CAB3 and the myth of electoral peace: Why Zimbabwe’s next parliamentary election could be its most violent

Dear Reader,

Constitutional Amendment Bill No. 3 (CAB3) has, for all practical purposes, cleared Parliament and now awaits the President’s signature. One of the central myths advanced in support of the Bill is that removing direct presidential elections will end electoral violence. This myth cannot go unchallenged because it offers Zimbabwe a false pathway to electoral peace.

I argue that CAB3 will increase electoral violence by multiplying the electoral arenas in which the high-stakes question of presidential succession will be contested. In effect, every constituency will mirror a mini-presidential election, from party primaries to the national election.

I substantiate this argument by examining Zimbabwe’s only five post-independence parliamentary elections held without a direct presidential contest. Excluding the transitional independence election of 1980, these were the parliamentary elections of 1985, 1995, 2000, and 2005, and the Senate election of 2005.

The principal drivers of electoral violence are mainly rooted in three deeper features of Zimbabwe’s political order, partly inherited from the colonial state and reproduced after independence. The first is the conflation of party and state. The second is the treatment of political opponents as enemies rather than legitimate democratic competitors. The third is a culture of impunity for political violence. These structural conditions have repeatedly produced violence even during parliamentary elections held without a direct presidential contest.

Reader, let us begin with the 1985 parliamentary election, which had no direct presidential contest. The election cycle unfolded during Gukurahundi under a State of Emergency inherited from a racist and violent colonial Rhodesian state.

Breaking the Silence by the Catholic Commission for Justice and Peace, Alexander, McGregor, and Ranger’s Violence and Memory, Gatsheni’s works, and Malunga’s The Killing Fields of Matabeleland document atrocities committed during Gukurahundi by the Fifth Brigade, other state agents, and ZANU-PF Youth Brigades.

These included mass killings, enforced disappearances, torture, sexual violence, people being buried and burned alive, food embargoes, and the destruction of civilian livelihoods.

Reader, travel with me to Matabeleland South. During the 1984 food embargo, entire communities were deliberately starved. In places such as Kezi and Maphisa, people survived on wild roots after being denied food and water. The violence spared neither adults nor children. In one documented case, a four-month-old baby was hacked to death before the mother was reportedly forced to eat the child’s flesh. Across much of Matabeleland, many of the mass graves remain to this day.

This was the political environment in which Zimbabwe entered the 1985 parliamentary election. Violence became part of the campaign itself. Kriger documents the coercion of civilians into buying ZANU-PF membership cards, the disruption of PF-ZAPU rallies, attacks on Joshua Nkomo’s campaign meetings, the disappearance of at least 80 PF-ZAPU officials and former Zimbabwe People’s Revolutionary Army (ZIPRA) combatants, and repeated warnings that supporting PF-ZAPU was equivalent to choosing death.

Violence continued even after polling. Following PF-ZAPU’s victory in fifteen Matabeleland constituencies, despite the climate of intimidation, former President Robert Mugabe urged supporters to “uproot the weeds”. ZANU-PF Youth Brigades subsequently attacked communities across Matabeleland, the Midlands, and Harare, leaving thousands homeless. The violence was driven by the brutal use of state coercion throughout the electoral cycle.

The parliamentary election of 8–9 April 1995 was less violent than that of 1985, but the underlying DNA of political coercion remained. The lower levels of violence reflected the collapse of meaningful parliamentary electoral competition, not the absence of a direct presidential election.

Makumbe and Compagnon’s Behind the Smokescreen, Sithole and Makumbe’s electorial studies, and Kriger’s analysis of ZANU-PF’s strategies of coercion all document this reality. Tekere’s Zimbabwe Unity Movement (ZUM), Muzorewa’s United Parties, and the Democratic Party all boycotted the election, arguing it was not free and fair.

Even before voting began, ZANU-PF had effectively secured parliamentary dominance. Fifty-five of the 120 elected seats were uncontested, while the constitutional framework guaranteed a further 30 appointed seats by the President. Nevertheless, opposition leaders continued to face harassment and intimidation, while senior ZANU-PF figures portrayed opponents as enemies acting on behalf of foreign interests.

Reader, the 2000 parliamentary election delivers more evidence against the myth that parliamentary elections are inherently peaceful. It was one of the most violent elections in Zimbabwe’s post-independence history, yet there was no presidential contest.

