ZANU-PF Party Research Articles

Briefing: Zimbabwe's 2002 Presidential Election

THE RECENTLY CONCLUDED PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION in Zimbabwe, from 9 to 11 March 2002, was arguably the most significant election in Zimbabwe's 22-year post-independence history. Moreover, it was an event that attracted widespread international political attention and media coverage. At the centre of this attention was Robert Mugabe, one of the central figures of Zimbabwe's liberation struggle, whose politics and rhetoric since the late 1990s had taken on an increasingly vehement nationalist and anti-imperialist cast around the long-standing demand for land redistribution in the country. The strongly anti-Western tone of his political message, the anti-neo-liberal policy interventions of the beleaguered Zimbabwean government, and the state-sponsored violence through which such policies were being pursued, pushed Mugabe into the forefront of African and international politics. Mugabe and his ruling ZANU-PF party articulated their politics as a return to the unfinished land agenda of the liberation struggle. Their central targets in this onslaught were the small white community, still dominant on the land and in much of the industrial sector, and, behind them, British, European and American foreign interests. Mugabe's core election message was thus expressed in a combination of the central legitimacy of the liberation struggle, a call for pan-Africanist unity around the fight for economic independence, and a denunciation of Western encroachment on African sovereignty, against what were considered Western notions of human and civic rights. As Zimbabwe's Minister of Information, Professor Jonathan Moyo, put it, Zimbabweans 'do not believe in moving from independence and sovereignty to new colonialism, they do not believe in the discourse of human rights to deepen inequality'.1 In this political configuration African identity and solidarity were constructed in essentialist terms, and the political and civic opposition identified as the enemies of 'Africanness' and 'the nation'.