Violence resumed in the fifteen constituencies that returned a ZAPU MP, and it did not stop completely until the Unity Accord was signed on 22 December 1987, becoming totally effective with the ruling party’s 1989 congress, when ZAPU and ZANU structures were amalgamated. After the 1985 elections, Mugabe knew that he could not eradicate ZAPU so easily and that he would have to co-opt ZAPU leaders into the ruling party, but he wanted them as submissive junior partners not as equals. There are interesting similarities between his attitude toward ZAPU at the time and his tactics toward the MDC after the 2002 presidential election, and even more so in the 2008 power-sharing negotiations. Mugabe has never been willing to negotiate with his opposition and share power on a fair basis—as demonstrated again throughout 2009 by his biased implementation of the September 2008 agreement on the inclusive government. In 1986 pressure was put on ZAPU through the detention of MPs and Bulawayo city councillors and scores of supporters, while negotiations were brokered between the two parties by church and civic leaders. The breakdown of the unity talks announced by Mugabe in his 1987 New Year’s message, the subsequent banning of all ZAPU meetings, and the closure of their offices clearly signaled that no less than a political surrender was demanded. ZAPU leaders had no other option given the amount of suffering in the Ndebele populated provinces.68 Besides, they had no contingency plans to resume fighting and could expect no support from abroad, especially from the neighboring states. Zimbabwe had by then emerged forcefully as a new leader of the Front-Line States fighting apartheid. In addition, most of the ZAPU leaders were tired of war as much as the people and wanted to enjoy the spoils of state power. The Accord secured their co-option into Cabinet, Politburo, and Central Committee.
Therefore, Mugabe’s war of attrition in Matabeleland was intended to force a merger on ZANU’s terms, which is precisely what the “Unity Accord”—a misnomer emphasizing the propaganda line that served to delegitimize any emerging opposition afterward—amounted to.69 Although the Unity Accord brought the state violence to an end, it also silenced voices from Matabeleland: the need to foster unity became an excuse for not acknowledging the past. Until the publication of the CCJP/LRF report in 1997, the subject was taboo even for Ndebele intellectuals.70 As a result of such “unity” ZAPU leaders were politically emasculated and they never again enjoyed significant influence within ZANU-PF. Joshua Nkomo’s elevation to the vice presidency was purely ceremonial and counterbalanced by the appointment of Simon Muzenda, Mugabe’s dedicated lieutenant, to the same position. Although Politburo and Central Committee members coming from ZAPU have sometimes been credited for a moderate influence in the ruling party politics (especially Dumiso Dabengwa or John Nkomo), they never confronted Mugabe and were easily whipped into line. Joseph Msika’s and John Nkomo’s official endorsement of the violent farm occupations since they began in 2000—in contradiction to their alleged inner feelings—underlines their political weakness. So by the late 1980s, Zimbabwe was a de facto one-party state and the situation remained similar until June 2000, when the MDC emerged as an effective contender for power.
Subverting Emerging Opposition Parties in the 1990s
From 1987 to 2000 opposition parties never obtained more than three seats at a given time in Parliament. There were more than twenty such organizations in Zimbabwe on the eve of the 1995 parliamentary elections. Yet, most of them were little more than a one-man party. Opposition MP contributions to parliamentary debates were minimal, while some outspoken ZANU-PF backbenchers, such as Margaret Dongo or the late Sydney Malunga (formerly a ZAPU member), exposed the ruling party’s poor governance record. In the 1995–2000 legislature, the two opposition survivors were largely lackluster absentee MPs.71 In fact, opposition parties did not have any significant impact on the political scene at all and issues of governance were raised more effectively by segments of civil society. Yet there have been several attempts to build a credible alternative to the ruling party prior to 1999. It is worth recalling these unsuccessful experiments, to understand the daunting task the MDC was facing and its own partly inherited shortcomings.
The first significant opposition to emerge was the Zimbabwe Unity Movement (ZUM), created in April 1989 by Edgar Tekere, a former ZANU-PF firebrand expelled from the Politburo for criticizing the widespread corruption in government ranks. Born in the midst of 1988–89 students’ and workers’ protests against corruption, censorship, and the one-party state project, ZUM got a significant share of the vote during the 1990 parliamentary and presidential elections, but it failed to break ZANU-PF’s hegemony. Veteran nationalist leader Ndabaningi Sithole returned in 1992 from his self-imposed exile in the United States to revive the “original” ZANU, however his ZANU (Ndonga) only achieved a gain of two seats in Parliament in 1995 (like ZUM in the previous legislature), in the district of Chipinge populated by Ndau, Sithole’s fellow tribesmen. Formed in March 1993, from the merger between the Harare-based Forum for Democratic Reform Trust, and the Bulawayo-based Open Forum, the Forum Party of Zimbabwe (FORUM) emanated from civil society organizations with a substantial element of white liberals72 and former junior ZAPU cadres, many of whom later found their way into the MDC. Led by the veteran nationalist and retired chief justice Enoch Dumbutshena, the FORUM failed to gain any seat in 1995, although it received a significant backing in several middle-class suburbs in Harare, Bulawayo, and Gweru. In September 1994, the United Parties (UP) attempted to melt together the old UANC with a splinter group from FORUM and some defectors from the collapsing ZUM. UP was Abel Muzorewa’s second attempt to unite the opposition, after a failed merger with ZUM in January 1994.73 However, the party’s popularity was never tested, since it boycotted both the parliamentary elections in 1995 and the presidential election in 1996, and it fizzled away in the late 1990s.
After Margaret Dongo won her court case and the subsequent by-election in Harare South, she created the Movement of Independent Candidates in 1996, with a view toward attracting ZANU-PF dissenters, and she sponsored candidates for the Harare council elections. Because she was a former guerrilla and a founding member of the Zimbabwe National Liberation War Veterans Association (ZNLWVA), the vocal independent MP could lay credible claims on the nationalist legacy. However, she failed to attract a significant following outside her Harare South constituency. Being a gifted grassroots politician, she lacked the sophistication—and the resources—necessary to weave a nationwide network. She hurriedly launched the Zimbabwe Union of Democrats (ZUD) in December 1998, in part to preempt the creation of an opposition party backed by the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions (ZCTU). After a promising beginning, ZUD was riddled by factionalism and was soon supplanted by a fast-expanding MDC. In 2000 Dongo responded to MDC overtures with unrealistic demands—17 constituencies reserved for her party—and she lost her parliamentary seat in the process. By then, most ZUD members had joined the newly formed MDC.
A combination of factors explain these successive failures: lack of funding;74 poor organization, especially the absence of permanent party structures at a grassroots level (Dongo confessed in interview how difficult it was to set up local cells and branches); inability to penetrate the rural areas where the ruling party patronage structures were paramount; sometimes the low political caliber of their candidates; and finally repeated leadership squabbles—though not more than within ZANU-PF—that damaged their reputation in the electorate. Many opposition party leaders lacked credibility, either because they were aging politicians or because they were perceived as opportunists settling scores with Mugabe. For example, Patrick Kombayi, who successively defected from ZANU-PF and ZUM, was an embarrassing and unreliable recruit for the FORUM: at one time he would stand in a ZANU-PF primary election for Gweru’s executive mayor, and at another he would castigate Mugabe’s regime and call for