Reform in Zimbabwe: More than billboards

In the movie Our Brand is Crisis, the political consultant, Jane, played by Sandra Bullock was asked if she would work for a candidate she did not believe in.

“I could convince myself of anything if the price was right,” she replied. After all, she mused, “Truth is relative in politics.”

A fictionalised account of the role of the campaign strategists Greenberg Carville Shrum in the 2002 Bolivian election, a country described as having an “economy in real trouble” with a “fragile democracy”, the movie could have been an African election setting. Jane takes a candidate, Pedro Castillo (based on the real life Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada) lagging hopelessly in the polls and propels him into State House. The consultants are portrayed as “the syringe that injects the people’s voice” into the campaign, using every trick, fair and foul, to do so, reinventing Castillo as the only man to solve the country’s crisis.

There are plenty of such syringes around Africa, with their focus groups, polling, media advice and content, and strategy sessions. And there is a whole new digital industry around communications security, targeting, messaging and, if the rumours are to be believed, rigging.

ED’s rise via the military takeover in November 2017 is portrayed as heralding a new dawn.

Everywhere in Harare are giant billboards proclaiming what Mnangagwa, who has been in government for the last 38 years of Zanu rule since independence from Britain, will do for Zimbabwe as President.

Yet some things have certainly changed since Mnangagwa took over. For one, the threat of violence and state intimidation has been lifted, the election so far being held in remarkably good spirits. Ask any Zimbabwean who they think will win, and the answer comes back clear as to whom they will vote for. Regalia is openly flaunted, and not just Zanu’s yellow and green, but also the red of the opposition MDC Alliance.

Opinion polls have the election too close to call. But what is clear is that whoever takes over faces massive challenges.

Some donors, led by an enthusiastic post-Brexit Britain, are said to be queuing up to spend their taxpayer’s money.

Yet resources have never been the underlying problem in Zimbabwe.

Rather the difficulties are much more about software than hardware. Short-term recovery will depend on the extent of the traditional mismatch between donor ideas and the intent of government. In the longer-term it will be down to local ownership and implementation of a development plan to attract permanent capital.

But such stats don’t, as ever, tell the full story.

The clash thus between Zanu and the MDC is one between old and new, between rural and urban based communities, and between the older and younger generations of Zimbabweans.

The legitimacy of an election victory can help to facilitate reforms, providing the poll is seen as free and fair.

But the election is not an end in itself.

Some of the government’s 350,000 employees who guzzle most of the tax revenue, and the hundred state owned companies, will have to be shed to bring government spending under control. Or that if you sort out the foreign exchange situation by re-engineering the system of multiple exchange rates, the currency will become more competitive. It won’t. This will have to be the result of a much tougher and long-term process of policy reform and investment in productive assets to create the jobs the population craves.

Dr Mills heads the Brenthurst Foundation.