The increasingly authoritarian President of Zimbabwe secures a third of the seats in an election suspected of fraud.

Miguel Murado

While all throughout the Catholic world, millions of faithful were still praying for the Pope’s health, in Zimbabwe an Archbishop admitted that he and much of his flock spare some time to pray for the death of the country’s President, Robert Mugabe. Even if Archbishop Pius Ncube prudently added for SW Africa Radio that “of course, this is up to God,”, the incident shows the extent of desperation among Zimbabwe’s opposition after the victory of Mugabe in the elections. In fact, he has just declared that he intends to remain in power “until he is a hundred years old”.

Archbishop Ncube’s prayers notwithstanding, he very well might, for yesterday it was also known that Mugabe has succeeded in securing in Thursday’s vote a full third of the parliamentary seats for his party, ZANU-PF. This should allow him to execute the constitutional reform he considers so urgent: the indefinite extension of his own mandate, which, although it has gone on for 25 years already and is not due to end for another three, he still finds too short.

Of course, Mugabe, whom years ago was compared by the press to Nelson Mandela and has now become the prototype of the African dictator, has been aided in this victory by one of his prerogatives: that of naming directly 30 of the 120 MPs. If we add to this what everybody suspects has been a massive fraud at the polls, the result is anything but an unsolved mystery.

And yet it has been a disappointment and a crushing defeat for the opposition which is aware of having lost support among the population. For whilst there is enough evidence of fraud in the election, it is also true (and more relevant for Zimbabwe’s future) that the oppositional Movement for Democratic Change has lost strength. The fact that, in spite of its fifty MPs, the MDC has been unable to exercise any influence at all has discouraged many of its supporters and this may explain the low turnout (in the region of 50%) as much as ZANU-PF’s voter intimidation, which has been much lower than in past elections.

Even the newest opposition force, lead by former Information Minister Jonathan Moyo, which many believed to have some chances of success, has been crushed in Thursday’s vote. Moyo was thought to have the support of the European and Asian business lite, worried by the disastrous course of Zimbabwe’s economy and its three-digit inflation rate. But not even this has been enough to challenge Mugabe, who has announced that he will carry on with his polemic appropriation of land (mostly belonging to the Zimbabwean White), the MCD’s main casus belli and, in the view of many, also the root cause of the country’s economic collapse.

(Miguel Murado is a former Middle East correspondent and current political analyst for the Spanish newspaper La Voz de Galicia)

Miguel Murado
La Voz de Galicia, 03 April 2005