Rural Zimbabweans: Are They The Silent Majority?

Zimbabwe’s election is in limbo following the court filing by Nelson Chamisa leader of the MDC Alliance challenging the results of the 2018 elections. The Zimbabwe electoral commission declared Emmerson Mnangagwa of ZANU-PF the country’s President. Chamisa is hugely popular in the urban areas but there are two groups that he has never been able to capture. Pundits and NGOs and intellectuals do not like to hear this but if the MDC is to win they have to learn how to get these groups on their side.

Organizations like Afrobarometer claim that their polls were able to predict the election results. However, 67% of Zimbabweans live in rural areas and were obviously not polled because the pollsters are totally disconnected to the rural Zimbabwean voters and what they could possibly want. What many non-African minded people fail to understand is that the rural voter is not as uneducated or endlessly manipulated as they think.

Thousands of people attended MDC rallies however, many people in Zimbabwe are unwilling to admit publicly that they support ZANU-PF. These are the thousands that went into the voter’s booth and put an X on Mnangagwa.

Economics teaches us that people respond to incentives and the answer to the question what motivates a rural voter is what everyone who is interested in Zimbabwean politics needs to know. Most rural voters are farmers by trade so the most important commodity is land. ZANU-PF is the party that gave rural Zimbabweans arable farming land. In 1930, the colonial government instituted a law known as the Land Apportionment Act which forbade Africans from owning land. In 2000, Mugabe gave Africans their land back.

• In 1980, foreign whites owned 95% of the land.
• In 2000, when land reform started; foreigners still owned more than 70% of the arable farmland and this was 20 years after independence.
• It is estimated that black Zimbabweans now own 96% of the agricultural land. This excludes company, church and corporate estates (2,041 million hectares) and transitional/unallocated land (2,684 million hectares) (Zimfact.org)
• In 2000, 4,000 white farmers produced 85% of the tobacco. In 2017, 81,000 African farmers grew tobacco and in 2018, a whopping 110,000 farmer’s bumper harvest created the second largest export for Zimbabwe.

Robert Mugabe famously declared that ZANU-PF is bigger than government.  After all this is the party that gave them land that gives them farming implements and cash when needed? Rural voters are not convinced that giving up their land is worth freedom of speech. It was after all as Mugabe always reminded Zimbabweans that ZANU-PF brought democracy and freedom to Zimbabwe. ZANU-PF has always been able to convince rural voters that they are better today than they were 5 years ago and much better than they were in 1979.