Thousands of Zimbabweans went to the polls Wednesday in what many here are calling the most pivotal election
since Zimbabwe voted out white rule in 1980. Despite frigid predawn temperatures, people lined up before the polling stations opened, eager to cast their votes.
Mugabe in His Own Words
In Harare, the capital, there was none of the violence and intimidation that characterized the disastrous 2008 presidential election season.
“This is a huge change, the fact that people can stand around and talk openly about their views,” said Namo Mariga, an agribusiness entrepreneur, after casting his ballot in the upscale suburb of Borrowdale. “The atmosphere is much freer.”
The election pits Robert G. Mugabe, 89, who has ruled Zimbabwe for 33 years, against the former union organizer Morgan Tsvangirai, leader of the Movement for Democratic Change. Mr. Tsvangirai won the most votes in the first round of the presidential election in 2008 but refused to participate in a runoff because of crackdowns on his supporters that left 200 people dead. A deal brokered by regional powers put the two rivals into an uneasy power-sharing agreement and both are seeking an outright victory to govern alone.
“It is quite an emotional moment sometimes when you see all these people after all the conflict, the stalemate, the suspicion, the hostility,” Mr. Tsvangirai said after casting his ballot. “I think there is a sense of calmness that finally Zimbabwe will be able to move on again.”
Sporadic problems were reported in a number of regions. Lines were long in urban areas, raising concerns that not everyone would be able to vote on Wednesday. The challengers said the Zimbabwe Election Commission had deliberately reduced the number of polling stations in their strongholds to discourage voters, but the commission denied this. Some voters who registered recently found that their names were not on the rolls, but they were able to cast ballots using the registration receipt.
“We’ve already made clear this election is illegal, illegitimate, unfree and unfair,” said Tendai Biti, the M.D.C. secretary general, said at a news conference on Wednesday afternoon. “We are participating with a heavy heart.”
The planning for the election has been chaotic and rushed because Mr. Mugabe unilaterally set a much earlier election date than other political parties had anticipated.
Mr. Mugabe, after casting his ballot, appeared confident of victory in remarks to reporters. Asked if he would serve a full five year term, he said, “Why not? Why should I field myself if it’s to cheat the people and I resign after?”
Fears of rigging remained high. Neil Padmore, 35, brought his own pen to the polling station because he had heard that the government’s pens used special ink that would disappear a few hours after the ballot was cast.
“I am hoping that the sheer volume of the voters will prevent them from rigging,” said Mr. Padmore, who runs a company that lays fiber optic cable. “We need change in Zimbabwe. We can’t have this draconian environment.”
But some voters said that Mr. Mugabe and his party, ZANU-PF, deserved to stay in power because they put Zimbabwe’s agricultural land, long controlled by a few thousand white commercial farmers, into the hands of black people through seizures.
Amina, a 26-year-old clothing trader who lives in Mbare and asked that only her first name be used, said that her brother was given a farm by the government and has prospered.
“He’s getting rich by the season,” she said. Her father had fought in Mr. Mugabe’s insurgent army in the 1970s and lost a leg to a bomb. Mr. Mugabe, she said, had made black people masters of their own destiny.
“He always told us the main grievance for the war was that we needed land,” she said. “They wanted to be masters of their own country.”
Mr. Mugabe, who has ruled Zimbabwe since the end of white domination in 1980, retains his iron grip on the country’s feared security apparatus. When Mr. Tsvangirai’s party tried to import motorcycles to register voters across vast distances, the government impounded them, forcing the challengers to use bicycles instead. Then the challengers’ election chief was jailed less than a week before the vote, and denied bail the day before it.
After more than 30 years at the nation’s helm, Mr. Mugabe said he was still the best option for the country.
“The 89 years don’t mean anything,” a confident Mr. Mugabe said in a rare interview on Tuesday. “They haven’t changed me, have they? They haven’t withered me. They haven’t made me senile yet, no. I still have ideas, ideas that need to be accepted by my people.”
But even with the shadow of the last election still looming, Edison Masunda was unafraid as he joined others streaming into a dusty field at the edge of the city center, part of a crimson wave of tens of thousands who gathered for the final rally by Mr. Tsvangirai’s party on Monday.
It was a far cry from the thick blanket of fear that smothered the country in 2008, when many opposition supporters dared not wear their party’s red insignia or openly show their political loyalties, lest roaming bands of Mugabe supporters beat them up, or worse.
“I want to see a new Zimbabwe,” said Mr. Masunda, a 25-year-old unemployed mechanic, as he prepared to cast a vote against the only president he had ever known, Mr. Mugabe. “We have no fear. Mugabe must go. The people will speak.”
Mr. Masunda and the others massed in the field, renamed Freedom Square, within sight of the headquarters of Mr. Mugabe’s party, emblazoned with its towering black cockerel insignia.
“Bye bye, Mugabe, bye bye!” they chanted in unison, palms aloft in a vast, synchronized wave.
The vote is being held on a tight timetable and a shoestring budget as a result of Mr. Mugabe’s insistence that it be held by the end of August.
