People in Zimbabwe live in hope. They give their children names like Learnmore and Lovemore (or, if they’ve had enough offspring, Nomore). Recently, I met a young man called Vision. Dressed in jeans and a grubby yellow jacket, he wandered up to me in the village of Nharira as I was waiting for two European Union election observers to finish interviewing a local human rights monitor. Nharira, just next door to the birthplace of President Mugabe’s wife Grace, is in the heart of rural Zimbabwe. Mugabe’s Zanu-PF has ruled there unopposed for 20 years, and is fielding as its parliamentary candidate one of the most powerful and feared men in the country, “Hitler” Hunzvi.
Vision said: “We cannot speak out loud, but we know in our hearts what we will do in secret on Saturday. We will vote for change.” Vision passed his O-levels, but his family was too poor to keep him in school. He, like 50 per cent of working-age Zimbabweans, is unemployed. When he listens to Morgan Tsvangirai, the leader of Zimbabwe’s new opposition, the Movement for Democratic Change, he is mesmerised by the word chinja – “change”. For the first time in his life, he feels things could be different. In other words, he has been given a new vision.
A couple of hours later, Dr Hunzvi rolled into Nharira in his silver-grey Mercedes-Benz. His foot soldiers in the election campaign, mainly middle-aged men, gathered near the village shopping centre at the foot of a kopje, one of the giant, natural piles of smooth rocks that rise from the bush all over Zimbabwe.
As leader of the War Veterans’ Association, which has spearheaded the invasions of white-owned commercial farms, Hunzvi has gained a reputation for violence. He has been charged with defrauding his own association and convicted of breaking the law by organising the farm occupations. The newspapers are full of his alleged violence against his former wife, a Polish woman he met in Warsaw when he was studying medicine there in the 1970s. (He may lead the war vets, but he never carried a gun himself. He may rail against white people, but he used to be married to one.) For a visiting journalist he has a well-rehearsed patter: “We are not invading farms, we are liberating our land. This is an ongoing exercise until all Zimbabweans have shared land and we are satisfied.”
Dressed in a baggy black suit with thin white stripes, he appears supremely confident: “I am a very powerful man.”
When his rivals, activists for Morgan Tsvangirai’s opposition, pulled into the village, he laughed. Two dozen of them threw campaign leaflets from the back of a yellow truck, sometimes stopping to dip into a blue plastic bucket of paste and stick MDC posters on available tree-trunks and gateposts. “They are like a helicopter, just flying through,” said Hunzvi, as his men lit small fires to burn the leaflets the MDC had scattered around the sandy street which runs through Nharira.
Such has been the intimidation of MDC supporters in this area that they frequently move at night so people wake at dawn to find MDC posters on the shop walls and leaflets flapping in the wind. Hunzvi, unsurprisingly, denies that his supporters have beaten up teachers and others who support the MDC. His explanation for his rivals’ decision to campaign under cover of darkness reveals the polarisation of Zimbabwe’s election politics. “The one who moves in the night is a devil. The one who moves in the light is an angel,” he said.
The opposition is equally emphatic. A headline in the Daily News, a newspaper that supports the MDC, read: “The election battle is between good and evil.” Hunzvi snapped back: “They are reactionaries. They are being used by external forces and they only want to change the black government to a white government.”
Amid the violence – about 30 killed and some 6,000 forced to flee their homes – what chance is there for a free and fair election? The American International Republican Institute has now withdrawn its observers, following the government’s refusal to accredit non-governmental organisations. “Of the 90 elections IRI has observed in 40 countries since 1984, Zimbabwe’s is the worst we have ever seen . . . the process is so flawed it cannot adequately reflect the will of the people,” it said, citing “violence against the opposition, voter intimidation, voter registration problems, changing lines and electoral authority and denial of observer accreditation”. Nonetheless, says the opposition, a boycott is impossible because people are so keen to vote.
At a beer hall a few miles from Nharira, two slightly drunk young men came up to talk. They were “civil servants”, they said, sent from Harare for two weeks to observe what was going on. When pressed, they refused to say more, implying – maybe self-importantly – that they were from the feared Central Intelligence Organisation, blamed by the opposition for stirring up violence and spying on MDC supporters. Made bold by beer, they confided that all was not as it might seem. Their job was to “observe”, but they did not tell headquarters the conversations they overheard in the bars and on the street, because this would not please their bosses. Support for Zanu-PF was waning, they said, even here in Hitler Hunzvi’s stronghold. Actually, they were secret opposition supporters themselves.
So if Zimbabwe does vote for change, will Mugabe pay any heed? “The MDC will never rule this country. Never! Never!” he cries at rallies. It is as if he cannot contemplate the possibility of losing power, or even of compromise. He talks of the struggle for liberation, the crimes of colonialism, his years in detention under the British, his fight against his old enemy, Ian Smith. Tsvangirai talks of the future, the need to revamp the economy, to pull troops out of the futile war in the Democratic Republic of Congo. But his main message is contained in one word: “Chinja“.
So what happens next? Even if the MDC wins a majority of the 120 seats in parliament, President Mugabe is under no constitutional obligation to bring the MDC into government. It would merely be the official opposition. If the MDC were to win two-thirds of the seats, it could change the constitution and theoretically bring President Mugabe down before his term expires in 2002. Faced with that prospect, Morgan Tsvangirai looks anxious. His party has existed for less than a year, and many of his candidates have no experience of politics, let alone of government.
“Chinja” is a fine slogan, but change to what? Zanu-PF is a monolith. Since Zimbabwe gained independence in 1980, and Robert Mugabe was voted into office, the lines between party, state, parliament and government have been deliberately blurred. The MDC may have the support of white farmers, the mainstay of the economy, but it has little understanding of the apparatus of power, the network of party patronage that extends from the president’s office down to the middle-aged men in leather jackets waiting for Hunzvi at the foot of the kopje in Nharira. The MDC has the momentum and it may have the popular support, but no one can yet tell whether the party really has the vision.
Lindsey Hilsum is diplomatic correspondent for Channel 4 News
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