“We fought for this country and a lot of blood was shed. We are not going to give up our country because of a mere X. How can a ballpoint pen fight with a gun?” (Mugabe addressing a rally in Silobela, Central Midlands 15 June 2008).
After a bloody three month “election campaign” which saw an enormous escalation in bribery, election-rigging, intimidation, violence, and terror, and despite being the sole candidate following the MDC’s Morgan Tsivangirai’s withdrawal, Mugabe has ensured that he is duly installed as president for a new five-year term. This was not so much an election as a cynical ploy to provide legitimacy to the electoral coup d’etat that followed the MDC’s 29 March parliamentary victory.
For the humiliating defeat inflicted on the ruling Zimbabwe African National Union (Patriotic Front) on the 29 March 2008, parliamentary election, its leader, Robert Mugabe, and the only president the country has ever known since liberation in 1980, has avenged himself on the people. Mimicking the former East German Stalinist dictatorship’s “disappointment” with the people following the 1953 uprising, a Zanu (PF) politburo member, reacted to the Movement for Democratic Change’s parliamentary election victory, by informing a Zimbabwean journalist with the New York Times “We’re giving the people of Zimbabwe another opportunity to mend their ways. This is their last chance.” (Sunday Times, Johannesburg, 11 May 2008).
In the parliamentary elections, the MDC had won 99 seats compared to Zanu (PF)’s 97. After re-uniting with the Arthur Mutambare-led faction, which won 10 seats, the MDC now controls 57% of the seats in parliament. With the manipulation of the parliamentary elections having failed to produce the “right” result, Mugabe could no longer afford to play parliamentary games.
In fact, Mugabe’s “election” as president, is the outcome of a carefully orchestrated plot by the Joint Operations Command – the junta that effectively controls Zimbabwe now. The Zimbabwean (22-28 May) reported that “the party (had) devised scorched earth policies that include propaganda, shutting out opposition views, toning down of rhetoric, a terror campaign and outright vote rigging.”
At the same time they also put into place plans to bribe voters. “Finance Minister Samuel Mumbengegwi said more people would be given free education and healthcare; social welfare and pension payments would be increased; food-for-work programmes in rural areas had been introduced; and civil servants’ salaries were being ‘reviewed’ according to the state-controlled Herald newspaper.” (Star, 29 May)
However, the bribery, election-rigging, media censorship etc, were subsidiary instruments in the campaign to keep Mugabe in power. The main weapon was a campaign of bloody terror, implemented under a succession of military code names: Operations Mavhoteraphi (“who did you vote for?”), Operation Red Finger (to prove that you had voted in the presidential run-off) and Operation Elimination, if it was found that you had voted for the MDC candidate.
The victims of violence have been killed using some of the most vicious techniques, including cutting off genitals, limbs, hands, legs and various other body parts. Bludgeoning of victims to death using steel bars, axes, sticks, gun butts and other blunt objects has been witnessed. The victims include Dadirai Chipiro, wife of Patson Chipiro, head of the MDC in the Mhondoro district who was kidnapped, had one of her hands and both her feet chopped off, was thrown into a hut, locked and burnt alive. (Sunday Times, Johannesburg, 15 June)
Mugabe has scored a pyrrhic victory. It has failed to erase the defeat he suffered on 29 March at the hands of the Zimbabwean masses. Predictably the African Union, the Southern African Development Community (SADC) and the UN have failed to formally declare his regime illegitimate. But even these bourgeois institutions, old boys clubs of dubious democrats themselves, can no longer afford to openly embrace Mugabe.
29 March represents a turning point in post-independence Zimbabwe. Despite retaining the presidency, the masses have pulled the parliamentary carpet from under Mugabe’s feet; he can no longer portray himself even fraudulently as the leader of a parliamentary majority. Mugabe and his Zanu (PF) have been rejected unequivocally by the Zimbabwean masses.
Courage of the masses
The Zimbabwean masses must be saluted for a magnificent show of courage. In the face of repression at home, the political antagonism of the SADC elite and an economic crisis of truly catastrophic proportions, they have sent out a message that the masses have a right to oust a liberation movement that turns against the people.
