ZANU-PF: A fading revolutionary party

But since that election re-run roundly condemned as a shame after the opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai, who had won the first round of the poll on March 29, pulled out in protest over violence against his supporters, ZANU-PF’s stranglehold on the country has been loosening as the country’s troubled economy plays havoc on the electorate.

It could be best described as “the way the cookie crumbles”. “If an election is called again today, ZANU-PF has no ghost of a chance of winning,” said one Harare resident, suddenly breaking the eerie silence gripping a long and winding cash withdrawal queue at a Harare bank.
His comments generated enthusiastic debate.

“You are right, but only if the elections are internationally supervised for them to be free and fair,” responded one of the several people who had joined in the idle talk that soon assuaged the pain of standing in the slow-moving queue.
Another man in the same queue differed: “The result will be the same as the June 27 because people have not yet forgotten the violent campaign. It is too early for most to get over the trauma of that period. All it needs is a few soldiers prowling an area and that does the trick,” he said amid howls of disapproval.
Unrelenting cash queues, crippling basic commodity shortages, erratic water and power supplies, and a host of other socio-economic problems have been fast whittling down ZANU-PF’s support base with its promises of turning around the situation bearing no fruit for the ordinary person on the street to regain confidence in the party.
And as ZANU-PF heads for its annual people’s conference mid next month in Bindura analysts say the party is now a pale shadow of its former self with a chronology of failed attempts to re-assert authority and the widening internal fissures continuously haunting it.
In a telephone interview with The Financial Gazette, the dean of the faculty of Political Science at the University of Zimbabwe, Eldred Masungu-ngure, said the violent June election campaign effectively drove a wedge between ZANU-PF and its support base.
“After the March 29 elections ZANU-PF essentially gave up the political side of campaigning and invested in the military side. It was no longer ZANU-PF in control but the military. ZANU-PF was an observer after it surrendered politics to the military elements. With the militarisation and depoliticisation, it alienated itself from its social base,” Masunungure said.
“The epicentre of those campaigns was the very base of ZANU-PF… the very places it enjoyed unrivaled political support and those campaigns were a form of retribution against its own flock. But this was counter productive. Coercion is not durable and it is unsustainable. ZANU-PF now has to go back to the basics and rebuild its base through persuasion.”
However, since the early 1990s ZANU-PF has ignored genuine concern by its own stalwarts that the party was slowly gliding off course and risked losing the bulwark of its support.
Many frustrated, outspoken members of the party notably the former ZANU-PF secretary general, Edgar Tekere, and Margaret Dongo, a veteran of the military wing, the Zimbabwe National Libera-tion Army, have jumped ship over the years when the party failed to seriously address concerns they raised.
And most recently, Simba Makoni, President Mugabe’s former finance minister and Dumiso Dabengwa, a former ZANU-PF politburo member, have left the party.
Perhaps Tekere probably summed up everything when he broke ranks with ZANU-PF in 1990 to form the Zimbabwe Unity Movement.
He said: “This ZANU-PF has a tremendous capacity for self-destruction. Wait for the day when they get at each other’s throat.”
Dongo also formed her Zimbabwe Democratic Union, which won a seat in Parliament after a bitter court wrangle over vote rigging in favour of her rival candidate, Vivian Mwashita.
Since then, ZANU-PF has been mired in damaging in-fighting, which has punctured fatal wounds into its fabric.
The biggest of the in-fights has been over who will take over after the 84-year old party leader, leaves or retires.
The pinnacle of the internal power struggles was the 2004 Tsholotsho de-bacle when six ZANU-PF provincial chairmen were suspended after being fingered for trying to influence the make-up of the Presi-dium.
The wrangle took five years to be dismissed as nothing but one big farce by the fifth-ranked man in the party, Didymus Mutasa.
The problems in the party have tended to spill over into the government do-main, seriously affecting the proper functioning of the country’s economy.
Even the late Levy Mwanawasa, the former Zambian president, saw the logjam faced by the once prosperous nation and likened Zimbabwe to a “sinking Titanic”.
The March 29 election loss to the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) was a serious wake up call. ZANU-PF’s reaction to the loss did not help matters.
Against all logic, the party sealed off rural areas to stop the MDC from infiltrating its former strongholds. The opposition simply pulled out of the race and the election turned into one big farce.
President Mugabe romped to a resounding victory in the one-man race but his pyrrhic victory appeared to worsen the country’s dire economic situation, forcing his party to enter into negotiations with the opposition for the country’s survival.
And ever since the talks started in earnest in July the sporadic internal fissures, which the party has been battling to plug over the years have stuck out like a sore thumb.
President Mugabe has twice threatened to form a government without the opposition but his attempts have hit a brick wall, further pointing to the fact that his party no longer holds sway on the country.
Already in untenable circumstances due to the targeted sanctions, the frightening prospects of more robust sanctions have forced the party and its leader to accept their predicament and stick it out on the negotiating table.
A Herald sharp critic of the opposition, Nathaniel Man-heru, recently highlighted the loss of steam in ZANU-PF, when he wrote: “You meet some politician from the ruling party and the question you can expect is: ‘So what’s happening?’ or its variant: ‘So where are we?’”
The weekend splintering of some of the Zimbabwe National Liberation War Veterans Association (ZNLWVA) members belonging to the former Zimbabwe Peoples’ Revolutionary Army (ZIPRA) in Bulawayo, is one of the latest evidence of a party in deep trouble.
The ZNLWVA has been one of the key linchpins that have propped up ZANU-PF as propagators of the party’s policies.
Among the reasons for the breakaway is that ZANU-PF has tended to favour ZIPRA’s former comrades in arms from ZANLA. The former ZIPRA cadres are also protesting over why, 20 years after the unity accord between ZANU-PF and PF-ZAPU, the later has not been given back some 20 farms and 28 businesses, part of property seized from them during the early 1980s political disturbances in Matabeleland.
A disgruntled member of the breakaway movement, Ray Ncube was quoted as having said: “The main reason why we have broken away from ZNLWVA is that our membership of that organisation has not helped. If you want to see a poor veteran, just look around for a former ZIPRA soldier.
“He has no land, no formal job, and no money to fend for their families. To see a former battalion commander, who sacrificed his life to liberate his country, sustained lifetime injuries during that war, living in abject poverty is painful. You ask yourself why we went to war in the first place.”
But ZANU-PF, as usual, has dismissed the breakaway faction as no threat to the party although the small chips falling from the behemoth over the years are beginning to weaken the party.