) met for an emergency meeting to discuss the implications of the heavy electoral defeat. The JOC is the nerve centre of the regime comprising army, police and intelligence chiefs in a country where the demarcation lines between party and state have long since been obliterated. The decision was taken to withhold the presidential election results, with sources in the ZEC saying that Mugabe had thwarted the release of the presidential election result to enable the regime to manufacture a more acceptable outcome.

A behind-the-scenes negotiated settlement apparently averted a military coup: 'It has been touch and go for the past 24 hours', one source told The Star (South Africa) on 1st April, adding that there were two security chiefs who were fully prepared to stage a coup, while Mugabe and many of his right-hand men were prepared to negotiate what one source termed 'a gracious exit' for the long-standing president. The two hardliners in question were Air Force Marshal Perence Shiri, who is closely associated with the Matabeleland massacres of the 1980s, and the Defence Force Commander, General Constantine Chiwenga. On 4th April the ZANU-PF politburo unanimously endorsed the defence and security chiefs' advice for Mugabe to face Tsvangirai in a run-off. On the same day 400 of Mugabe's so-called 'war veterans' marched through Harare and later told the media that they would 'defend the country's sovereignty' against an opposition takeover and 'a white invasion'. This was typical of the stale anti-colonial and racial cliches which now passed for a political platform in an ideologically bankrupt ZANU-PF. However, in a clear message to the Zimbabwean army, South Africa's ruling African National Congress (ANC), now under the control of Thabo Mbeki's rival Jacob Zuma, requested 'all institutions of state to respect the outcome of the election' (Washington Times, 3rd April).

Delaying the Presidential Elections

Although the parliamentary and presidential elections took place simultaneously, it was the results of the presidential election-clearly the most decisive of all given the enormous powers of the president-that were delayed. Fearing regime manipulation, a frustrated MDC eventually released its own results, saying that Tsvangirai had won 50.3 per cent of the vote to Mugabe's 43.8 per cent, so avoiding a second round of voting. But these figures differed slightly from those of the Zimbabwe Election Support Network, a coalition of civil society organisations, which said that Tsvangirai had won 49 per cent to Mugabe's 42 per cent-which, if true, would necessitate a run-off. The official results released by the ZEC on 2 May-a full five weeks after polling-announced that Tsvangirai had won 47.9 per cent of the national vote, against Mugabe's 43.2 per cent, setting the stage for a run-off between the two on June 27, although technically a second round should have been held within three weeks of the first round results. The clear international suspicion was that the ZEC had massaged Tsvangirai's total downwards and Mugabe's upwards to artificially contrive a run-off. That run-off would come to be treated by ZANU-PF less as an exercise in conventional electioneering and more as a declaration of total war against the opposition and its support base.

South Africa's Response: a Cacophony of Voices

One subsidiary effect of the Zimbabwean crisis has been to expose the scale of the discord within South Africa's ruling ANC, particularly the differences between State President Mbeki and Jacob Zuma, the man who dislodged him from his position as party president in December 2007. Speaking from London a week after polling, Mbeki called on the international community to wait patiently for publication of the full election results. Addressing the diplomatic corps in South Africa, Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs Aziz Pahad condemned media reports that Mugabe was attempting to rig the election by delaying the release of results, a comment which casually ignored Mugabe's long history of electoral fraud.

Tsvangirai visited South Africa on 7th April on his first trip abroad following the 29th March polls. He met there with Jacob Zuma who criticised the delay in declaring the results of the presidential election. Zwelinzima Vavi, the general secretary of the Confederation of South African Trade unions (COSATU) and a strong ally of both Zuma and of the MDC, called on the ZEC to release the results immediately. Zuma continued to be critical of the crisis and, implicitly at least, of Mbeki's handling of it, and indeed Tsvangirai eventually called upon Mbeki to give up his role as mediator on account of his partisan pro-Mugabe position. The ANC's treasurer general, Mathews Phosa called Mugabe 'an embarrassment', and, in a sign of the ongoing tensions within the ANC, he demanded that Mbeki 'must listen to us' (Washington Post, 18th April). Jacob Zuma would go on to describe Zimbabwe as a 'police state' when riot police raided the Harare headquarters of the MDC on 25th April. The Secretary General of the ANC, Gwede Mantashe, even declared that the withholding of the election results by the ZEC was tantamount to a 'coup' (Mail and Guardian, 11th April).

