Confusion: A Zimbabwean woman calls a friend in an attempt to find out the latest on the country's disputed elections. Photograph: AFP/Getty
MORGAN Tsvangirai has more problems this weekend than just proving that he has, as his supporters claim, won the right to be the new leader of Zimbabwe.
His immediate hurdle is a second, run-off presidential election in a few weeks time against incumbent Robert Mugabe, whose security agencies gerrymandered the results of the first poll eight days ago to give Tsvangirai less than the 50% of the total vote he needed for victory. The circumstances leading to the run-off suggest that Tsvangirai supporters will face widespread intimidation and violence from Mugabe's police, military, youth militiamen and the so-called 'war veterans' who drove white farmers from their properties with extreme violence from 2000 onwards.
But even if Tsvangirai, leader of the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), does emerge victorious against what will be massive odds, he will face an even greater challenge – the reconstruction of a once bountiful and beautiful country that has been almost totally destroyed by Mugabe and his top lieutenants.
The scale of the task will be immense. Since 2000 the economy has suffered devastation on a scale normally inflicted only by war or natural disaster. The country's Gross National Product is today more than 40% smaller than it was eight years ago.
While aid agencies estimate that African states need to sustain an annual GNP growth of 7% to make marginal advances, Zimbabwe under Mugabe has had the world's fastest declining economy for most of the past decade. This is mirrored in such statistics as inflation far in excess of a surreal 100,000%; an unemployment rate of 80%; the flight to other countries of a quarter of the population in search of work; and the world's lowest life expectancy – including a criminal rate of hardly 34 years for women compared with nearly 60 at independence in 1980.
The main pillar of the economy was then agriculture, in the shape of white-owned commercial farms. By seizing these farms with extreme violence and handing them to some 400,000 landless peasant villagers, without bothering to provide them with finance, training, farm machinery or title deeds, Mugabe wrecked commercial agriculture.
Subsequently, Mugabe ordered his armed services chief, General Constantine Chiwenga, to drive the peasants from the farms and give them instead to his close relatives, ministers, the country's top judges and armed forces and police officers, as well as pliant journalists and clergymen. These properties are now mainly used as weekend retreats and, for the most part, have ceased to be productive.
Zimbabwe, until the late 1990s a net food exporter, was known as the breadbasket of Africa. Now it is Africa's basket case. One of the substantial benefits of getting rid of Mugabe would be that Zimbabwe would likely immediately receive massive food aid from international agencies and governments. But reviving and reforming agriculture to guarantee long-term food supplies and a degree of prosperity would be a top priority of a Tsvangirai administration.
However, politically he cannot afford to return to the pre-2000 situation and restore white farmers to the land they once owned. Most of them have fled into exile in Britain, Australia, New Zealand, Zambia, Mozambique and Nigeria anyway. And, disastrous as the land invasions were, they were initially popular because white farmers occupied most of the best agricultural land and they were, for the most part, subsequent denials notwithstanding, deeply racist.
"Even before Robert Mugabe embarked on this ham-fisted measure, there was a national consensus on the need for land reform," said Tsvangirai in one interview. "There was no argument. The argument is over how it was done. We need to deal with that not as a political issue but as an administrative matter… The land has to be rationalised. It will be a big programme. It will take three to five to 10 years."
He said the MDC planned to establish an independent commission to carry out a land audit and to establish how Zimbabwe became a food deficit country in which most of the population lives at near-starvation levels. "The new programme will not discriminate on the basis of race," he said. "So some of the white farmers may find there is land for their farming activities, but not the same farm they had before."
"There are no white farmers, nor black farmers, only Zimbabweans," said the MDC's international affairs secretary Eliphas Mukonoweshuro. "Breaking the racist stereotypes upon which Mr Mugabe has built his incendiary policies will be one of the most significant tasks in order to set the country on a course of modernity and growth. We propose to reprise Zimbabwe's role as the breadbasket of southern Africa by putting to use fallow fields laid to waste by Mr Mugabe's supporters and cronies."
Some £30m in British aid has been on the table for years in the event of an equitable and legal programme of land reform in Zimbabwe, and now the government has pledged an additional £1bn in aid to any future government it considers to have been freely and fairly elected.
