March 25, 2008 Desperate Zimbabweans
Clutching
at Straws of Change By Clare
Byrne
Harare
Four days before millions of Zimbabweans go to the polls to select a
new president, House of Assembly, senate and councilors, the country
is convulsed by talk of change.
A group of around 25 people sit in a semi-circle on the veranda of
Mary Ndlovu's home in Bulawayo listening to David Coltart tell them
why they should vote strategically March 29 if they want to end the
repressive rule of President Robert Mugabe.
Mary is the widow of Edward Ndlovu, a liberation war hero, who was
imprisoned and charged with treason during a brutal state crackdown
on the opposition in the 1980s known as Gukurahundi.
Coltart, a tall, reed-thin lawyer, who has served seven years as an
MP with the MDC is now aiming for a senate seat.
But the breakaway faction of the MDC to which he belongs is
supporting ex-finance minister and former Zanu-PF politburo member
Simba Makoni over MDC founder Morgan Tsvangirai for president. It's
a decision that requires some explaining.
"If you've had the same coach since 1980, and the team has dropped
back to fourth division and you have no goalposts and the grass is
that high," he says, measuring a meter off the ground with his hand,
"you'd fire your coach".
Laughter breaks out among the racially mixed group of mostly
professionals.
"It simply is time to change the coach," he says of Mugabe, who is
seeking to extend his rule by five years despite presiding over an
economic nosedive on a scale unseen in a country not at war.
Coltart believes Makoni, as a former Zanu-PF insider, is best placed
to topple the 84-year-old leader and halt inflation of over 100,000
percent and widespread food and fuel shortages.
The sense of a tipping point being reached in beleaguered Zimbabwe
is palpable.
"If things don't go well for us in this election we will die! We are
hoping for change," a 41-year-old man says, surveying a dozen or so
stalks of unripend maize in the yard of his tiny tenement house in
Bulawayo's poor Makokoba suburb.
"There are days when I think, 'What am I doing here?'" says a former
white farmer in Harare, whose lands were expropriated in 2002 and
now relies on black-market foreign exchange deals for a living. "But
now, there's this buzz."
The excitement is caused partly by the relaxation of repressive
security and election laws agreed to by Zanu-PF at talks with the
opposition in South Africa last year.
In Harare, youths in white MDC T-shirts saunter down the road in
Highfields township, past riot police heading for the stadium to
guard a football match.
Eddie, a taxi driver, blows his horn at the group and gives them the
raised-hand party salute.
"Three years ago (during the last parliamentary elections) they (the
police) would have smashed your car for that," he says. "It's much
better this time."
Both Tsvangirai and Makoni have been allowed to campaign in the
ruling party's rural strongholds and afforded a little space in
state-controlled media in what some fear is the "the calm before the
storm".
Threats by Zimbabwe's police chief that he will not allow a 'puppet'
regime (Mugabe refers to both Tsvangirai and Makoni as puppets of
the West) to take power and the government's threat to exclude
Western journalists are seen as further indicators that Mugabe will
not relinquish power without a fight.
Few Zimbabweans appear to have the appetite for violence if the
election result is manipulated. "There will be no Kenya here,"
Coltart says curtly, when asked.
But warns the owner of a guesthouse in the tourist resort of
Victoria Falls darkly, "It's like a vicious dog standing between you
and a plate of steaming food. If you get hungry enough, eventually
you'll lose your fear of that dog. We're at that point now in
Zimbabwe".
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