Exasperated by the lack of a diplomatic breakthrough, and Mbeki's passive response, the MDC secretary general, Tendai Biti, complained about 'the deafening silence by our brothers and sisters' in Africa, and drawing a parallel to the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, Biti urged institutions such as the AU and the SADC to take a clear stand. Speaking on 13th May, South Africa's central bank governor Tito Mboweni sharply differed with President Thabo Mbeki after he warned that the political crisis plaguing Zimbabwe could blight economic growth prospects in the rest of Africa. Pallo Jordan, the Minister of Arts and Culture and a key intellectual figure in the ANC, subsequently declared that 'ZANU-PF should surrender power to the party that has won' (Zimbabwe Metro, 17th May).

Laurence Caromba of the Centre for International Political Studies (based in Pretoria) argued that Mugabe could be more inclined to relinquish control if he was convinced that the consequences of illegally holding on to power might include regional military intervention. In June, Mbeki declared that "We will continue to insist that the people of Zimbabwe must have the possibility freely to choose their leaders and government and refuse to participate in projects based on the notion that we have a right to bring about regime change in Zimbabwe' (Mail and Guardian, 12th June). This comment, much like that of Aziz Pahad's above, was made seemingly oblivious of the rather obvious fact that it was the regime itself which was hell-bent on denying the Zimbabwean people 'the possibility freely to choose their leaders'.

Operation Mavhoterapapi and the Reign of Terror

Mugabe's deputy information minister, Bright Matonga, predicted a resounding victory in the second round, saying: 'We only applied 25 per cent of our energy in the first round. That [the run-off] is when we are going to unleash the other 75 per cent'. It soon became clear what he meant. ZEC officials were arrested, with as many as 50 presiding and polling officers detained at Harare Central police station. The ZEC was moved to a secret location while high-ranking army officers joined the ranks of the 'war veterans' providing a private army facility for ZANU-PF. The principal target of the campaign of state terrorism unleashed by the regime ahead of the second round was inevitably the MDC, its activists at all levels, and the communities from which it had drawn support. People were beaten, raped, forcibly removed and murdered in a sustained campaign of violence crudely codenamed Operation Mavhoterapapi ('Operation Where did you put your cross?'). Across Mashonaland, Manicaland and Matabeleland, where the opposition had made strong inroads into ZANU-PF's support base, armed gangs warned people of dire consequences should the vote go against Mugabe again.

By the middle of June the South African Mail and Guardian reported that 'more than 100 have been killed and 2000 have disappeared. Thousands more have been beaten so badly they will bear the scars for life' (17th June). The Times (12th June) claimed that Mugabe's thugs murdered the wife of one of his opponents, Patson Chipiro, by severing one of her hands and both feet and then burning her alive. Some 200,000 people had also fled their homes. A South African government representative on the SADC's regional observer team, Kingsley Mambolo, said it was not possible to hold a fair run-off under existing circumstances. Tsvangirai himself was detained five times while attempting to campaign and Tendai Biti was immediately re-arrested on his return from South Africa and charged with treason.

ZANU-PF now appeared to be shedding all its inhibitions and all the pretences to democracy it showed ahead of the March poll. The second round failed to qualify even as caricature of a democratic election. The most senior ZANU-PF officials now appeared on television threatening war if Mugabe lost. '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'. Mugabe himself revealed his total disdain for the entire democratic process when he stated on 14th June that 'we are not going to give up our country for a mere X on a ballot' adding 'how can a ball point pen fight with a gun?" (International Herald Tribune 23rd June) - a statement worthy of a Mussolini or a Hitler. In the same speech he threatened to 'go to war' to prevent an MDC victory saying that party would never govern Zimbabwe (The Independent on Sunday, 15th June). Things reached their nadir on 20th June, when Mugabe stated, in a phrase showing all the signs of advanced megalomania, that 'only God who appointed me will remove me' (The Daily Telegraph, 21st June).

The SADC Dimension

What of the region's key multilateral body, the SADC? Relatively early on in the election crisis, an emergency meeting of southern African leaders was called by the Zambian President Levy Mwanawasa, as SADC chair. Mwanawasa had previously compared the plight of the country's economy to the sinking of the Titanic. The South African President, Thabo Mbeki, en route to the summit, astonished both South Africans and the international community by saying that there was 'no crisis' in Zimbabwe (later he qualified this by saying there was no 'electoral' crisis). Mbeki was filmed holding hands with Mugabe on the tarmac of Harare airport, where the Zimbabwean leader proclaimed that SADC had been 'hijacked' by Britain in its bid to destroy the country (Observer, 13th April). The summit on 13th April urged the electoral authorities to release the results 'in accordance with the due process of law' (The Times, 14th April). Mugabe had rebuffed a final plea by Mbeki to attend the meeting and predictably, if tediously, branded Mwanawasa as a puppet of the British.