Violence escalated because Morgan Tsvangirai’s Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) posed a new, serious threat to ZANU-PF’s parliamentary dominance. Raftopoulos and Sachikonye identify the violent election as a decisive turning point in Zimbabwe’s authoritarian trajectory.

This interpretation is reinforced by independent human rights organisations. Throughout the electoral cycle, commercial farms were violently occupied by war veterans, ruling party activists, and auxiliary forces acting with apparent state support.

Farm workers, local government workers, and villagers perceived to support MDC were abducted, assaulted, and, in some cases, murdered as documented by Rutherford and McGregor. Torture bases proliferated across rural Zimbabwe, night-time pungwes re-emerged, and entire resettlement schemes became inaccessible to opposition parties, election observers, and civic organisations.

The Zimbabwe Human Rights NGO Forum documented approximately 80 extrajudicial killings, more than 799 abductions or disappearances, over 90 cases of torture and rape, more than 925 property violations, and at least 34 torture bases.

The violence was concentrated in constituencies where MDC was likely to win. Opposition supporters were denounced as “sell-outs”, “traitors” and “stooges of Western imperialism”, while even judges and lawyers defending constitutional rights became targets of intimidation. Reader, the violence was driven not by the method of electing the President, but by the determination to retain parliamentary power through organised coercion.

The 31 March 2005 parliamentary election marked a change in the form, rather than the disappearance, of electoral violence. As Reeler, Masunungure, the Zimbabwe Peace Project (ZPP), and the National Constitutional Assembly (NCA) show, the overt brutality that characterised the 2000 parliamentary and 2002 presidential elections became more calibrated, targeted, and less visible.

Fear itself became a political resource, what I have conceptualised elsewhere as the Harvest of Fear. While some international observer missions described the election as peaceful, Zimbabwean human rights organisations documented a different reality.

Between August 2004 and March 2005, the ZPP recorded 3,783 violations, including eight murders, fifty-two abductions, 1,309 assaults, and more than 2,000 incidents of harassment and intimidation. The NCA similarly documented systematic, subtle forms of intimidation.

The subsequent 26 November 2005 Senate election reinforces the 1995 lesson. Lower levels of violence reflected the collapse of meaningful parliamentary electoral competition, not the absence of a direct presidential contest. Following the MDC split, Tsvangirai called for a boycott; only 19.48 per cent of registered voters cast ballots, and 19 seats were uncontested.

Zimbabwe’s five post-independence parliamentary elections, therefore, point to three recurring drivers of electoral violence, none of which depends on the direct election of a President. The first is the conflation of party and state. State institutions repeatedly served partisan rather than democratic ends.

This was evident in the deployment of the Fifth Brigade, other coercive state agents, and ZANU-PF Youth Brigades during the 1985 electoral cycle, and later in the collaboration between war veterans, sections of the security services, and ruling party activists during the 1995, 2000, and 2005 parliamentary elections.

The second is the treatment of political opponents as enemies rather than legitimate competitors. During the 1985 election cycle, PF-ZAPU supporters were labelled dissidents. In 1995, ZANU-PF leaders dismissed Forum opposition leaders as “the white man’s proxies”.

By 2000, MDC supporters were denounced as “sell-outs”, “traitors” and agents of Western imperialism. As Tendi argues, such language legitimised violence against political opponents.

The third is impunity. From the atrocities committed during the 1985 election cycle to the murders, torture, abductions, farm occupations, and destruction of property in 2000, and the more sophisticated intimidation of 2005, perpetrators rarely faced meaningful accountability. Violence, therefore, became a low-risk instrument of political competition.

Reader, CAB3 multiplies the electoral arenas in which the high-stakes battle over presidential succession will be fought, turning every parliamentary seat into a presidential battleground. Violence is likely to intensify first within political parties, as aspiring presidential contenders compete to secure parliamentary numbers during primary elections, before spilling into the national electoral arena.

In reality, every constituency election will resemble a mini-presidential election. Zimbabwe should therefore not mistake an indirect presidential election for a pathway to peace. Rather, CAB3 creates the conditions for Zimbabwe’s next poll to become the most violent parliamentary election in the country’s post-colonial history.