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Zimbabwe Presidential and Legislative Elections, August 23
By Joseph Siegle and Candace Cook
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The Zimbabwean elections are shaping up to be the bloodiest on the continent this year as the ruling Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF) ramps up its use of violence and intimidation in the attempt to retain its 43-year grip on power.
In Summary
The latest cycle of violence against opposition candidates has, in fact, already begun. In June 2022, opposition activist Moreblessing Ali was abducted on the outskirts of Harare. Her dismembered body was later found in a well nearby. Witnesses identified a ZANU-PF activist as the assailant. Over a dozen opposition politicians who attended her funeral were arrested for “inciting violence.” Many remain incarcerated even though they have yet to be charged.
This is but one illustration of the pattern of intimidation and suppression of political opposition, including arrests and extrajudicial killings, that Zimbabwe faces as it heads toward elections.
ZANU-PF has held a stranglehold on the presidency since Zimbabwe’s independence in 1980. Seven-term president/prime minister, Robert Mugabe, was ousted in a 2017 coup by former army chief, General Constantino Chiwenga. ZANU-PF continuity was retained with the installation of former Vice-President Emmerson Mnangagwa as President. Chiwenga defended the unconstitutional exercise by saying, “when it comes to matters of protecting our revolution, the military will not hesitate to step in.”
Mnangagwa was subsequently declared the victor of the widely criticized 2018 election with 50.8 percent of the vote. Chiwenga is now Vice-President.
2023 Elections Calendar
Event
Timeline
Voting date
Wednesday, 23 August 2023
Run-off if no outright winner
Monday, 2 October 2023
Political violence
The deployment of political violence in Zimbabwe continues a decades long pattern—from the liberation movement days known as “Chimurenga.” It was marked by incidents such as the Matabeleland massacre in the 1980s, the mysterious killings of rival politicians inside and outside of ZANU-PF, and the multiple beatings longtime opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai suffered in the effort to unseat Mugabe.
What is noteworthy in the 2023 cycle is how early the violence against the opposition has started. The faction now in control of the ZANU-PF is also increasingly dropping any pretense that violence is not part and parcel of the party campaign playbook. This may reflect the more central role the military has played in the party since the coup.
While the ZANU-PF governing model has long been built around a politicized military, known as “securocrats,” this relationship has fostered fraught civil-military relations that pose a formidable obstacle to democratic progress. Today, security officials are routinely indoctrinated in ZANU-PF’s Chitepo School of Ideology.
The increasingly harsh methods used against the opposition may also reflect lessons Mnangagwa learned as head of the Joint Operations Command under Mugabe, which the latter used to target political rivals with abductions, arrests, and killings. Mnangagwa has been under U.S. sanctions since 2003 for “contributing to the deliberate breakdown in the rule of law.”
Electoral commission composition
This perspective is reinforced by widely held perceptions that the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission (ZEC) is biased, with leading ZANU-PF family members serving as commissioners. ZEC’s reputation also suffers from the outsized role of the military, where 15 percent of ZEC staff are former service personnel, including the chief elections officer, who is a retired army major. Contrary to electoral best practice, ZEC has refused to publish an electronic copy of the electoral register to foster transparency.
This pattern of institutional bias builds on a long history of election engineering in Zimbabwe including: limiting the number of polling stations in opposition strongholds, challenging the credentials of opposition candidates, and filing criminal charges against others—all with the aim of preventing them from standing for office.
An illustration of the latter is the imprisonment of Fadzayi Mahere, a 36-year-old lawyer and opposition member of Parliament with half a million Twitter followers. She was charged with “communicating false statements prejudicial to the state.”
Who are the frontrunners?
Despite this lopsided electoral playing field, ZANU-PF may still lose.
The antipathy many Zimbabweans hold toward the party is so strong that it will be difficult for ZANU-PF to credibly claim an electoral majority. Should the electoral results and public sentiment become so overwhelming, ZANU-PF may be forced to accept defeat. This was the choice faced by President Edgar Lungu in neighboring Zambia in 2021 and President Joseph Kabila of the Democratic Republic of the Congo and his handpicked successor in 2018.