A subsequent SADC meeting in Mauritius on 20th April backed Mbeki as the mediator in the Zimbabwean crisis. It was clear, however, that the authority of the SADC -and to a slightly lesser extent the AU-had been seriously weakened by the crisis. When confronted with the most egregious human rights abuses and the flouting of the democratic principles embodied in its own founding documents, the SADC-with the honourable exceptions of Botswana and Zambia-had once again prioritised solidarity between African regimes at the expense of solidarity with African peoples.

Round 2: The One Man Election

On 24th June the ruling ANC in South Africa voiced its harshest criticism to date, saying that it was dismayed by the actions of the Mugabe regime, which was 'riding roughshod over the hard-won democratic rights of the people'. Jacob Zuma added to mounting pressure on Mugabe by saying that Zimbabwe was now 'out of control'. He added: 'We cannot agree with Zanu (PF). We cannot agree with them on values' (The Times, 25th April). Tsvangirai decided on 24th June that the level of violence was such that it would be pointless and dangerous to take part in the run-off, and he announced the he was pulling out of the contest and took refuge in the Dutch Embassy. The presidential election went ahead on 27th June and even in a one-candidate election there were still widespread irregularities with members of the security forces and prison officers being compelled to vote in front of superior officers. Unsurprisingly (no delays this time!) Mugabe was declared the winner and sworn in for his sixth term as president. The ZEC said Mugabe had won 85.5 per cent of the vote, compared with 43.2 per cent in the March election, which Morgan Tsvangirai had won with 47.9 per cent.

The AU's monitors stated that 'the vote fell short of the African Union's standards of democratic elections'. Monitors from both Zimbabwe's neighbours in the Southern African Development Community (SADC) and the Pan African Parliament said the election's credibility was fatally undermined by violence. On 30th June, the UN Secretary General, Ban Ki-moon, expressed the view that the election did not reflect the will of Zimbabwe's people and the result was therefore not legitimate. South Africa's response was that the MDC and ZANU-PF must enter into negotiations although not one word of censure was uttered by an official South African government spokesperson against the murder, rape and torture of the previous three months. The former Archbishop of Cape Town, Desmond Tutu, called for an intervention from African states to quell the violence. 'If you were to have a unanimous voice, saying quite clearly to Mr Mugabe...you are illegitimate and we will not recognize your administration in any shape or form-I think that would be a very, very powerful signal and would really strengthen the hand of the international community', Tutu declared (Reuters, 29th June). The G8 industrialized nations meeting in Japan denounced the systematic violence and intimidation in Zimbabwe and stated that they would 'not accept the legitimacy of any government that does not reflect the will of the Zimbabwean people' (The Times, 9th July). In London, as part of his 90th birthday celebrations, Nelson Mandela bemoaned a 'tragic failure of leadership' in Zimbabwe. At its summit in Egypt in early July, with the newly sworn-in Mugabe in attendance, the AU urged the formation of a government of national unity although a number of member states openly supported Zimbabwe's formal exclusion. Ultimately the elections had solved nothing; in fact they threatened to produce a pyrrhic victory for Mugabe by intensifying the country's political and economic crisis and leaving its future as uncertain as ever.

Future Scenarios

In the aftermath of the election, it has become evident that the two principal players, 'the ruling party' and 'the winning party' to use Tsvangirai's description of ZANU-PF and the MDC, have radically different visions of the way ahead with extremely limited prospects for the establishment of common ground between them. ZANU-PF's approach views politics through a zero-sum game prism. It is opting for a strategy of force majeure characterised by a ferocious physical onslaught on the opposition designed to effectively liquidate it as a political force and compelling it to sue for peace on ZANU's terms. This capitulation would take the form of a 'government of national unity' -a decorative fiction designed to secure international but especially African endorsement-in which some MDC elements are admitted to the government in a junior capacity but ZANU continues to call the shots. Over the long term the objective would be to close down the political space available to the MDC and convince it that openly competitive pluralist politics has no future. This approach would take as its inspiration ZANU's absorption of Joshua Nkomo's ZAPU in the 1980s. (Nkomo was a long-time and bitter rival of Mugabe in the battle against Ian Smith's Rhode-sian government.) Such a scenario would allow Mugabe a triumphal exit entirely on his own terms and would facilitate a smooth handover to a designated ZANU henchman after a decent post-electoral interval.

By contrast, the MDC approach is based upon an ever tightening squeeze on the regime, at sub-regional, regional and international level in the hope that a denial of legitimacy coupled with continued economic collapse will compel ZANU-PF to enter serious negotiations about democratic transformation. The MDC scenario does not envisage a protracted government of national unity as such but rather a transitional authority with a relatively short lifespan of 18 months to two years. During this period a new constitution and a series of structural reforms would be agreed, culminating in new internationally supervised elections.

