The wisdom behind Zimbabwe’s election calm

Voters in the southern African nation have confronted fraud and threats with a quiet confidence in their right to honest self-government.

The Monitor's View

When people in a struggling democracy demand free and fair elections, they sometimes feel the wrath of the ruling regime and its security forces. In Zimbabwe, where past elections saw both intimidation and ballot fraud, many decided to try a different approach during the Aug. 23-24 vote for president and Parliament. They displayed a determined stillness.

“For us this is about our right,” Brighton Goko told the Daily Maverick, a South African newspaper, after casting his ballot at 3 a.m. “If it means us sleeping on the queue to cast our votes and have our voice heard, so be it.”

A first-time voter, Mr. Goko was one of many Zimbabweans who spent long hours outside polling stations – even at night – waiting for ballots to arrive. Their persistence shows what can happen when people calmly refuse to consent to fear, cynicism, and dishonesty. Election officials were forced to allow a second day of voting in 40 opposition strongholds to correct the highly suspicious delays.

It may yet take days for the election results to be known. Early counts show a close race between the main opposition candidate, Nelson Chamisa, and President Emmerson Mnangagwa, whose ZANU-PF party has been in power since the nation’s independence in 1980.

Whatever the outcome, Zimbabwe’s election reflects a maturing in the minds of citizens across Africa to cling to democratic values – even where the mechanics of elections remain vulnerable to manipulation. One key to that growth, particularly among younger generations, is what Iranian dissident Ramin Jahanbegloo has called “the seamless convergence of nonviolence and politics” – a recognition, in other words, that democracy at its root demands peaceful means to build and sustain it.

Electoral shenanigans often reveal the weakness of ruling parties. Since 1998, when an opposition coalition first showed then-President Robert Mugabe to be vulnerable at the polls, ZANU-PF has resorted to underhanded electoral tactics familiar in many African countries: manipulated voter rolls and stuffed ballot boxes, stacked security forces outside polling stations, and arbitrary arrests of civil society election monitors.

Those tricks don’t seem to be working as well these days. Participation in Zimbabwe’s election was robust. An Afrobarometer poll prior to the vote showed that 72% of Zimbabweans felt confident that their vote mattered. One reason for their certainty may be a broader trend in Africa. In the past decade, 25 new presidents have come from opposition parties.

For the first time in history, notes Zachariah Mampilly, an expert in nonviolence at the City University of New York, African youth have reason to trust that democracy is a reliable alternative to violence in bringing change. “Africa’s rebellious young people are better understood as harbingers of the continent’s democratic future,” he wrote in Foreign Affairs in 2021. “Behind the scenes, youth protest movements are laying the groundwork for eventual transitions, prioritizing the long, hard work of building support for democracy.”

The ongoing riddle for many African countries is how to move beyond political parties or individual leaders who perpetuate their rule through undemocratic means. Zimbabweans may have an answer. Patient, calm persistence in the pursuit of honest government can bring peaceful change.