‘MDC, opposition lose electorate’s trust’

By Mugove Tafirenyika

The Morgan Tsvangirai-led MDC and other opposition political parties have lost the electorate’s trust in recent years, a leading think-tank — Afrobarometer — has claimed.

The research firm’s assistant project manager for southern Africa, Rorisang Lekalake, said a survey, which involved 9 500 interviews in Botswana, Mozambique, Namibia and South Africa (SA) and Zimbabwe, revealed this.

The survey found widespread support for multi-party politics in countries such as Zimbabwe and others where sitting presidents have lost some electoral support in recent years, but opposition support has not been high enough to unseat them.

“ . . . in Zimbabwe trust in the political opposition declined sharply after 2008-2009 and similarly, the proportion of Zimbabweans who said they felt ‘close to’ an opposition party dropped from 45 percent in 2009 to 19 percent in 2014,” Lekalake said.

This dramatic reversal of fortune, Afrobarometer concluded, provides an important lesson for opposition parties like the MDC, which it said was unable to leverage its role in stabilising the country when it was part of the Government of National Unity (GNU).

Lekalake said trust in ruling parties stood at 46 percent while it was lower at 35 percent for opposition parties.

However, this was an improvement in the situation more than a decade earlier when trust levels in opposition parties was much lower.

The survey showed that in countries such as Namibia and Mozambique, levels of trust in opposition parties are at the highest levels ever.

The survey also revealed that there was a lopsided distribution of power and resources for opposition parties in countries with dominant governing parties than for those in competitive party systems such as Botswana.

Similarly, in SA, the opposition’s strong showing in the 2016 local elections has bolstered its optimism about its prospects in the 2019 national and provincial polls.

“This success suggests that confidence in the political opposition may have grown since the 2015,” the Afrobarometer said.

But public dissatisfaction with government performance doesn’t necessarily translate into perceptions that opposition parties could do a better job, Lekalake said.

This is particularly so in SA and Zimbabwe.

While eight in 10 citizens in the two countries report poor government performance on their top policy priority, only 37 percent say that another political party could solve the problem. Daily News