Hopewell Chin’ono: What is likely to happen if either MDC Alliance or Zanu PF lose this election
By Hopewell Chin’ono
Kofi Annan was right when he said that the Zimbabwean general election taking place on Monday would be the most important plebiscite since the 1980 election that brought independence.
This is a watershed election in the politics of Zimbabwe as it signals an end to the founding-father politics of Robert Mugabe. This election will give birth to the Second Republic and the winning political party hopefully being able to take us there.
The losing political party will die a painful and public death that will see the emergence of a new opposition voice for 2023.
This is an election that both ZANUPF and the MDC Alliance have to win, because a loss for either party will fade their political fortunes to black and oblivion.
It is an election with dire existential consequences for the loser that is why many are anxious and nervous on the eve of this historic event in the life of our young country, they know that it is a kill or be killed battlefront.
There is no way any party that loses this election will go on to become politically viable anymore post-election, because of the stark political realities before us.
Only a coalition of some sort can breathe life into the loser’s corner, it will be the only way that will allow them to regroup and still have national political relevance.
I am ruling out a coalition government and I will explain why later.
ZANU PF has been in power for 38 years and over that time, they have accumulated a lot of political baggage that saw them wobble and lose the presidential election in 2008.
If the MDC Alliance wins this election on Monday, they will go after ZANUPF and try to finish it off by removing the economic levers that make ZANUPF financially viable.
This will be the scorched-earthpolicy that Fredrick Chiluba used in Zambia when his Movement for Multi-Party Democracy (MMD) came to power.
The MDC Alliance might do this to announce an arrival that is meant to herald some kind of radical change.
I say some kind of radical change because we already have a transcript of their GNU story, those five years were not so rosy as some of their ministers became embroiled in ZANUPF corruption involving road building company, Group 5, fuel deals and donor funding.
The MDC will most likely change the constitution and allow parliamentary floor crossing, so that they extinguish the ZANUPF spectra as happened to Kenneth Kaunda’s United National Independence Party, UNIP.
Fredrick Chiluba and MMD made sure that their arrival in town was synonymous with the death of UNIP, it was a clarion call for change.
The difference is that UNIP was not a political party with a military outfit like ZANUPF that had ZANLA, which morphed into the Zimbabwe National Army.
UNIP was easy to dislodge because Kenneth Kaunda like Mugabe, had become thoroughly unpopular and had NO ideas to extricate himself and his party out of the Zambian political abyss.
Today’s ZANUPF is different from Mugabe’s ZANUPF because it is slowly renewing itself by bringing in people with new ideas to save itself from extinction.
However, it will have to content with a fresh MDC Alliance desire to uproot it from the political ground and consign it into history books if Nelson Chamisa manages to win.
The MDC will also be energized by an impatient and exuberant opposition social base, which will want to see the tangible political fruits of their efforts, if they win.
MDC supporters have worked very hard especially on social media where they aped ZANUPF’s intolerance of past.
This is something that has contributed to non-partisan folk turning away from the Alliance brand of political militancy on social media.
This has resulted in the new American Ambassador, Brian Nichols, pushing Nelson Chamisa to make an apology after a lot of nasty misogynistic attacks on Zimbabwe Electoral Chair, Priscilla Chigumba.
Chamisa met the Americans on Monday morning and was told that the attacks on women who include Presidential candidate Thokozani Khupe and Harare West Independent parliamentary candidate, Jessie Majome, were totally unacceptable.
Chamisa has campaigned on doing away with ZANUPF’s legacy of corruption best epitomized by people like Obert Mpofu, Supa Mandiwanzira, Joram Gumbo, Priscilla Mupfume, Patricia Kagonye and many others.
The tussle between ex ZANUPF G40 members and Emmerson Mnangagwa’s Lacoste team has drawn in Nelson Chamisa, with G40 supporting his candidature with the hope of getting a respite under his rule.
Those are some of the reasons why ZANUPF will make sure that they win this election, if they lose, they are all finished!
They will become the first military liberation movement to lose an election in Southern Africa.
An MDC Alliance victory will require Nelson Chamisa to be the consummate statesman who will need to reach out to the most important elements in ZANUPF, in order to guarantee a smooth transition.
I will take you back to 1980 where Robert Mugabe had to be magnanimous to Ian Smith and his troops and how he took some of them on board his new administration.
He was advised by Samora Machel to do this in order to create an atmosphere of trust and peace during and after the power transfer from white minority rule to black majority rule.
Mugabe even wanted to have Ian Smith in some significant role in government but Julius Nyerere told him that his magnanimity was going too far.
