Important government decisions were made outside Cabinet meetings that endorsed the president’s will—to a point that high ranking civil servants often ignored their own minister’s instructions and rather obeyed orders emanating from the Office of the President,104 which has been enlarged through the years operating like a parallel power structure with direct links to the permanent secretaries in the various ministries.105 The latter are carefully selected ZANU-PF cadres and certainly not neutral functionaries. Mugabe has become extremely skillful at staging controversies over policy issues in the Cabinet or the party organs, which would appear in the media, thus enabling him to better impose his own will behind closed doors.106 Those few of his lieutenants from the liberation war who can talk face to face with him and voice their concerns never confront him in public. Praise and reprimand are used alternatively to seduce or, on the contrary, destabilize Cabinet ministers and party officials. Often Mugabe has played younger generations against the old guard and vice versa, especially in Cabinet or Central Committee appointments. This balancing act has been necessary for Mugabe to control the factional struggles mentioned before, but it has also allowed him to keep the upper hand in Cabinet proceedings: any minister is worried enough to be constantly watching his back and lashing out at his colleagues, rather than colluding with others against Mugabe. Besides, the appointees perceive positions in a bloated government—around forty ministers in the 1990s—as a fast track to self-aggrandizement (see Chapter 7). Through this process and the sudden elevation of unknown cronies, and the equally abrupt disgrace of erstwhile close aides, Mugabe has become the untouchable cockerel (the ZANU-PF symbol) in the farmyard. The so-called succession debate further contributes to these dynamics.
Hegemony Through Manipulated Elections
Once he won the founding elections, Mugabe never had any intention of relinquishing power. Although he was obliged to shelve his plans to establish a formal political monopoly, all possible means were used to control the outcome of the general elections. Thus no elections in Zimbabwe have ever been “free and fair.” Even the independence elections under international supervision were marred by violence and intimidation, mostly from ZANU-PF, a reality overlooked at the time by most diplomats and commentators. The outside world was quite happy to uphold the fiction of a multiparty democracy in the making until the trick was fully exposed by the political crisis that came in the first decade of the twenty-first century.
The conventional wisdom had it in the mid-1990s that the opposition parties’ weaknesses accounted for the most part of their marginalization in Zimbabwean politics. On these grounds, most observers have discounted the claims from opposition parties and civic organizations that the electoral process was seriously flawed and the balance was heavily tipped in favor of ZANU-PF. Margaret Dongo’s exposure of the rigging system put in place in Harare South by ruling party cadres and partisan civil servants and her subsequent triumphal election in a rerun ridiculed assumptions that ZANU-PF enjoyed undiluted electoral support.107 However, many still saw the manipulation of the electoral process in Sunningdale as a series of isolated incidents. The reality is that the 1995 elections were rigged in the sense that the process was manipulated to ZANU-PF’s advantage, from registration of voters to announcement of results. Had opposition party candidates done their homework, like Margaret Dongo, not to mention journalists from the independent press, the truth would have unraveled long before 2000.
Another common but inaccurate explanation was the so-called voter apathy in the post-1980 elections, both in terms of the numbers bothering to register as voters and in terms of the share of the latter actually voting. In the 1996 presidential election, Robert Mugabe was returned to power with the support of only 27 percent of registered voters. In fact, the large numbers that stayed away from the polls, especially in urban areas, did so to express their dissatisfaction with the regime and at the same time their frustration over the lack of a credible alternative. The opposition parties’ attempts to dislodge ZANU-PF from power were seen as preposterous. By making sure these parties did not win constituencies—even though this would not have jeopardized ZANU-PF’s hegemony—Mugabe’s strategists cultivated popular beliefs that the electoral route was closed. The February 2000 referendum’s results provided the breakthrough: the surprise victory of the “No” vote contributed to further mobilize the urban electorate in support of the MDC.
Indeed, the systematic rigging and the extent of intimidation that marred the 2000 and 2005 parliamentary and 2002 presidential elections came as a shock for many. It was then more obvious because the robust MDC challenge to the ruling party’s grip provoked a panic reaction within the ruling elite. However, if there was a change of scale in the manipulation of elections after the lost constitutional referendum the means and methods were already in place before February 2000. The study of the 1995 general election already pointed to a sophisticated system of controlling all phases of the electoral process before and after election days. It is a system where the state security agencies are involved in the electoral process and work in cahoots with partisan civil servants such as Tobaiwa Mudede, the registrar general, and supervisory bodies lacking even a modicum of independence. Since 2000 the rigging strategy has been delineated in meetings of the Joint Operations Command (JOC), which comprises the army, police, prison authorities, home affairs officials, and the CIO, and is chaired by Mugabe. There have been numerous NGO reports (especially from the Zimbabwe Election Support Network, a coalition of 35 organizations, and the Zimbabwe Human Rights NGO Forum, a coalition of 17 organizations), and some reports from international observer missions (EU in 2000, Commonwealth in 2002), which all pointed to the various techniques used by ZANU-PF to influence the election outcome. We will summarize their main findings that suggest a consistent, permanent, and now familiar pattern.
The registration of voters process, overseen by Registrar General Mudede, a functionary loyal to Mugabe and born in the same area, has been used repeatedly to increase the number of registered voters in the areas perceived as pro-ZANU-PF—such as the Mashonaland provinces—therefore allowing some gerrymandering to take place through the delimitation of constituencies (which is based on registration and not census figures). This manipulation has affected all elections since 1980, and once again in 2005 with three constituencies cut out of MDC strongholds.108 Although Mudede has been ordered by the courts to clean the voter rolls and allow the public to check their accuracy, his office has deliberately kept the voter rolls in shambles,109 in such a way that there was always a need for supplementary voter rolls, to which the opposition parties had no access and which were used to doctor ballot figures in selected constituencies. This supplementary voter roll was ruled illegal in 1995 and has been relentlessly criticized by human rights NGOs and election observers. As in the previous elections, there were between one and two million more people on the voter rolls in 2005 than the total number of potential voters in the country—given the rate of emigration and increased mortality linked to AIDS and malnutrition—with still many duplications and names of deceased people appearing on the rolls.110
For the presidential elections in 2002 a good number of white citizens were stripped of their Zimbabwean citizenship, hence of their right to vote on the basis of the Citizenship Act 2001. This policy was generalized prior to the 2005 general election: 150,000 lost their right to vote when descendants of migrant workers from the neighboring countries and Zimbabweans of European descent were declared noncitizens.111 For the 2002 presidential election, proof-of-residency requirements, which had been tightened up, were used to disenfranchise thousands of urban dwellers—known to be massively pro-MDC—especially new voters. In rural areas, however, an oral confirmation by village headmen or farm owners was accepted as a proof of residence, allowing an easy registration of voters controlled by ZANU-PF. In addition, Mudede and his aides also made it as difficult as possible to opposition candidates to field their nomination papers at various elections.
In the run-up to all national elections, the state and the ruling party prevented the opposition parties from campaigning