For the past 24 years, Zimbabwe’s opposition has been valiantly fighting to remove ZANU-PF from power through elections. Along the way, thousands of opposition leaders and supporters were killed or maimed.
It has not been an easy fight because of the nature of the regime in Zimbabwe. Some “stalwarts of the struggle” have fallen by the way side with many of them either joining ZANU-PF or clandestinely working with the regime to further their own interests.
Zimbabwe has always held contested elections, especially from 2000 onwards. It is a champion in the league of those countries which have held the world’s ignominious elections.
The last election was held in August 2023. Election observer missions, notably SADC, roundly condemned them. If SADC condemns an election, you must know that it was beyond a farce. However, things continue as usual despite the verdict of guilty pronounced by election observer missions.
It is ironic and comical that Zimbabwe assumes the chairmanship of SADC this August. The regime is keen to use this development to seal its claim that it is legitimate.
That the regime arbitrarily arrested, tortured, and detained opposition voices ahead of SADC’s 44th Annual Summit in Harare is evidence that it does not care.
After the disputed 2023 election, the opposition told its supporters that SADC would resolve Zimbabwe’s legitimacy crisis through a fresh election or a national transitional authority. Of course, this was a delusional expectation. SADC did its best by roundly condemning the election.
The opposition was supposed to take advantage of this by disengaging from any government processes and embarking on widespread protests. This would have deepened the legitimacy crisis, making it difficult for ZANU-PF to move forward and creating the conditions for SADC to intervene.
Expecting SADC to intervene merely on the basis of its election observation report was delusional.
It appears that Nelson Chamisa has been disappointed by SADC. He was cited in The Standard of 11 August 2024 saying that “SADC is not the ultimate answer to the problems we are facing. We must fix our challenges and find answers to our questions. But SADC is not the ultimate or the whole answer. God is. We are the answers to the questions ourselves. SADC is just a referee, but if a referee chooses not to play their role, it doesn’t mean that the players stop playing. You play, but you know that you are on your own”.
Many Zimbabweans have lost faith in SADC. However, it is important for them to understand that SADC can only play its part if they play their part first and their part goes beyond voting.
In his Big Saturday Read, the late intellectual luminary, Dr Alex Magaisa, gave the opposition immortal wisdom when he argued that: “Whatever their weaknesses and the unpopularity of their approach among some Zimbabweans, the African countries and SADC, in particular, remains a key arena for the resolution of our political challenges. Strategically, the opposition cannot be seen to be disrespecting or alienating SADC in preference for the West. In any event, the West generally will have to work through and with the SADC countries to have any serious impact. The ordinary people can nonchalantly dismiss SADC and the AU in casual debates, but serious opposition politicians and strategists know that they cannot afford that petulant attitude”.
It is clear that like any other electoral dispute, nothing will be done to resolve the 2023 electoral dispute. Zimbabweans have to wait for 2028 but President Mnangagwa wants to remain in power unconstitutionally until 2030 at the least.
No reforms will be implemented ahead of 2028. It will be another shame election and things will continue as usual as Zimbabwe waits for 2033. The cycle will continue that way as generations come and go.
Imagine that a Zimbabwean who was 20 years old in 2000 when the opposition contested its first parliamentary election is now 44 years old, and still waiting for change…with no job, savings, medical aid, water, electricity, internet, and other essential services.
This is why a significant constituency of Zimbabweans has concluded that elections do not work in Zimbabwe. This group believes that the opposition’s participation in farcical elections only gives people false hope and enables ZANU-PF to remain in power and claim that it is a legitimate political authority.
One of the leading Zimbabweans to take this position is Hopewell Chin’ono, an award-winning international journalist. While responding to a tweet by Zimbabwe’s main opposition leader, Chamisa, who wrote that “Zimbabwe must have proper elections and fix broken politics”, Hopewell wrote “We have been talking about elections for the past 24 years, but they don’t work! Responses to Hopewell’s posts show that the number of Zimbabweans who believe that elections do not work is growing exponentially.
However, many others continue to believe that elections remain an important avenue to fight ZANU-PF. For example, Chipo Dendere, a Lecturer and political analyst, responded to Hopewell, saying “Even in autocracies we can’t give up on fighting for proper elections. Elections matter and the right to vote is sacred. We should not give it up easily”.
Chamisa insists that Zimbabwe must conduct elections that are free, fair, and credible. The axis of evil in Zimbabwe is that elections have been turned into rituals. For them to work, they must be converted into a meaningful contestation for power.
For this to happen, Zimbabweans must be allowed to use all peaceful and constitutional means of holding ZANU-PF to account and demanding meaningful elections. But ZANU-PF has savagely criminalized even the slightest exercise of democratic freedoms.