The prevailing environment at the time if Chamisa wins will tell him whether to execute a scorched-earth policy or to go for magnanimity.
The situation is complex because ZANUPF comes with the security services whose leaders are loyal to ZANUPF.
So much nonsense has been peddled about professional soldiers, but we all saw in November that when cornered, the top soldier will serve and save the party.
Will they surprise us if Nelson Chamisa wins? We don’t have long to wait, that is if Chamisa wins.
Alternatively, if the opposition MDC Alliance loses this all-important election, that will be the end of the MDC as we have known it.
They are broke and have NO international appeal anymore as the key countries that supported them in the past such as Britain and many in the EU got tired of playing verbal ping-pong with ZANUPF.
Their real deal breaker was Robert Mugabe and his removal smoothed things over.
Britain and her silent allies have moved on from the days of opposition activism and the activist ambassadors.
And this: https://nehandaradio.com/2018/02/28/hopewell-chinono-british-no-choice-work-mnangagwa/
Countries act on the basis of national interest and not some moral consideration code as many in the opposition were misled to believe. If Robert Mugabe were not fighting the interests of the West, he would have been just like the Saudi King, he would have been conveniently ignored.
The other problem for the MDC Alliance is that there was a lot of bloodletting between Thokozani Khupe and Nelson Chamisa’s camps that led to both sides going their separate ways after Morgan Tsvangirai’s death.
Without state power, that bloodletting will only get worse as they will have to fight over the MDC carcass in courts.
The MDC Alliance is officially a seven party grouping, as such, many of them will disappear into oblivion if they don’t get parliamentary seats.
Those who will get into parliament will most likely resort to ad hoc political arrangements if the Alliance fails to win the Presidency, since they are not bound by ideology but their search for state power.
At the moment, Thokozani Khupe owns the name MDC-T, Nelson Chamisa will have no party to return to as the Alliance is not a political party, so he will inevitably have to fight for the MDCT name once more in court.
Most likely, the ruling party will also change the constitution to allow floor crossing in order to finish off the remnants of the MDC if Chamisa loses on Monday.
This will be an easy job to do because it is part of human nature to want to be where the greener pastures exist. The state has been used on the African continent as the vehicle for enrichment, in most cases political parties only become active during election time.
No politician wants to be grouped together with the losers, so it will be so easy for ZANUPF to offer the MDC Alliance MPs trinkets, in exchange for floor crossing to ZANUPF if it has the numbers to tinker with the constitution.
These people are already talking on an individual level so it will be the culmination of these unofficial linkages coming to fruition.
Politicians are hawkers of hope and dealers in pragmatism, they will not blink if a good deal is put before them, the election messages will be long forgotten.
It is called the politics of the stomach, it has been on display during this election campaign and will become accentuated when deal making becomes the only route out of political irrelevance.
If I were Emmerson Mnangagwa’s advisor (or if I were advising Nelson Chamisa), I would also advise him to change the constitution in order to increase the number of MPs he can appoint into cabinet from outside parliament.
This would allow him to get the best people who are not necessarily in parliament and also assist him in loosening his party’s grip on his Presidency.
Both parties are talking about revisiting the constitution because as we all know, it was a compromise document.
The MDC would like to remove the clauses that were pushed into the constitution to accommodate Robert Mugabe’s founding-father baggage.
The MDC tried and failed to put in presidential age limits because Robert Mugabe was of an age where age limits ceased to be meaningful.
He was 89 years of age when the current constitution came into being and any talk of age limits would have meant blocking him from contesting the 2013 elections.
ZANUPF would like to put in elements into the constitution that would make governing easier for them, for instance, Emmerson Mnangagwa would like to be able to hire the right people who are not necessarily in politics.
His parliamentary candidates are thin on talent and some have credibility issues emanating from various corruption scandals.
The other problem is that ZANUPF only has 23 female parliamentary candidates, so in order to balance the gender dynamics, Mnangagwa will need to look elsewhere outside parliament for the right female gravitas in Cabinet.
There is no doubt in anyone’s mind that Vice President Constantino Chiwenga has presidential ambitions, so the build up for 2023 will start in August if the opposition loses.
This will be meant to consolidate ZANUPF’s electoral gains if and when it wins on Monday.
This happened in 2013 after Morgan Tsvangirai lost the general election to Mugabe.
ZANUPF immediately started giving rural folk maize and sometimes rice every two weeks for the next 5 years.