Michael Holman, for years the African editor of the Financial Times, has proposed that the £30m be devoted to a pilot land reform programme in a former commercial farming area near Zimbabwe's eastern border with Mozambique. Farmers dispossessed from 2000 onwards could be brought in to share their expertise with a wide range of Zimbabweans seeking to enter agriculture in a post-Mugabe era. Holman suggests that the Commonwealth, from which Mugabe withdrew in 2003 but which Tsvangirai is sure to rejoin, could coordinate the project. It is the kind of imaginative, tangential thinking that an MDC government will need to engage in on a huge scale to get Zimbabwe back on its feet.
While feeding the people and reviving agriculture will be top of the agenda, restoring tourism in one of the world's most spectacular countries, industry and mining would fully occupy Tsvangirai, as well as the creation of a new currency and bringing under control a destructive inflation rate which is even worse than anything Germany's Weimar Republic experienced in the 1920s.
The big question will become whether Morgan Tsvangirai is up to the job. Tsvangirai, the eldest of nine children of a bricklayer, left school at 16 without academic qualifications to work at the rock face in a nickel mine. He was an active trade unionist and in 1984 spent nine months in Britain, where he witnessed the coal miners' strike and met union leader Arthur Scargill.
In 1988 he was elected Secretary-General of the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions. He transformed the ZCTU into a powerful opposition force, organising a series of nationwide strikes against the increasingly oppressive policies of Mugabe and his ruling ZANU-PF party.
Surviving a number of attempts on his life, he formed the MDC and in 2002 narrowly lost a heavily rigged presidential election, inflicting an extraordinary blow to Mugabe's aura of power. Tsvangirai was initially regarded as a hero and was widely compared to South Africa's iconic superstar Nelson Mandela.
But although he has posed the only credible threat to Mugabe in 28 years, he is no longer seen in the same heady league as Mandela. His record inside MDC is widely questioned. Party workers describe him as vacillating and indecisive. Tsvangirai described his defeat in the 2002 presidential election as "daylight robbery", but he proved unable to lead shocked Zimbabweans in any kind of protest strategy. Such indecision became a hallmark of the MDC leadership and led to deep and widespread frustration among party activists. In parliamentary elections in 2005 the party saw its previous tally of 57 seats fall to 41 against ZANU-PF's comfortable 78.
Worse still, former supporters began to accuse Tsvangirai and his top MDC officials of cowardice as well as incompetence. The MDC leaders were accused of encouraging "the masses" to take the lead in anti-Mugabe street protests while they stayed at the rear of the action. Consequently, call after call by Tsvangirai for mass protests failed ignominiously.
Harare bank clerk Humphrey Mutasa expressed a common sense of pessimism when he said he would refuse to take part in any demonstration called by Tsvangirai. "To tell you the truth, I would rather suffer quietly at home and in peace than be beaten up and still continue to suffer," said Mutasa. "Nothing will change after half-hearted attempted mass protests and boycotts. Let's say the people pour into the streets. And then what? They will just throw stones and call Mugabe names. That will not force Mugabe to flee the country, will it?"
Tsvangirai has increasingly demonstrated a lack of political savvy. Time and time again, he has been found wanting when his leadership was needed most. He also began to demonstrate worryingly autocratic traits. In 2004 party thugs loyal to Tsvangirai's inner 'kitchen cabinet' launched a series of assaults on critics within the party, seizing their party vehicles and sometimes manhandling them out of the MDC's headquarters building.
Tsvangirai ignored appeals to stop the violence that was polluting the party and its reputation, and in October 2005 the MDC split into two factions over leadership and policy differences.
The factions began attacking each other with more vigour than they criticised Mugabe and his government. They entered last month's presidential election as separate parties, splitting the anti-government vote and allowing Mugabe to stay in the last chance saloon, from where in the coming weeks he may well emerge for a sixth Presidential term.
In their current dire situation, Zimbabweans are so desperate for change that they will cling on to the coattails of anyone who promises change. To that extent, Tsvangirai is these days what ordinary Zimbabweans describe as the "ABM (Anyone but Mugabe) factor".
