The issue is not merely over support for a particular political party and the possible, or even probably, outcome of an impending election. Neither is it whether or not support for MDC-T is waning and that for Zanu (PF) increasing, and why. The key issue is how to explain why such large numbers of people will not express a preference for one party or another, why this has been the case for nearly a decade, and whether the “fear factor” affects the crucial variable in political party support: does it affect who citizens actually vote for?
The Freedom House report says that support for MDC-T is waning, that fear of political violence is receding, but also that a very large number of citizens (47%) do not support either party. The Afrobarometer report argues that the gap between Zanu (PF) and MDC-T is negligible, but nearly a quarter of those polled would not express a preference for either party.
The Afrobarometer report argues that fear makes people either claim to support Zanu (PF) (when they don’t) or claim to be apolitical (when they aren’t). The Freedom House report claims that fear is waning, and surprisingly that, with this waning, support for MDC-T has declined. There is perhaps a methodological argument to be had between the two reports, but how to understand fear and its effects on politics and the citizenry in Zimbabwe is an even more crucial factor.
When Eldred Masunungure pointed out that Zimbabwean citizens were “risk averse” some years ago, he was not making a simple politico-psychological point, but indicating something fundamental about our politics. He was drawing our attention to the place of coercion in political life, and to the ready use by the state of violence and intimidation as a means of maintaining political power – what he termed “risk taking” as a strategy of governance.
The use of coercive means has been more recently illustrated by Lloyd Sachikonye, shown in his detailed historical analysis of politics over the past four decades. The intimate relationship between politics and violence is embedded in our collective and individual psyche. It is embedded in our ordinary language of political description.
This is a perspective that does not require detailed description of our history: it is common knowledge. The equation, politics=elections + violence, is burned into the understanding of us all, no matter which party one supports. This is clearly demonstrated by the findings of all four rounds of the Afrobarometer surveys. Not only are Zimbabweans the most demanding of all African countries in their desire for independence, believing that elections can deliver this, but we are amongst the most pessimistic that elections will, in reality, deliver democracy or the party of their choice.
It may be that this pessimism cannot be solely attributed to fear. Since almost every aspect of elections held since 2000 is opaque – the number of people in the country eligible to vote, the real number of registered voters, the number of ballot papers actually printed, etc. – we have no idea how to interpret election results, apart from the final results that we are given (and these are scarcely derived from a transparent process). The relationship between fear and votes is not a simple one.
The point is that fear (or its absence) measured by opinion poll does not necessarily translate into votes, as the Afrobarometer report rightly states. Opinions must be triangulated against other factors. One factor is that it is unknown how many people did not vote that could vote, but we can speculate as we have done above. The other factor is the consistent reporting on the extent of political violence and intimidation by a wide number of different sources, and intuitively it can be concluded that this must affect voting.
Post published in: News