Johannesburg - Emerson Mnangagwa was re-elected president of Zimbabwe this week. It didn’t surprise anyone. The result was proof, if ever any more was needed, of the old cynical adage of democracy in action in Africa. The rallying cry of the 1960s: “One Man, One Vote” (with all the attendant sexism), truly has become One Man, One Vote, Once, as sham elections rubber stamp the incumbents.
The only surprise perhaps was that the international electoral observers didn’t stay until the end to rubber stamp the result but got the flock out of Dodge, having seen enough before the results were tallied to denounce it for the sham it was.
In Zimbabwe, the government lies with a straight face, aided and abetted by the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission; late delivery of ballots to opposition strongholds headline a host of frustrations and infractions that may include ballot box stuffing and the gerrymandering of the voters roll.
It was so blatant and so crass that one wag posted a meme of the Springboks historic win last Friday against the All Blacks as 7-35, but then added a four before the seven to make it 47-35 and captioned it as being supplied by the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission.
The Sentient Naartjie, Donald Trump, must be looking at this s***hole, as he notoriously described Africa, with unabashed envy. He’s facing indictment after indictment – not just for his personal conduct, from sexual predation to reckless trading and fraud – but also for trying to steal the US presidential elections in 2021. He has racked up federal and state indictments and the ringleaders of his unofficial militia, the Proud Boys, are starting to get sent down for 15 years and more apiece.
Trump hasn’t ignored South Africa though, his legal playbook owes much to the Nkandla Crooner’s Stalingrad defence; litigating on any point till you find a court that agrees with you. But then again, both his broader family and President Joe Biden’s first son also appear to have borrowed our political elite’s tenderpreneurial tendencies, if media reports are anything to go by.
When you think about it from this angle, as the US State Department ponders how to respond to the next Mnangagwa administration, perhaps the election observers from the EU and the AU should start applying for their visas to monitor next year’s race for the White House.
But the biggest lesson, as always, is for South Africans. We have our own general elections scheduled for next year and it isn’t going to be pretty. The ANC is proof, biblical and political, that a house divided against itself cannot stand. There are charlatans and rogues aplenty watching the Crocodile to the north’s playbook – and seeing how the world is impotently letting him get away with it. And they’ll use any tactic including doubling down on xenophobia, as we saw government ministers shamefully doing so yesterday at the scene of one of Johannesburg’s worst tragedies to play to the gallery.
We’ll need our fair share of election monitors too.