Tsvangirai's more recent courage has not been in doubt. Last year he suffered a fractured skull, mild brain damage and internal bleeding in a severe police assault after he took part in a prayer meeting that had been deemed illegal by the Mugabe government.
But in January, his obstinacy resulted in the failure of an attempt to reunite the two MDC factions. A pact had been near-agreed in which faction members would not oppose each other in parliamentary constituencies. Tsvangirai was holding out for one more candidate for his camp. but, under pressure from his militants, he raised the demand to more than 20 seats. The pact collapsed and the consequences were woefully apparent in the 29 March parliamentary vote. Mugabe's ZANU-PF took more than six seats that were uselessly contested by both MDC factions.
If Tsvangirai is not able to overcome Mugabe's survival strategy in the coming days, his own future will probably be political oblivion as new and younger opponents of Mugabe try to end their country's misery. If Tsvangirai does somehow survive the blitz being planned by Mugabe and his generals, then he will face a host of problems in addition to food, farming and inflation.
Doctors, for example, have stopped performing routine surgery in the country's major hospitals because of a lack of anaesthetics and other basic medical supplies. A new report on staffing levels within the crumbling healthcare system paints a dire picture of the impact of the brain drain, with vacancy rates for crucial skills in hospitals as high as 70%. More than 3,500 nurses and 1,000 doctors have left the country since 2000 in search of decent wages and conditions. Care homes throughout Britain are staffed by Zimbabweans who remit most of their wages home to help their families survive.
Last year, a parliamentary committee heard that Zimbabwe's potholed road network was crumbling because there was not a single civil engineer left in government service. More than three million Zimbabweans, a quarter of the population, are working outside the country.
Both Tsvangirai and Mugabe are now desperate men. But if the MDC leader can survive the coming assault by Mugabe and his generals, his new government would mark a significant new beginning. The international community stands ready to assist Zimbabweans in getting back on their feet. And millions of skilled Zimbabweans around the world are just waiting for the end of the Mugabe era to go home and rebuild their shattered nation.
'The world must insist the democratic verdict is upheld'
PETER HAINAFTER all the prevarication – and sometimes outright complicity – with Robert Mugabe's horrific rule in Zimbabwe, this is a moment for the international community to stand rock solid and tell him his time is up.
Although he has stolen elections before, the verdict of his long-suffering people has been resounding in this latest one. No amount of his poll rigging, no amount of intimidation or brutality against opponents, none of this by now familiar manipulation by Mugabe and his clique could hide the bravery of Zimbabweans in resolutely voting against him, as confirmed by independent monitors.
For the first time Zimbabweans could see election results as they were posted up outside local polling stations, a procedure insisted upon by Pretoria. For the first time, they were able to safeguard the ballot by sending these results to independent monitoring centres which showed a clear win for the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) leader, Morgan Tsvangirai.
Indeed, the fact that Mugabe did not quickly claim victory as he has always done confirms that he knew he had lost. But the machinations of his clique since demonstrate a determination to cling on to power regardless.
Now his ruling Zanu-PF party has come up with a new ruse. All but conceding an obvious defeat, and massaging the results of the presidential election through hand-picked officials on the Electoral Commission, the outcome is being presented as "unclear" and therefore requiring a re-run.
But what is their real plan? To bring out their henchmen in a violent assault on the opposition and (like in 2002) to terrorise voters, especially in the rural areas, into staying at home or succumbing again. The recent appearance of Mugabe's militia – the so-called 'war veterans' – is ominous; the threats of martial law even more so.
This is a moment of truth for Africa and especially the southern African neighbours. An African solution to this African crisis is needed now, even more than before. Though embarrassed by Mugabe, these leaders have deferred to him as the heroic liberation leader of decades ago rather than the corrupt tyrant he has become.
For me this has been painfully poignant. With many others I was thrilled at Mugabe's 1980 landslide win in the country's first ever democratic election after generations of racist white minority rule. I vividly recall black electors queuing in their millions as dawn broke, allowed to vote for the very first time.