The Zimbabwean masses have achieved this in the most difficult political and economic circumstances. Hyperinflation has surpassed the legendary levels of the Weimar republic in Germany after the First World War. It has become impossible to keep track of inflation which has spiralled completely out of control. Estimates vary from 1 million to 15 million per cent! Steve Hanke, a leading world economist, calculates cumulative hyperinflation in Zimbabwe since 1998 at 3.5 million per cent as a result of the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe issuing currency “at a rate that even exceeded that of Germany’s central bank from January 1921 to May 1923, the ramp-up period of the great German hyperinflation.” (Business Day 8 April).
Supermarkets have had to acquire money counting machines normally only used in banks. Inflation is so bad that a bus journey into the city will cost Z$20 million in the morning, only to rise to Z$25 million two hours later. “Harare estate agency Merctrust Real Estate, in a statement on its website said the currency was in free fall. ‘On Monday last week we adjusted the rate to Z$4/billion/US$1 and on Monday this week it was Z$10billion/US$1 and on Wednesday it was Z$15billlion/US$1.’ The agency stated that all the houses in its books, many in Harare’s plush northern suburbs, are now for sale in quadrillions of Zimbabwe dollars. Very soon it will be quintillions.” (Sunday Times Johannesburg 22 June)
Unemployment has reached 80% in an economy that in 2007 had a fiscal deficit of 40% of GDP. GDP had fallen 35% by 2007. According to the United Nations Human Development Report 2005, over the last decade Zimbabwe had fallen 23 places in the ranking of the world’s poorest countries and by then stood as the 145th poorest out of 177 countries. Official UN statistics show that, in a country with a HIV infection rate of 25%, one of the highest in the world, the humanitarian crisis is expressed graphically in the drop in life expectancy from 60 in 1980 to 34 for women and 37 for men in 2008.
HIV/AIDS has also led to the increase in the number of orphans to 1.8 million today. “Children have been the worst affected as the relentless rise in food shortages and the world wide rise in food prices has led to one in ten children dying before the age of five” according to Save The Children which has been working in Zimbabwe for nearly 25 years (ABC Australia 14 April 2008). Save the Children further explains that “Zimbabwe has the highest female mortality rates. The health service is completely shattered and you have children dying from preventable diseases such as malaria and diarrhoea”.
Four million people face food shortages in a country that was formerly the bread basket of the region. Tendai Biti, Secretary-General of the MDC reports that 4,500 are dying of starvation every week. That means that within 10 months the total will reach 160,000 compared to the 50,000 who died during the 25-year long liberation struggle.
Conditions in Zimbabwe have forced many people to risk their lives fleeing for South Africa and other regional countries with three to four million Zimbabweans – more than a quarter of the population – living outside the country as economic and political refugees, mainly in South Africa and Britain.
The actions of the Zimbabwean masses in these elections must be seen in this perspective. In economic circumstances where the struggle for survival could have drained away their energies and completely sapped their will to struggle, they have been able to summon the courage to resist the repression of the Zanu (PF) regime.
They have had to struggle not only on the economic and political front at home, but also abroad. In their struggle, the Zimbabwean masses have encountered, at best, indifference, at worst hostility from the leaders of the SADC countries. Zimbabweans have also had to endure the humiliation of xenophobia in neighbouring countries especially SA during the horrifying pogroms in May.
Zimbabwe After Mugabe
Should the MDC eventually take office, the economy in the short term will likely stop the nosedive. Some emergency measures, including the suspension of the uncontrolled printing of money, the possibility of the introduction of a new currency to bring inflation down, the re-scheduling (and possible partial write-off) of debt to international financial institutions, aid in the form of cash injections and food, would bring some temporary relief.
With the present neo-liberal polices, the MDC would have a very short honeymoon. Even the openly pro-capitalist Simba Makoni has described the MDC’s policy correctly as “old wine in a new bottle.” With the world economy facing its worse crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s, a MDC government attempting to solve the crisis on a capitalist basis will be compelled to carry out attacks against the working class. The MDC would soon be faced with mass discontent and protests.
Although expressed in the negative form of the xenophobic massacres of May, these events show that the struggles of the working class in southern Africa are interdependent. Like the working class in SA, the Zimbabwean masses need their own voice – a mass workers’ party on a socialist programme. Only such a programme can solve the problems of poverty, unemployment and exploitation. Only by uniting against our common enemy – capitalism – and fighting for the socialist transformation of society in SA and Zimbabwe, the African continent and the world, can the foundations be laid for a society of prosperity and human solidarity.
Go to www.socialistworld.net for further reading on Zimbabwe including a 9,000 word article by Weizmann Hamilton.
