Comment
Finance Minister Trevor Manuel got hot under the collar in parliament last week, saying the best South Africa could do about the crisis in Zimbabwe would be to encourage its citizens to solve their own problems. Quite. Then, getting more irritated, he brought Iraq into the debate: "For those who don't understand, I ask that President Bush recruit them and send them to Iraq. Then they will understand what regime change is about." Quite. But Manuel has a short memory. That is certainly not what Zimbabweans wanted - regime change the George Bush way. They wanted regime change the other way, through the ballot box. Very, very regrettably, South Africa chose to impede that.
The South African government's election observer group, led by its own election supremo, Brigalia Bam, overlooked overwhelming evidence that President Robert Mugabe's 2002 victory in the presidential election was dishonestly won. Even worse, South Africa decided at least 10 days before the elections that the poll would be adjudicated as having been "credible and legitimate". South African observers in Harare saw well-behaved queues of people determined to vote, however long it took, but who would be unable to exercise their democratic right because Mugabe had dramatically reduced the number of polling stations in urban opposition strongholds. Manuel may have forgotten that Brigadier-General Douglas Nyikayaramba from Zimbabwe National Army headquarters organised the army to run the presidential election of 2002.
He claimed to have retired from the military at the time. After the poll, he was given a previously white-owned farm at Nyabira, 40km north of Harare. The election machinery which Nyikayaramba controlled also delayed people who eventually got to the front of the endless queues to cast their votes in high-density areas. Movement for Democratic Change president Morgan Tsvangirai immediately challenged Mugabe's victory in court. More than two years after the election and seven court orders later, he eventually got access to ballot boxes in 12 constituencies. The documented results of the search showed that the results announced by the election "command centre" run by the army in Harare did not coincide with the ballot papers in the boxes. There was also some double voting, 2 000 in one rural constituency, but no ballot box stuffing.
The command centre was off limits to journalists. The South African observers certainly did not check out the command centre in 2002, and did not even know there was one in the 2005 general election. Despite voting delays - tens of thousands in Harare never got to vote - secret last-minute voter registration, appalling violence against opposition polling agents, candidates, supporters etc, Tsvangirai actually won the 2002 presidential poll by a small margin. Mugabe's 15% victory was manufactured by the army in the command centre. So, Zimbabweans had tried very hard to effect democratic regime change.
Maybe it is recent events Manuel was thinking about when he became cross in parliament: that many Zimbabweans who want democratic regime change have not been doing their cause much favour in recent times. The vibrant young MDC had already started sliding into disunity even before the presidential poll, but certainly we, the foreign press, didn't know that. The first known intra-party violence took place in June 2001, when a young woman activist in Harare was beaten up by thugs loyal to Tsvangirai, accused of being sister to the secretary-general, Welshman Ncube. She wasn't his sister; she just shared the same common surname. Tsvangirai's call for a boycott of senate elections in November 2005 was enormously successful. But there was, as usual, no follow-up, and so the momentum disappeared and Mugabe became the winner, as he could use the senate seats further to extend his patronage to a new bunch of Zanu PF cronies. And it has been downhill all the way since then.
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