But over the past 10 years especially, Mugabe has savagely prostituted the freedom struggle he once led so ably. With murder, torture, maiming, incarceration and intimidation of opponents, he copied the very techniques of repression used against him and his comrades in that struggle.
Zimbabwe was once the jewel in Africa's crown, a beautiful and hospitable land to visit, with the highest standards of education on the continent, good infrastructure, and a strong and growing economy. Yet, these past 10 years, Mugabe has all but destroyed it, turning a booming agricultural sector – breadbasket not just for his people but surrounding nations too – into a barren wasteland.
With corruption institutionalised, inflation has surged to a mind-boggling 100,000%. Unemployment is a staggering 80%, power cuts are rife and starvation widespread. The impact on neighbours has also been destabilising. Millions of refugees have escaped into South Africa and other nations, with all the accompanying disruption.
His black tyranny is an ugly stain on Africa; for me almost as abhorrent as the white tyranny of apartheid I and my parents fought so hard to defeat.
As Britain's Africa minister eight years ago I recall being asked what would happen to Zimbabwe under Robert Mugabe. It will get worse and worse was my prediction, unfortunately proving distressingly and horribly true.
What people have been unwilling to acknowledge about Mugabe is that he is not susceptible to diplomacy. I recall trying to disabuse some of my Foreign Office officials of this, and also arguing with ministerial friends in southern African governments.
After a colossal failure of diplomacy – for Britain, for South Africa, Europe, the United Nations, the Commonwealth – for everyone concerned, the international community must insist that the democratic verdict is upheld and that there is an orderly transfer of power, with Mugabe and his elite offered a safe passage if they wish. This requires global engagement from the United Nations in New York to Beijing (China has been bankrolling Mugabe as it buys up the country's rich resources).
Above all it requires Zimbabwe's neighbours in the Southern African Development Community to engage and speak with the same voice of democracy.
This is no time for diplomatic niceties or pretence that a re-run election could be a solution. Mugabe needs to be presented with the only language he has ever understood: an uncompromising insistence that he has no alternative. He must obey the democratic will of his people, go and go now. And in so doing, ironically liberate his people for the second time in his long career.
• Peter Hain MP is a former Labour Cabinet minister
MDC leader Morgan Tsvangirai. Photograph: EPA
AFTER the crash of his previous helicopter last year, Robert Mugabe was surely looking forward to flying around Zimbabwe in his new, gleaming white £3m HM036, bought in March from China's Shenzhen Zhangyeng Corporation.
He may also have been looking forward to living in his new Harare home, a palace with 25 ensuite bedrooms set among lake-strewn grounds. It cost more than £15m to build in a country where most people earn less than the equivalent of £6 a month.
If his presidency is doomed – either soon or by a thousand hostile knife cuts and betrayals over coming weeks or months or years – Mugabe, 84, will be less concerned with chopper jaunts and admiring the paintings by imported Arab artists on his arched ceilings than with the thousands of people who will loudly demand justice and revenge for his many alleged crimes.
Mugabe's biggest concern, and that of General Constantine Chiwenga, chief of the Zimbabwe Defence Forces, and Augustine Chihuri, Commissioner General of the Zimbabwe Republic Police, will be the likely repercussions from their 2005 Operation Murambatsvina ('Drive Out The Trash'). In that operation some 2.5 million poor town dwellers perceived to be supporters of the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) were made homeless.
Ostensibly a slum clearance project, Chiwenga and Chihuri directed the Murambatsvina assault by soldiers and policemen in which more than 700,000 houses were smashed by bulldozers and sledgehammers. Chihuri crowed that the operation was designed to "clean the country of the crawling mass of maggots bent on destroying the economy".
If a new head of state makes Zimbabwe a signatory to the 2002 Rome Treaty underpinning the International Criminal Court (ICC), Mugabe, Chiwenga and Chihuri would be eligible for trial in The Hague to answer alleged crimes against humanity.
As Mugabe and his cronies cling to power, they will surely be considering whether they can negotiate amnesty for their alleged crimes if Morgan Tsvangirai, left, becomes president. However, there is nothing to stop Murambatsvina victims independently petitioning Moreno-Ocampo, a former Argentinian human rights lawyer, to prosecute Mugabe and his security chiefs. Moreno-Ocampo would be legally obliged to investigate.