The future of Zimbabwe will be decided in the interaction-the struggle-between these two contrasting templates. Each side is subject to severe pressures in the post-election era which will limit its freedom for manoeuvre. The MDC is clearly seriously weakened after four months of sustained attacks on its constituencies and activists at every level and it urgently needs some respite from those assaults. Also, while it has made progress on the international diplomatic front it has yet to secure the regime's isolation. The two key African multilateral organisations-the SADC and the AU-have taken a cautious approach and, as a collective, have not unambiguously condemned Mugabe or ostracised his regime through a suspension of membership. On the broader international front, there has been a strong chorus of opposition from the West but, crucially, the formal veto by Russia and China of a sanctions resolution placed before the Security Council on 11th July prevented the West from translating that into mandatory punitive action. This leaves the West able to tighten its own sanctions via the G7 and EU but it has neutralised the UN as an actor, and China and Russia continue to extend a lifeline to the regime.

For its part, ZANU-PF is subject to pressure from two key areas. First, Mugabe is bereft of ideas to halt the continuing implosion of the economy with inflation now becoming almost incalculable such is the speed of price rises. Zimbabwe is the world's fastest contracting economy and recovery from this is inconceivable in the context of the status quo. Second, the regime's African support base is gradually eroding. Although, as noted above, African multilateral organisations have failed to speak critically as collectives, more individual African states than ever before have broken ranks on the Zimbabwe issue. A raft of states including some African heavyweights-Botswana, Zambia, Nigeria, Ghana, Senegal, Kenya, Rwanda-have condemned the Mugabe regime in very stark terms. These voices are difficult for Mugabe to ignore or to dismiss, in his familiar hackneyed jargon, as 'puppets of imperialism'. Even many of those African states unprepared to be publicly critical have made it known privately that the situation in the country is untenable and that substantive change is needed. That is a new dynamic in the situation which should not be underestimated.

The Memorandum of Understanding 

It was these acute pressures on either side which produced a tentative inter-party dialogue and led to the Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) signed by Mugabe and Tsvangirai in Harare on 21st July 2008 to much accompanying fanfare. The MOU was couched in necessarily vague, even bland, terms but it sought to provide a framework for future negotiations over free political activity, political violence, the constitution, the economy, and the formation of an inclusive government. It spoke optimistically of ending 'polarisation, divisions, conflict and intolerance' {Business Day, 22nd July) but scepticism is the proper and natural response to this supposed 'new dawn'. Given the scale of regime violence, the fact that the machinery of state terror is fully intact, the mutual distrust indeed repugnance which characterises the MDC-ZANU relationship, and the huge gulf between the two sides on the issues listed above, a successful outcome is difficult to envisage.

True, the MOU speaks eloquently of a society 'free of violence, fear, intimidation, hate, patronage and corruption' in favour of 'justice, fairness, openness, transparency, dignity and equality'. However, one is bound to ask what ZANU-PF, now at least as much a criminal enterprise as it is a political party, an organisation which has orchestrated a descent into outright fascism to preserve its power, possibly stands to gain from 'justice, fairness and openness and transparency'? After all, the bedrock of its entire 30-year rule has been 'violence, fear, intimidation, hate, patronage and corruption'? Unless and until there is a decisive shift in the country's balance of power, one which opens up major cracks within both the state apparatus and ZANU-PF itself-and that will only be achieved through sustained internal and external pressure coupled with further economic meltdown-then it is likely to seek to contrive a settlement which preserves its existing power with minimal concessions to deflect external pressure.

This would explain the difficulties the post-MOU negotiations experienced in reconciling the positions of the two principals. The MDC and ZANU-PF remained divided on issues such as the lifespan and balance of power within a transitional government, the respective powers of President and Prime Minister, and the control of the security forces. Even a summit meeting of the SADC on 16-17 August was unable to make progress on these issues as the MDC insisted that the distribution of power should reflect the country's last partially credible election on 29th March and not the violent sham of 27th june. Clearly the defeat of ZANU-PF's strategy of violent co-option and a slightly modified, but still deeply authoritarian, status quo remains an essential first step on the road to a democratic Zimbabwe.

Mugabe received a hostile reception when he addressed Parliament on 26th August. The MDC had already shown its power there by electing Lovemore Moyo as Speaker. When Mugabe entered, the MDC majority did not stand in respect. Mugabe's reference to 'regrettable and isolated cases of violence' by all parties during the election provoked jeers, singing of the MDC anthem and other signs of contempt. The elderly President then wished them 'fruitful deliberations' but this could scarcely be heard above the shouts. Parliament then was adjourned to mid-October. Mugabe has always been shielded from public criticism. This was probably the first time he has faced an openly hostile Parliament.

James Hamill is a Lecturer in the Department of Politics & International Relations, University of Leicester and John Hoffman is a retired Professor of Politics in the Department of Politics & International Relations, University of Leicester.