The repressive climate has contributed to a unified and resilient opposition under the banner of Nelson Chamisa and his Citizens Coalition for Change (CCC) party. After ZANU-PF appropriated the name and assets of the longtime leading opposition party, Movement for Democratic Change, the newly organized CCC won 19 out of 28 parliamentary seats in by-elections held in 2022, including in Mnangagwa’s home district of Kwekwe Central. CCC also won a majority of local council seats it contested despite adversarial state media coverage and intimidation tactics by ZANU-PF.
The CCC also offers hope for economic stabilization. With the government having abandoned the peg to the U.S. dollar (USD) in 2019 and the unregulated printing of currency to meet financial obligations, Zimbabweans have seen a return of the hyperinflation of the 2000s. Inflation now stands at around 250 percent and is expected to escalate. The value of the Zimbabwe dollar (ZWL) has sharply dropped. It now trades at 900 ZWL to 1 USD versus 200 to 1 in 2021.
Nearly half of the population has fallen into poverty over the past decade. Rolling power outages regularly last for 20 hours per day. Unemployment stands at roughly 90 percent, and more than two-thirds of Zimbabweans earn their livelihoods from the informal sector. The prolonged economic crisis has caused an estimated 3 million Zimbabweans (out of a total population of 16 million) to flee the country, most to neighboring South Africa.
This economic hardship is juxtaposed with the perception that ZANU-PF and security leaders benefit from sole-source contracts and exclusive mining access, while sheltering their assets from inflation via offshore accounts. Anjin, a Chinese diamond mining firm with close ties to the Zimbabwe military, has been invited back into the country after having been expelled in 2016 for having “looted” the country of $15 billion, according to then-President Mugabe.
The opposition’s track record for monetary and fiscal probity is also fueling support. It was only when the then-opposition MDC gained control of the Ministry of Finance under an awkward power-sharing deal between 2009-2013 that the previous bout of hyperinflation was brought under control. Responsible monetary policy and greater transparency re-instilled confidence in the economy, precipitating an economic turnaround.
The matters at play
Hopes for progress also rest on resilient democratic norms among the populace. Judges have regularly thrown out government charges against opposition politicians as lacking merit. While the track record of judicial independence is uneven, it has been sufficient to enable the opposition to take their grievances to the courts rather than resort to violence.
Mnangagwa’s ZANU-PF has tried to rein in the independence of the judiciary with constitutional amendments in 2021 that would allow the president to extend the terms of select senior judges as well as appoint judges instead of subjecting them to a public vetting process as has been the norm. However, Zimbabwe’s High Court has ruled these amendments unconstitutional. This is significant since Mnangagwa is seeking to extend the term of Chief Justice Luke Malaba, who had dismissed the opposition’s petition to annul the 2018 election for election rigging.
Similarly, despite persistent intimidation, the media has maintained a degree of independent reporting. Journalists like award-winning Hopewell Chin’ono have been regularly arrested and imprisoned under harsh conditions for exposing government corruption.
As in other African polities, the Zimbabwean election also represents a generational battle for the future of the country. An octogenarian, Mnangagwa represents the status quo of one-party rule, while 44-year-old Chamisa captures the democratic and reformist aspirations of millions of Zimbabwean youth. Roughly 62 percent of the Zimbabwean population is below 25 years of age.
The election also pits the more urban and educated supporters of the opposition against the largely rural base of ZANU-PF who benefit from food and social welfare support in proportion to their party loyalty.
The Zimbabwean election may also turn on the support of external actors. China has a longstanding relationship with ZANU-PF and is a major creditor, even though Zimbabwe has defaulted on some of its loans and refused to pay others. This relationship has afforded China privileged access to diamond and mining interests in Zimbabwe. Through its sponsorship of disinformation campaigns, Russia is also a candidate to help sustain ZANU-PF’s hold on power as a means of advancing Russian political and economic influence.
While the deck is stacked high in favor of ZANU-PF, the legitimacy of the party and the securocrat state it governs rests on a house of cards—and therefore it persists in a perpetually fragile state.
References.
This article has been republished with permission from the Africa Center for Strategic Studies. https://africacenter.org.