Tomorrow Zimbabwe’s opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) will make the toughest decisions to be asked of any politicians — whether to pull their candidate Morgan Tsvangirai out of the presidential run-off election next Friday or to stick with the campaign, despite the rising tide of official violence against them and the ordinary Zimbabweans who desperately want change.
If they quit, there will be no change. Mugabe will claim to have won the second round by default. He will then doubtless set about the newly elected Parliament which since the March 29 general election has a majority of opposition MPs. The judiciary, which is still fighting to uphold the rule of law — a judge has just overturned on official ban on an eve-of-election MDC rally — will be purged. Zimbabwe will continue to be run by a seemingly increasingly unhinged 84-year-old Mugabe and the shadowy senior officers from the police and army who are backing him. The country is bankrupt. Bank notes are now worth less than the paper on which they are printed. A former breadbasket of Africa is starving. All this has happened on Mugabe’s watch since he became the liberated country’s first prime minister 28 years ago.
If, however, the MDC decides to press on, it can be expected that the final days of the election will be increasingly fraught and voting day itself will demonstrate, as Angolan President Jose Eduardo Dos Santos, once a close Mugabe ally said Thursday, that these are not free and fair elections.
ZANU-PF approached the March 29 elections absurdly overconfident that they could win, even if the vote went against them. However, permitting the results of each constituency to be posted at local counting centers before the ballots were sent to Harare for final processing was a mistake.
Though the presidential vote was ultimately rigged, March’s elections were arguably the freest and fairest that have taken place under Mugabe. For the runoff, however, it is clear that Mugabe is pulling out all the stops to win anyway he can. He has gone so far as to say that only God can now remove him from office. In the face of such odds, the MDC — whose chairman has been arrested and charged with treason — would look to be heading into a brick wall Friday.
Nevertheless they should follow the political process through to the bitter end. If Mugabe’s people are sufficiently brazen in their fraud and brutal in their suppression of opposition support, maybe even the still sympathetic South African President Thabo Mbeki, head of the 14-nation Southern African Development Community, will be forced to protest and finally take economic action to force change on Zimbabwe.
In the face of Mugabe’s ruthless administration, the only alternative to the political process is insurrection and Africa does not need another civil war. Zimbabwe’s neighbors must back the Movement For Democratic Change because of the peaceful political transformation it offers.
