Zimbabwean
By Gift Phiri
25 November 2010
HARARE – Next year’s general elections in troubled Zimbabwe will be decided largely by the country’s rural population, as both Zanu (PF) and MDC scale up their efforts to win over the local chiefs.
Last week Prime Minister Tsvangirai met with Fortune Charumbira, the president of the Council of Chiefs and a hard line supporter of Mugabe. The Zimbabwean understands the Council of Chiefs is now sharply divided, with one small faction fiercely resisting President Mugabe’s plan to draft them into his Zanu (PF) campaign machinery. The Prime Minister’s spokesman said: “The meeting was meant to find ways of improving relations with the chiefs following widespread reports that some chiefs were being abused by Zanu (PF).
President Tsvangirai told Chief Charumbira that the MDC respected the chiefs as custodians of the tradition and culture. He said the chiefs played an invaluable role in securing societal stability.
Besides periodically awarding chiefs allowances, installing electricity in their homes, pampering them with the latest all-terrain government vehicles, the chiefs are beginning to question the status quo, flatly refusing to be active participants in Zanu (PF)’s plan to win the hearts and minds of the rural people. However, a huge number of the chiefs still vociferously back Zanu (PF), even proposing making the 86-year-old Zanu (PF) leader, Life President.
Analysts said Zanu (PF) wanted chiefs to be grateful of this generosity by helping in making rural areas ‘no go areas’ for Zanu (PF)’s political opposition. In the bloody 2008 vote, rural areas became places for political purges and retribution, flashpoints for those considered not loyal to the ‘revolution’.
Zanu (PF) is moving to enlist the support of headmen, village heads and even chief’s aides or messengers. War veterans and party activists have terrorised the countryside to prevent black farm workers and peasants living on community settlements perceived to support the MDC from voting.
Villagers must now take loyalty tests to Zanu (PF) in exchange for a guarantee they will not be harassed and allowed to continue the work of ploughing, sowing, harvesting and going to auction. And the chiefs are being put at the centre of this strategy.
“The outcome of the next vote will be determined in rural areas,” said Ronald Shumba, a political commentator. No date has been fixed for the vote, but Mugabe said it must be early next year amid reports it could happen in June just after the referendum on a new Constitution.
“People in these areas have been the stake in the violent political struggle that we have seen in recent years between the MDC and Zanu (PF),” Shumba said.
After the defeat in March 2008 of President Robert Mugabe in the historic general election, former veterans of the independence war backed by Zanu (PF) and Mugabe unleashed a “smart genocide”, abducting and viciously assaulting MDC activists and returning the grievously wounded activists to their communities to act as billboards of Zanu (PF) brutality. The gruesome violence cowed the MDC, forcing it to boycott a subsequent run off election.
David Coltart, an MDC-M leader and minister in the GNU, said in a recent paper he thought the government was trying to use old intimidation techniques in the next election, but “they simply do not have the same resources as before”.
He said: “They used to have a guerrilla army of 50,000 people country-wide. We think that there are probably no more than 3000 to 4000 of these people – the actual core, then they use untrained youths.”
Shumba declared: “People are determined to go and vote no matter what the conditions are,” he said.