“The Donald’s” claim that the American elections are rigged in his opponent’s favour (while it appears that in fact his supporters are doing as much as they can to jimmy the great contest) is reminiscent of many African opposition leaders’ claims.
They, however, are usually proffered after the elections’ results displease them.
Some of these unhappy losers’ claims are as wild as Trump’s – whose fantasies are relatively common in a long history of his country’s paranoid political style. But an unsavoury proportion are close to the bone.
Liberal democrats the world over have been disappointed with the results of the nearly three post-Cold War decades of democracy promotion in Africa. Then, given the fall of the Berlin Wall, they thought the continent’s benighted souls could no longer fall prey to the promises of Soviet versions of communism.
This disenchantment is not due to African democracy producing a feared wave of fiscally irresponsible populism, but because it hasn’t prevented a re-ignited wave of authoritarianism.
Those who have called “foul” to the winners of Zimbabwe’s nine national elections since Robert Mugabe and his Zimbabwe National African Union–Patriotic Front replaced Ian Smith’s minority regime in 1980 have more cause than most to complain.
Mugabe and ZANU-PF are masters of an arsenal of coercion and chicanery – and a modicum of well-manipulated consent – that is well-honed to take to the trenches come election time.
ZANU-PF’s electoral armoury, combined with the opposition’s own goals, has produced a complex and contradictory accumulation of wealth, power, and paranoia.
This will be hard to crack in the tenth Zimbabwean election, due in 2018. That one may not be as easy to take as those in the past, given the ruling party’s fracturing as its ever-older leader’s powers wane.
But the much splintered parties trying to take advantage of ZANU-PF’s cracks will have to get their unity act together quickly. They had also better examine ZANU-PF’s history of guaranteeing that its power doesn’t get diminished by a mere election or two conducted free of rigging by any means possible.
Furthermore, much of what has traditionally been conceived as “southern” political and ideological discourses are now overlapping with what used to be called the “north” (or the “centre” of global capitalism) as it becomes riven with inequality and the world’s marginalised enter its former centre.
Thus Trump-style demagogues take on the practices of dictators everywhere, moulding the languages of disenfranchisement and resentment into authoritarian populism. Mugabe-politics are becoming a global phenomenon. Their electoral tactics will follow.
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