The tragic upshot is that elections continue to be ritualistic. What is clear is that there now exists a huge contestation regarding the utility of elections in Zimbabwe.
It is important to embrace this discussion because it will fundamentally shape the future of opposition politics and the broader struggle for transition in Zimbabwe.
The opposition has always faced the “oxymoronic burden” of trying to find a non-existent balance between two irreconcilable positions: the position that elections are brazenly rigged and that they work.
The position that elections are rigged is a true reflection of the situation in Zimbabwe, but it leads to electoral apathy as opposition supporters lose faith in elections.
While the position that elections work is intended to energize opposition supporters to participate in elections, it overlooks the vile electoral irregularities in Zimbabwe.
This position has been based on the delusional and simplistic optimism that the opposition can win a flawed election by gaining a huge number of votes that can disorientate and overwhelm ZANU-PF’s rigging machinery.
The harsh truth is that ZANU-PF has an occultic, monstrous, multi-layered, and elastic rigging machinery that is capable of corrupting and depleting the opposition’s electoral fortunes at every stage of the electoral process: banning opposition rallies, refusing the opposition access to state media, using state resources to buy votes, electoral violence and intimidation, manipulating constituency boundaries in favour of ZANU-PF, disenfranchising opposition supporters through a slow and frustrating voter registration process in opposition strongholds, removing the names of opposition supporters from the voters roll, moving the names of opposition supporters from one polling station to another without their knowledge, manipulating the assisted voting system, “command voting” where opposition supporters are forced to vote ZANU-PF, intimidating the opposition’s election agents to falsify election results, the opaque printing of ballot papers, and fraudulent counting and tallying of election results.
This list is not exhaustive. There are many other ways that ZANU-PF uses to rig elections. ZANU-PF is also skilled at using the “demoralize to disenfranchise” strategy through which it makes opposition supporters to lose confidence in the power of the vote.
Statements such as: “the opposition will never rule this country”, “the opposition are daydreamers”, “Zimbabwe will never be taken through the ballot paper”, “ZANU-PF will rule Zimbabwe forever” and “we must be respected, we are the majority, we are the people, we are the government, we are the army, we are the air force, we are the police, we are everything that you can think of” are intended to achieve this goal.
Let us assume that all the aforesaid election rigging mechanisms fail and the opposition wins an election. The Electoral Commission (ZEC) can manipulate the figures and announce a falsified outcome. In 2008, ZEC released the presidential election results after a month.
It was clear that the results had been cooked. In the event of an election dispute, ZANU-PF has a captured judiciary on its side. In the unlikely scenario that ZEC declares an opposition candidate as the winner of a presidential election, ZANU-PF has the army as its “last bulwark” to stop the democratic transfer of power.
Any struggle for democratic change in Zimbabwe must be based on a solid understanding of these six fundamental truths: that Zimbabwe’s electoral field is grossly unjust, that as long as the electoral field remains the same, elections will never deliver change, that electoral reforms will never come through appealing to the seared conscience of ZANU-PF, that it takes extraordinary courage, unity of purpose, and sacrifice to remove ZANU-PF, that the military is the center of transitional politics in Zimbabwe, and that only the people of Zimbabwe can redeem themselves from the curse of ZANU-PF.
The strategy to deliver change in Zimbabwe must be found within this context.
The bottom line is that after 24 years of fighting to remove a vile, incompetent, corrupt, arrogant, entitled, and entrenched dictatorship through elections, Zimbabwe now stands at a defining juncture; either to continue participating in farcical elections and enable the regime to remain in power, or to find alternative ways of peacefully and democratically removing it.
The ZANU-PF regime is fully aware that only mass action can bring change to Zimbabwe. This is why it is intimidated by the slightest exercise of democratic freedoms by Zimbabweans who are opposed to its rule.
Elections can only work if Zimbabweans overcome fear and valiantly demand their constitutional rights. ZANU-PF has managed to stay in power simply because its terror tactics have made Zimbabweans prisoners of fear.
It is this fear factor that needs to be dealt with. Zimbabweans will only free themselves if they realize that the power of the masses is always incomparably superior to the power of armaments, but dictators survive by convincing the powerful masses that they have no power and that the geography of power is complex, expansive, and fluid, but the masses are always the true geography of power.
Moses Tofa is a Research Leader, political analyst, and self-critical Pan-Africanist. He holds a PhD in Politics from the University of Johannesburg and a PhD in Conflict Studies from the University of Kwa-Zulu Natal. He writes in his capacity. He can be reached at [email protected], Twitter handle: @DrDrMTofa.
