Nailing down Vampire Bob's electoral coffin

The new year is a time of irrepressible, instinctual optimism. But for Zimbabweans this year looms like an onrushing tsunami — a disaster that is probably unavoidable and certain to be fatal to many.

In a last hurrah, Zanu-PF President Robert Mugabe — who turns 87 next month and is the world’s oldest head of state — has declared that there will be a general election sometime in 2011, two years early. Predictably, the ageing despot has ignored the MDC, his notionally equal partners in the coalition government engineered by South Africa, who protest that conditions are not yet right for free and fair elections.

Perhaps SA and the SA Development Community might yet exercise some influence. Neither wants a rerun of the violent and rigged 2008 elections, while President Jacob Zuma, in overseeing the drawing of an electoral road map for Zimbabwe, undoubtedly won’t want to repeat his predecessor’s abject failures.

Following on the Ivory Coast’s incumbent Laurent Gbagbo refusing to step down after losing the presidential election, they will be particularly keen to have an exit strategy for Mugabe. Equally important, any deal has to be acceptable to the security establishment who, whatever immunities are granted Mugabe personally, fear prosecution for human-rights abuses and don’t relish an end to their plundering of state resources.

Unfortunately the auguries for a trouble-free journey following Zuma’s road map are not good. Zanu-PF, for one, is stronger than it has been for ages.

The party has been financially buoyed by the wealth it is diverting from the new Marange diamond fields that, it is predicted, could make Zimbabwe the world’s biggest diamond producer. The lifeline offered Zanu-PF by a resource-hungry China, as well as the West’s distraction by its own domestic problems, have emboldened the ruling party.

A sign of this is the increasingly threatening rhetoric. At last month’s Zanu-PF national conference, Mugabe urged the death sentence for “treasonous” supporters of sanctions, while vowing that the party would “operate like an army” to crush the opposition in the election.

Zanu-PF chair Simon Khaya-Moyo warned journalists that criticism of the security forces would not be tolerated and that those who did not toe the line would be hunted down and killed. “You hear them talking about press freedom,” he said, “What press freedom?”

MDC supporters were forced to attend a meeting at which former cabinet minister Ambrose Mutinhiri declared that he was “good at killing” and ready to go to war against those who opposed Mugabe. This echoes feared Defence Minister Emmerson Mnangagwa, tipped as Mugabe’s heir, who warned voters that he had been “taught to kill” and that in the last election they had voted for the “wrong” party: “If you don’t vote for us in the next election we will rule, even if you don’t want.”

Zanu-PF has had 30 years to become adept at intimidation and chicanery. For example, at least 15% of the voters’ roll is filled by ghost voters who will “turn out” for Mugabe. And because Zanu-PF has fragmented the already gerrymandered constituencies into tiny polling districts, its goons can establish very easily where the vote has gone against it and target their retribution accordingly.

So to be of any use on a practical level, Zuma’s road map for Zimbabwe has to go beyond the usual fine sentiments. There has to be credible international oversight and, on a practical level the plan, would at best replicate SA’s first democratic elections of 1994: no rigged voters’ roll, but voters instead able to cast their ballots anywhere, on production of an identity document.

Even then, until the coffin is nailed shut, Zimbabweans will fear that Vampire Bob will find a way of rising from electoral death.