Zimbabwe

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.