Over and above these maize freebies, they also got more through food for work programs. They would go and get this maize at the local councillor’s home, where he would first address a mini rally. Where there is food, you are guaranteed a captive audience.
That is why I have been arguing that the election will be won and lost in rural areas.
This is where the majority of our people live and even at the height of ZANUPF’s Lacoste/G40 fights, this reality was not lost on ZANUPF.
Seventy percent of Zimbabwean voters are in rural areas, so the urban vote is inconsequential in this election. Also inconsequential is the exaggerated social media reach and influence.
Only 15 percent of Zimbabweans have access to twitter, so this lot that makes so much noise will have very little say in the actual election dynamics tomorrow. Theirs will start and end online whilst the real game will be played on the ground in rural Zimbabwe where twitter does not exist.
Zimbabweans on twitter are mere spectators because many of them don’t even live in Zimbabwe.
Professor Bruce Mutsvairo, one of the leading social media scholars in Sub Saharan Africa once told me that when one wants to push real political messaging in Africa, they should “…switch off the phone and go to the grassroots.’
Professor Mutsvairo who teaches journalism at Australia’s University of Technology in Sydney said that whoever adopted such an approach will be guaranteed of results.
Now to the all important issue of a coalition government, if the MDC Alliance wins on Monday, there won’t be any traditional coalition government save for a few picks to placate the ZANUPF top elites.
Nelson Chamisa promised so many things to so many people, he would need room to accommodate all these job seekers, volunteers and MDC party folk.
We have seen the unprecedented sycophantic bleating even from people who used to hammer Chamisa as far back as January both.
This has been evident too in the press, social media and within his party. Many are writing daily “love” letters as they sense a victory and an opportunity to serve in his administration.
That is politics and it will always be like that, quid pro quo arrangements have been in politics since time immemorial.
Conversely, if Emmerson Mnangagwa wins the election on Monday, there won’t be a traditional coalition government too, the reasons are many and varied.
The first being the toxic nature of this election campaign, it was brutal, unforgiving and unnecessarily nasty.
Read This: https://www.newzimbabwe.com/violence-intolerance-makes-mdc-t-another-version-of-zanu-pf/
Many lies were created to advance arguments and attacks on adversaries, journalists perceived to be writing in favor of the other side and ordinary folk mercilessly belting each other online.
The ZANUPF rejects that have now found a home in the MDC Alliance brought with them the unacceptable culture of hate speech, abuse, lies and malice. Unfortunately there is a market for this kind of drivel on social media where many vent their frustrations.
People like Tendai Biti called Vice President Constantino Chiwenga’s wife, “nzenza” (woman of loose morals), and added to that is the general abusive tone of the MDC Alliance towards ZANUPF that has energized the hardliners to block any coalition government arrangement.
With the passing of the Zimbabwe Democracy and Economic Recovery Act Amendment Bill in both houses of Congress and Senate, the ZANUPF elites will now be infuriated with Tendai Biti’s role in making that bill a reality.
Biti spoke in the US Senate asking for the American legislators to only release their sanctions grip against the Zimbabwean government after the elections.
This will make it difficult for the ZANU PF hardliners to agree to a coalition government that will include the likes of Biti in it.
One of the authors of that bill, Senator Jeffry Lane Flake, arrived in Zimbabwe on Friday and will be one of many election observers in the country.
The opaque links between the MDC Alliance and Robert Mugabe’s NPF have unsettled the security establishment in government and the security apparatus themselves.
They are saying that bringing in the MDC Alliance into government has the danger of giving Robert Mugabe an indirect lifeline and access to the state and its affairs.
This they don’t want at all. Mugabe’s shadow continues to freak them out because they know how sly and crafty he is and what he is capable of doing if given a chance.
They worked for him and up to now, many of them are traumatized by how he managed to subdue a whole state and nation for 37 years playing one against the other.
The thought that he might have an invisible front row seat through some coalition arrangement with the Alliance, has made many in government and ZANUPF unease, cautious and dismissive of the coalition idea.
This has been made worse by Chamisa’s failure to open a communication channel with the ZANUPF and security elites as many of them expected him to do.
The big boys in ZANUPF have been waiting for a proper conversation with Nelson Chamisa, but those around them say that he hasn’t been able to do this for one reason or the other.
This is how people like Nelson Mandela built trust and confidence leading to the independence of South Africa, regardless of the complexities that existed within the apartheid state including its political and military architecture.
Emmerson Mnangagwa and his Vice Presidents owe so much to so many people who made the transition post November 15 possible and smooth.
They will need to reward them putting the coalition dream to a premature end.