Many Murambatsvina victims were forced to destroy their own homes at gunpoint. No one knows how many died as a direct result of the operation.
Mugabe has already been devastatingly censured by Anna Tibaijuka, the special United Nations envoy sent to Zimbabwe by the secretary-general to investigate Murambatsvina. In her report, Tibaijuka described the operation as "a catastrophic injustice, carried out with disquieting indifference to human suffering".
She stopped just short of describing Murambatsvina as a crime against humanity – one of the two specific indictments, with war crimes, on which the ICC is legally able to bring charges.
"This is a genocide police," said Dr Steve Kibble, of the Catholic Institute for International Relations. "It's a strategy of letting the urban population die by leaving them to starve in the bush rather than facing the bullets of Mugabe's goons. It doesn't cost them a cent."
Assuming that Mugabe is not totally paranoid and deluded, that he has some residual concept of having done wrong, he will also be frantically worried about the consequence of the massacres he ordered in 1983 of Ndebele people in the west of his country, purportedly to suppress a small insurgency but actually to crush all dissidence.
Mugabe unleashed the North Korean-trained 5th Brigade, personally answerable to the head of state and not to the army chief, and soon some 30,000 were dead in Operation Gukurahundi (a Shona word meaning "The early rain that washes away the chaff before the spring rains"].
Most of the dead were shot in public executions, often being forced to dig their own graves in front of family and fellow villagers.
No one has ever been brought to trial for the Gukurahundi.
Mugabe knows also that there have been innumerable smaller scale killings between the big ones. If his bloodied fingers are finally wrested from the levers of power, would Mugabe stay or flee? He has always insisted he would only leave Zimbabwe in a coffin, and most commentators agree that he would stay and fight. If he did jump ship, the search parties should start looking for him in Malaysia, one of the few places he is able to travel to freely; it is also said to be where he has stashed the money – perhaps billions of pounds – that he has bled from his country.
Bloggers' views... Zimbabwe speaksJust when we thought that the Hurricane that is Mugabe will quietly and SWIFTLY die down and jump the country, he managed to make an appearance for the first time since casting his ballot on Saturday, March 29.
Meanwhile, our favourite fame-seeking Simba Makoni says he will throw his weight to MDC PRESIDENT Morgan Tsvangirai, should the votes go to the run-off. And ex-pat Zimbabweans around the world have vowed to go back home, and are ready for the new dispensation. A brand new dawn is rising is Zimbabwe!
Obakeng, The Chief http://onctoday.co.za/2008/04/03/the-hurricane-is-still-alive/It's hard to believe that the night before last the news was buzzing insanely with stories that Mugabe was on the brink of stepping down and going. Tonight the news has swung like a pendulum with talk of a Mugabe crackdown against the opposition. We saw him on TV seeing off the AU observers and almost immediately afterwards (like two fingers thrown up to the world) the news switched to the MDC MT offices being raided and riot police at the Meikles Hotel: apparently Tendai Biti, the MDC MT Secretary General was staying there. There are times when you have simply run out of energy, the fuel tank is drained and you are stuck on the road to nowhere. For tonight, Robert Mugabe has won the battle.
http://www.sokwanele.com/thisiszimbabwe/Behind the doors of the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe, where notorious governor Gideon Gono, the man many hold as responsible for the country's financial melt-down, seems to be in a state of panic. There, he and his staff are ransacking files that go back many years and cover many strange dealings for which he and other ministers have been responsible. The files are loaded into cars, and rushed away. I am told that a big bonfire can be seen burning at the back of Gono's Glen Lorne house.
Moses Moyo Our Man in Hararehttp://www.zimbabwetoday.co.ukEven if Tsvangirai is sworn in as president, his party's parliamentary majority is so razor-thin that he will not be able to ram through constitutional changes without ZANU-PF support. Mugabe may be on his way out, but based on its number of parliamentary seats, ZANU-PF is far from finished.
Chido Makunike, Zimbabwe Review http://zimreview.wordpress.com/The full article contains 4066 words and appears in Scotland On Sunday newspaper.
