Zimbabweans are making efforts to reach conclusion on their future this week about the just concluded general election, supporters of chief opposition leader Nelson Chamisa were still stunned at how their orator-pastor had been trounced by President Emmerson Mnangagwa.
And yet several signs of Chamisa’s political loss in the polls had been foregrounded, if predictable, long before the elections, the latest harbinger of his troubles being the “kiss of death” that he received from former president Robert Mugabe, who was ousted by the military in November 2017.
Mugabe’s open support for the 40-year-old leader of the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) Alliance, intriguingly on the eve of a critical election last week, had effectively sealed Chamisa’s political fate after persistent media reports linked him to the former president, including charges that Mugabe had donated at least US$24-million in cash and cars to the opposition leader’s campaign.
In a country still smarting from Mugabe’s ruinous four decades in power – a president who once boasted of having “degrees in violence” that seemed to be actualised in the 1980s death of thousands of opposition supporters in southern Matabeleland and the Midlands provinces – the ex-president’s backing of Chamisa was seen by a large number of Zimbabweans as an attempt to bring Mugabe back to power “through the back door”, to use Mnangagwa’s telling words.
Aside from Mugabe’s eleventh-hour intervention in the 30 July general elections, a range of variables had seemed to stymie Chamisa’s chance of victory.
The first was the sheer uneven spread of voters between those in urban areas, where the MDC has the greatest support, and the rural areas, where most Zimbabweans live and where Mnangagwa’s ruling Zanu-PF party has long enjoyed strong political support for a variety of reasons, including alleged intimidation of villagers.
In the name of what the government has branded as its “Command Agriculture” that is meant to boost Zimbabwe’s self-sufficiency in food, especially of the staple maize, the government had for the past few years poured huge amounts of funds into rural and peri-urban areas to improve the livelihoods of voters there.
Often residents in the rural areas were given significant farming inputs such as fertilisers and seeds and, ahead of last week’s elections, even thousands of cattle to restart collapsed livestock farms, mostly in dry and parched Matabeleland provinces.
Mnangagwa, in power for just seven months before the 30 July plebiscite, was therefore keen to use his brief incumbency to demonstrate to rural dwellers that his government was delivering tangible “gifts” of his revolution –a revolution he said was necessary to ensure Zimbabwe catches up with the rest of the world after years of isolation caused by Mugabe’s factitious ties with the West.
Mnangagwa’s “gifts” included the opening or refurbishment of two power stations in northern Zimbabwe; the opening of some closed factories (such as the regional Pepsi headquarters for southern Africa in Harare), and a couple of manufacturing outlets, to try to woo voters and show that Mnangagwa’s new mantra of “Zimbabwe is open for business” was indeed bearing real fruit, however modest.
“All in Zimbabwe and outside now await the evidence of rigging of the elections which Chamisa says he has got and is taking to the Zimbabwean courts. He needs to provide compelling evidence; otherwise many people will see his actions as bordering on ‘politricks’. The long-suffering people of Zimbabwe want to go forward.”