Election weary already
A colleague of mine was talking about how so many seem to be election weary already when the date has only just been announced. He gave the example of a young man that he gave a lift to the other day.
The hitchhiker was a student at NUST, and he wasn’t aware that the election date (29th March) had been set. On hearing the news, the student became tired and defeated. He told my colleague that he had been hoping and praying that the elections would be much later in the year. Instead, he said he now had face the likelihood that his final exams, due for May this year, would be in jeopardy because of the furore that always surrounds elections.
He worked as cross-border trader to supplement his income and he struggled to pay the fees to cover his exams. And because he worked as a trader, he struggled to keep up with his course work. He was longing for his exams, so they’d be over and he could move onto the next phase of his life.
My colleague was telling me the story because he had apparently quipped back, at that point, “And what is the next phase? Unemployment?”
His young hitchhiker became even more despondent and my colleague badly regretted his unfunny joke.
But why, he asked, if elections are in March does that affect you in May?
The student replied that elections brought massive unrest to the universities. The police became hyper-sensitive to student activities and unfair crackdowns often ensued, proving anger and a state of tension at the universities. He said that previous elections, even when Mugabe ‘wins’, were usually followed by reprisals against those who dared to disobey the regime in the lead-up to the elections. But Mugabe’s men didn’t discriminate and they extended the reprisals to absolutely everyone. He also said that staff, sturggling to earn a living often used election time as a chance to strike for more money.
What struck me about this story was how both my colleague and the young man sharing the short journey into town didn’t spend one single moment discussing whether or not the outcome of the elections would be positive and bring about change and a brighter future. I pointed this out to my colleague and he laughed at me:
“Don’t be stupid, we all know the score! They’ll be stolen the way they always have been; we just need to find a way to get through them so we can continue figuring out how to survive the next day”.
And with that he left my office, and this time it was me struggling with a sense of deflation!
February 4th, 2008 03:34
Thanks for this enlightening take on the coming elections. It’s very interesting to hear first person accounts from inside Zimbabwe, rather than the dry reports we’ve been getting here in the US. I’ll look forward to more coverage from you.