In Zimbabwe, a massive fraud has been perpetrated on the electorate. But the man responsible, Robert Mugabe, who cannot bear to surrender power, will not get away with it. There will be consequences, beginning with sanctions. The US has already rejected the election results and intends sanctions as do countries like New Zealand and Australia. The EU is certain to apply them as well. For Zimbabwe, once the storehouse for all southern Africa but now unable to feed itself, with 65 percent of the workforce unemployed and inflation at 110 percent, where there is no animal feed, where starvation is fast approaching the townships (it is already a reality in the countryside) and over a quarter of the adult population is HIV-positive, it will trigger yet more opposition to the government. And that does not even begin to take into account the existing outrage that many Zimbabweans feel about the election.
Mugabe will probably try to save himself and his party by trying to forcibly abolish the opposition Movement for Democratic Change while pushing ahead with land reform. Neither will succeed: the redistributed land will simply go to those who already support him and be used for subsistence farming. What the economy needs is aid, but all the possible donors have been antagonized. As for rebuilding public support, Mugabe may succeed in crushing the present opposition but others will spring up in their wake. As for those who have been intimidated this time round, they are not going to turn into future Mugabe admirers. They may cower at present, but as soon as he weakens, they will turn on him with fury. Anyone who has any doubt about that needs look no farther than Madagascar; there, “people power” has overwhelmed a similar grasping dictator who tried to manipulate the elections.
There are those who are sympathetic to Mugabe — not because they have any truck with his politics, but because they choose to see the conflict both inside and outside Zimbabwe in terms of latter-day racism and neocolonialism or because they dislike the West and think that “my enemy’s enemy is my friend”. Anyone who takes this line is profoundly wrong. Mugabe beats the racist drum and some governments in Africa choose to go along with it purely for propaganda purposes. The reality is that he is in conflict with his own people. Race has nothing to do with it. The fact that some African governments choose to ignore this reality is largely because they too are frightened by what “people power” might do to them.
For the moment, Mugabe may appear to have succeeded where Madagascar’s Didier Ratsiraka failed, but he has won no more than a battle — and even that is as yet unclear. Who can say what the next development will be? His fraud will trigger a chain of responses, domestic and international, that will bring him down. By cheating the electorate, he has set the clock ticking against him. There will be sanctions and they will be painful, although as in Iraq, it will probably be ordinary people who suffer most. The biggest danger is that the longer he tries to swim against the tide of history and more repressive he becomes, the more likely that change, when it comes, will be violent. He should bear in mind the fate of the Ceausescus while he has the time.