However, I have a strong feeling that Mnangagwa will pick people out of parliament who are not necessarily in the two main political parties.
He will need to do this in order to help his government with the missing technical skills.
This will instill confidence and placate the international community especially if hires familiar names in the world of international finance and development.
He has already done this with Vincent Hungwe who came from the UNDP to replace Mariyawanda Nzuwa.
I like predicting the election result within a group of friends, but it makes NO sense to have written all this way and then not call the election.
My call is based on what I have been seeing the two main political parties doing during the election campaign, their strategies, their weaknesses, their desire to listen and adapt, their ability to mobilize when need be and the power of incumbency.
ZANUPF will prevail and will do so courtesy of its traditional social base in rural areas.
Yes the MDC Alliance has had good crowds coming out at its rallies, but in my humble view, it takes more than that to win an election.
Nelson Chamisa is said to have had 70 rallies, let us assume that there was an average turn out of 10000 people per rally, which makes it 700000 people for his 70 rallies.
The people registered to vote are 5,7 Million and that leaves a good 5 Million people who didn’t attend his rallies.
The same applies to Emmerson Mnangagwa, the number of people who attended his rallies is irrelevant. It is the people registered to vote that will matter on Monday not people who come to enjoy the rally carnival atmosphere and entertainment.
The MDCT under the late Morgan Tsvangirai did very little to allay their social base’s fear of violence when they were in the GNU.
There has been NO violence this year and every political party campaigned unhindered, however the ghost of 2008 needed to have been exorcised.
The MDC did very little about this factor for almost ten years, they will pay for that too with either voter apathy or switching of voter choice informed by the need to safeguard the voter after the election.
The MDC also didn’t keep a tight and close connection with the rural areas until they started campaigning this year.
They also lost out with Mugabe’s removal from power in November, he was the real toxic element in the ZANUPF brand. There are no more MUGABE MUST GO slogans and unfortunately, this is what galvanized many including those in the international community.
Ultimately, the power of incumbency will inevitably be an important factor in a ZANUPF victory, they are in charge of the state and have access to vital information that you and I don’t have access to.
ZANUPF has used the power of incumbency to maximum effect when they gave civil servants a 17.5% salary increase. The civil service is the biggest employer in the country.
The fight between Chamisa and Khupe will split enough votes to relegate Chamisa behind Mnangagwa by at least three to five percent of the vote.
The emergence of credible presidential candidates like Nkosana Moyo and Noah Manyika will also eat into the opposition vote which would have been in Chamisa’s corner.
ZANUPF will have to content with the NPF and Joice Mujuru factors but this will be insignificant compared to the damage that Nkosana Moyo, Noah Manyika and Thokozani Khupe will do to the MDC Alliance.
If the MDC Alliance has as much support as they say they have, then they have no reason to worry.
If they don’t, many of their supporters will go to bed wearing shoes, not ready to run, but out of depression.
Along with changing the nature or the very existence of the losing party, the election outcome has the potential to change the nature of the political system since both sides want to change the constitution.
This will result in an exacerbation of the current concentration of power in the hands of the ruling party of the day.
Any healthy democracy needs a good opposition in place, if one of the major parties falls away, it will allow a de facto dictatorship.
There is a possibility that the smaller parties will act independently and serve as a check on power excesses, or at least gain concessions from the dominant party in government.
I am also convinced that if Nelson Chamisa loses, his bullet train campaign and prospects of being President will crash and burn on Monday never to arise again.
There will be new opposition voices in 2023 with new ideas rooted in values and principles. I stand corrected if History proves me wrong.
That opposition will not win elections in 2023 if there are NO root and branch electoral reforms to change the rules of the game.
SADC told the MDCT this point and they were proved right in 2013. I told the MDC Alliance this point and I will be proved right on Monday.
As Jonathan Moyo said, there is NO ruling party that will initiate reforms, which will see it lose power, you have to fight for them.
Monday will be yet another day of formalizing that well known reality, repeating the same process under laws set by Robert Mugabe’s administration will not yield a different reality.
It will only remind us how the opposition has been inadequate in looking ahead and making the reality of winning possible.
Hopewell Chin’ono is an award winning Zimbabwean international Journalist and Documentary Filmmaker. He is a Harvard University Nieman Fellow and a CNN African Journalist of the year. He is also a Fellow at the University of Oxford’s Africa leadership Institute. Hopewell has a new documentary film looking at mental illness in Zimbabwe called State of Mind
Hopewell can be contacted at [email protected] or on twitter @daddyhope