The voter registration process was truncated, and just two days before the election there was still no final list of voters, as required by law. Early voting by police officers and emergency workers was chaotic, and many were unable to cast ballots.
The government barred Western observers like those from the European Union, but the African Union and the regional trade bloc, the Southern African Development Community, as well as local organizations, have been accredited in large numbers to watch the polls.
And while most foreign journalists were barred during the last election, social media is prominent. Mr. Mugabe’s party, ZANU-PF, and its main challenger, the Movement for Democratic Change, are using Twitter and Facebook to get out news. Several Web sites have sprung up to monitor election irregularities, and the challengers are counting on voters to use their cellphones to announce results as they come in and to report abuses.
Dressed in a bright red suit at the final challenger rally, Nelson Chamisa, a candidate for Parliament, exhorted tens of thousands of party supporters to use their phones as a weapon for democracy. “If you have a cellphone, I want to see it,” Mr. Chamisa shouted.
Almost every hand went up, and a chant of “Show your phone!” washed over the crowd.
Mr. Chamisa later said that the well-attended rally was a sign that voters were fed up with Mr. Mugabe and not afraid to defy him. “This is the final nail in the coffin of dictatorship,” Mr. Chamisa said. “We are going to lower the coffin and bury it on Wednesday.”
The absence of violence in the days leading up to the election emboldened many to openly support the main presidential challenger, Mr. Tsvangirai. Divisions within Mr. Mugabe’s party have also we
akened the president’s hand, with a succession struggle pitting the vice president against the defense minister in the race to succeed him.
“Mugabe’s own house is not in order,” said Pedzisai Ruhanya, a researcher at the Zimbabwe Democracy Institute, an advocacy group. “People feel they can come out and have their say in this election like never before.”
But that may not translate into an easy victory for the challengers, even if they win the most votes. One veteran analyst who did not wish to be identified because he fears arrest said that the election observers were mainly looking for violence, not fraud.
“Last time it was all about intimidation and violence,” the analyst said. “This time the rigging hinges on technical issues like the voters roll and the vote tabulation.”
Mr. Mugabe has outlived virtually all his African contemporaries, but he showed few signs of his age at a rally for his party on Sunday, standing at a lectern for two hours, delivering a thundering harangue in a mix of clipped English and mellifluous Shona. His topics ranged from good governance to the American use of drones in Pakistan, and his party hopes to win on its claim that it has restored Zimbabwe’s land and natural resources to black Zimbabweans.
Mugabe in His Own Words
“Just because you bring your hoes to our land, it doesn’t mean you are entitled to it,” Mr. Mugabe declared to a tepid ripple of applause. “The money comes and goes. My resource is there in Mother Earth. It cannot be compared to pieces of silver.”
The stadium, built to hold 60,000, was about half full. So many people tried to leave during Mr. Mugabe’s speech that the police formed a human chain to hold in the crowd and locked the exits to the stadium.
“I only came for the T-shirt,” said one young man who pleaded with a policeman to let him out. “I’m not voting for the old man,” he continued, in a whisper.
In a news conference on Tuesday, Mr. Mugabe bantered and joked with journalists as he sat flanked by stuffed lions and cheetahs on the veranda leading to his office.
Asked if he would run for yet another term if he won this time (he would be 94 then), he quipped, “Why do you want to know my secrets?”
Up close, Mr. Mugabe appeared more frail, struggling to keep his eyes open, his eyelids slowly fluttering. In the interview, Mr. Mugabe brushed off questions about the delays in getting the voters roll.
“Well, that there was delay, yes,” he said. “Unfortunately we were not informed about this in good time.”
Mr. Mugabe spoke in valedictory terms about his achievements, saying that history would remember him as a liberator, whatever the outcome of the election.
“If they want to damn me, they will damn me,” he said. “There is no one who is a perfect person. I am not a perfect person. I have my own mistakes here and there.”
Mr. Mugabe incited the seizure of farms owned by white Zimbabweans, which began in 2000 and led to the wholesale collapse of Zimbabwe’s once prosperous economy. Joblessness, hyperinflation and hunger soon followed, though in recent years the agricultural sector has recovered, and farmers who were given land have begun to see real increases in their incomes.
The two parties were supposed to work together to overhaul Zimbabwe’s institutions before these elections, and they managed to pass a new Constitution that many criticized as a flawed compromise. The power-sharing government switched the currency and began using the United States dollar, arresting hyperinflation, but deep reforms of the police and the army, which have been implicated in political violence, never took place.
Both parties predict big victories. Polls in Zimbabwe are often unreliable, producing large numbers of undecided voters. The challengers argue that this drastically understates support for them because of what they call the “margin of terror,” people who are too afraid to reveal their party choice.
Mr. Mugabe said that he would respect any outcome.
“If you go into a process and join in a competition, where there are only two outcomes, win or lose, it can’t be both,” Mr. Mugabe said. Asked if he would step down if he lost, he said, “We will do so, yes.”
Courtesy:NY Times