I have been following the debates on the President Emmerson Mnangagwa’s term extension (because that is what it is really) with keen interest and a sense of déjà vu.
It was inevitable that we would end up here. Our fascination with China and Rwanda, who abolished term limits recently, sort of signposted that.
My interest really has been drawn to the disingenuous argument proffered by Zanu PF that extending the president’s tenure to seven years will deal with electoral toxicity.
In addition, the party also argues that by having parliament elect the president, instead of the citizen, this will also end electoral toxicity.
These are blatant lies that totally ignore our country’s very short history.
Let’s start with the two elections of 1980 and 1985, where we did not elect the head of state directly and this was done through parliament.
The 1980 elections rank among the worst in the history of this country. The elections were so bad that Joshua Nkomo, the leader of PF (Zapu) approached Lord Soames, the governor to complain about the overt violence in some parts of the country that made it impossible to hold elections.
Lord Soames agreed with Nkomo and sought a postponement in some parts of the country. But the British were super eager to get out of Zimbabwe and turned a deaf ear to Nkomo’s request. The elections went ahead, Nkomo still complained, but in post-colonial euphoria, he was seen as a sore loser.
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Within two years, a pogrom was unleashed to get rid of Nkomo and his supporters.
The 1985 elections were probably the bloodiest this country has ever seen. There was a state of emergency in parts of the country, which led to a news blackout. To this day, the extent of the violence has never been recorded fully.
Candidates were killed in broad daylight. Opposition supporters were jailed and tortured for no reason at all. People were driven out of their rural homes and into exile.
The leader of the party had at some point sought exile in the United Kingdom, ironically, the country that had colonised Zimbabwe.
Now, remind me on what basis do we think that having parliament elect the president will end toxicity.
I know some of us tend to look back at the 1980s and think this was some golden period. This is known as the rosy retrospection, a cognitive bias where people recall the past as being significantly more positive, pleasurable, or better than it actually was, often ignoring, minimising, or forgetting negative details.
The 1980 elections were terrible, the 1985 were the worst, let’s stop thinking that they were any good and trying to revert to those days.
Toxicity is a byproduct of our failure as a country to have strong independent institutions. If we respected the constitution and the rule of law, then how we elect our president would not be an issue.
The toxicity in the period between 1980 to this day is driven by the fact that regardless of us having a constitution that supports multiparty democracy, Zanu PF is hell bent on having a one party state. It will seek to achieve this by any means necessary.
Amending the constitution, as we seek to do now, only weakens our democratic institutions. Ultimately, we will yield more toxicity.
Arguing that having parliament elect the president, rather than a direct election, is a self-serving ahistorical falsehood.
Secondly, supporters of the constitutional amendment argue that extending the president and parliament’s terms to seven years would reduce electoral toxicity.
Oh dear! We have experimented with this before. In the 1990s, we extended the president’s term to six years.
From a five year cycle, we moved the presidential elections to 1996, 2002 and 2008.
Unless, as a country, we have the memory of a goldfish, we all remember the violence, the toxicity, the displacements and the disappearances of opposition supporters in 2002 and 2008.
Surely, they can come up with better arguments for a term extension than this – or can they really?
As I said earlier, our problem is not how the president is elected or even how long the term of office is. Our real problem is failing to stick to what we agreed to, failing to adhere to constitutional tenets, failing even on predictability on when we would have elections.
This amendment that is being proposed by Zanu PF will only fuel toxicity, not just electoral toxicity, but also societal toxicity.
Zanu PF has tried it before. In 2006, the party agreed to extend the president’s term limit by two years, so it could end in 2010.
Ultimately, they decided to cut parliament’s term by two years rather than extend the president’s term.
This is because they realised the dangers of their plans and how this could only serve to fracture Zimbabwe even further.
I am not confident the current crop will reverse their plans, they seem determined to forge ahead with their plans, as we have already seen with the Private Voluntary Organisations Act.
The so-called “first republic” was led by the dastardly Robert Mugabe, who brought destruction and poverty to this country, but sometimes knew when to bring the country back from the brink.
He resisted signing an NGO law that would have cemented Zimbabwe as a pariah state and also resisted amending the constitution to add two more years to his term.
