
Zimbabwe

Zimbabwe is an authoritarian regime. It is a lower-middle income country with an economy that is ranked 118th in the world. Since the late 1990s, Zimbabwe has experienced a protracted period of economic and political crisis, during which the country’s democracy has remained weak. Low points in this crisis include historic hyperinflation of 89.7 sextillion percent, punitive slum clearances, the violent seizure of white-owned farms and the eviction of hundreds of thousands of farmworkers. The fragility of Zimbabwe’s democracy was laid bare when in November 2017, it’s long-serving independence leader President Robert Mugabe was deposed in a military coup that installed as his successor Emmerson Mnangagwa, Mugabe’s estranged former-vice president. Despite some positive early developments, Mnangagwa has failed to deliver on his promise of a new ‘open democracy,’ with the post-coup landscape marked by a deepening securitisation of politics, state capture and the violent suppression of dissenting voices. These developments are reflected in the GSoDI data, which show that Zimbabwe has registered low performance in three out of five of the indices’ attributes since 2018: impartial administration, participatory engagement and representative government.
Zimbabwe’s history of racial and ethnic discrimination means that these identities have an important political salience. The prominence of nativist politics in Zimbabwe since the 1990s, for example, owes much to the British colonial legacy of entrenched white privilege and to the sluggishness with which it was addressed after independence in 1980. The politics of race have been particularly visible in relation to land ownership. Also of political significance is the ethnic-regionalism present in the western provinces of Matabeleland, a phenomenon that has antecedents in the unaddressed scars of the Gukurahundi – an episode of extreme political-ethnic violence perpetrated principally against the Ndebele people in the 1980s by the Zimbabwean African National Union- Patriotic Front (Zanu-PF) government of the time. The importance of racial and ethnic identities, however, should not be overstated. The principal cleavage among Zimbabweans is political partisanship, and it is to this end that politicians have invoked these identities, often making them difficult to disentangle. The cleavage divides the supporters of the ruling Zanu-PF from a handful of opposition parties, the most prominent of which is the Citizens Coalition for Change. Polarization across this divide is higher than any other country surveyed by the Afrobarometer and is fuelled by the distinct demographic groups from which supporters are drawn (Zanu-PF supporters are overwhelmingly rural dwellers, less educated, older and female, with the pattern reversed for opposition supporters) and by their divergent news consumption, with partisans favouring separate news outlets.
In line with the GSoDI’s recent performance findings, the Global Monitor has identified two developments that are likely to affect the durability of Zimbabwe’s democracy and should be watched in the coming years. The first of these is the deepening securitization of the state and politics since the 2017 coup. This has occurred through the embedding of military personnel within Zanu-PF’s party structures and within strategically important Zimbabwean state institutions, including the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission and the judiciary. This is likely to undermine trust in the integrity of the country’s electoral processes, enlarge the military’s stake in continued Zanu-PF rule and increase the prospect of a military intervention in the event of an opposition electoral victory. Concerning too, is the government’s dismantling of the newly minted constitutional constraints on presidential powers. Recent amendments have increased the president’s ability to determine the composition of the judiciary and experts predict that further constitutional amendments centralising the executive’s power can be expected.
Monthly Updates
October 2022
Zimbabwean security agencies’ assault, detention and obstruction of five journalists in less than a week, marked an escalation in the harassment of journalists by state authorities as the country prepares for elections in 2023. The Media Institute of Southern Africa (MISA), an advocacy group, says that approximately 30 journalists have been subject to such treatment in 2022. In all five incidents, the journalists were trying to cover public interest events. While an escalation in journalist harassment in the build up to elections is common in Zimbabwe, the director of MISA Zimbabwe has said that this election season is promising to be worse than usual for the media. The Committee to Protect Journalists, an NGO, described the increased violence against journalists in the country as “a serious source of concern.” In 2022, Zimbabwe fell 7 places to 37th in the Press Freedom Index, which is published annually by the NGO Reporters without Borders.
August 2022
Two journalists became the first to be charged under one of the controversial cybersecurity provisions of Zimbabwe’s Data Protection Act, eight months after its enactment in December 2021. The provision amends the country’s criminal law, so as to make it illegal to transmit what it vaguely terms “false data messages intending to cause harm” and imposes heavy penalties on offenders (a prison sentence of up to five years and/or a fine of up to USD194). The prosecution of the journalists is reported to relate to their investigation of the business activities of politically connected individuals and, according to civil society, confirms their early concerns that the legislation would be used to infringe freedom of expression and the media. The development takes place against a backdrop of escalating government harassment of the media and in 2022, Zimbabwe fell seven places to 137th in the Press Freedom Index, which is published annually by the non-governmental organization Reporters Without Borders.