Surprise surprise:
President Robert Mugabe’s ruling Zanu-PF party today emerged victorious in the official results of a Zimbabwean parliamentary election criticised by the opposition and western powers as fraudulent.
With 84 of the contested 120 parliamentary seats declared, Zanu-PF took 51. Morgan Tsvangirai’s opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) won 33, according to results on the official counting screen at the Harare election centre.
The ruling party entered the race needing only 46 seats to obtain a simple majority in the 150-seat parliament, where 30 members are Mugabe appointees.
Still, at least this election has given everyone something to grab hold of, and it surely counts for something that Mugabe feels that he needs to fake the result he wants.
It is interesting how much more interest the pro-Iraq-war blogosphere is paying to Zimbabwe now. It is all because of the Iraq election. Until that happened, the pro-Iraq-war blogosphere was understandably pre-occcupied with Iraq, and other misery-spots tended to be neglected. But since the election, the pro-Iraq-war blogosphere is interested in any circumstance which seems in any way to be being influenced by that election. Suddenly, all political badness everywhere is part of the story, provided only that some locals are making democratic noises, demonstrating, etc.
I am not complaining. This just goes to show how right they were when they said, those that did, that the election would make a huge difference. It has.
However, this is interesting. It is a piece by S. J. Masty at the Social Affairs Unit blog, trashing the whole idea of spreading democracy hither and thither, in countries to which it is not suited and who have not evolved it at their own speed and in their own way. Instead of having one relatively staid kleptocracy in permanent charge, says Masty, democracy is liable to replace that one kleptocracy with two or three competing kleptocracies. “Predator democracies”, he calls these unfortunate countries. This is well worth a read, and a think. (Thanks to Patrick Crozier for the link.)
What I think is that Masty may be confusing the messenger (democracy) with the message (lots of people are now rowing about who gets to rule the country). An old fashioned monarchy, by definition, would put an end to the rowing, but can an old-fashioned monarchy survive in a country where so many more people want a slice of the action than in the old days?
UPDATE: This is the kind of thing Masty has in mind.
The villain is not democratic process, but the ancient and widespread belief that government is a vehicle for enriching the non-productive at the expense of the productive. When the state is merely the biggest protection racket around, run by the toughest mob, then the name of the process underlying it is meaningless.
Lee Harris in “Civilization and It’s Enemies” describes the creation of team mentalities which transcend family or tribal allegiences as a significant factor in participatory government. A recent article about events in Central Asia mentioned that most of those nations are ruled by extended families. When a member of a powerful family gets elected, that family immediately begins looting the state for its own enrichment. This is also the pattern in Haiti. In other words, Brian is correct in that democracy only fits over a culture which has at least started to transcend family or tribal allegiences as its social core.
The opposition in Zimbabwe is complaining that the election was unfree and unfair, but it seemed pretty clear from the start that would be the case. So, why did they participate in the election and give legitimacy to this fraud?
Danny – Because boycotting an election is rather like urinating in a black wetsuit. It gives you a nice warm feeling and nobody notices.
Matt,
That’s a, um…colorful metaphor. But I think people would notice if the turnout was extremely low, and Mugabe got one of those Saddamesque 99.5% victories. By making it appear that there was real contention for the government, the opposition gives Mugabe legitimacy he otherwise wouldn’t have had. Maybe I’m being naive. As Brian wrote, the fact that Mugabe felt it necessary to hold this election is a good thing.
Yes danny, you are being naive. Snout counting is just a replacement for shooting or stabbing. The underlying theory is that if the voters were all armed with swords and pikes or muzzle loaders, then the results would be the same as the vote. Remember voting predates the concept of ‘force magnifier’. Back in the days when wars were fought with pointy sticks and bronze swords, the local diety truly was on the side which could bring the most spearcarriers to the battle. Casualties were normally a 1 to 1 ratio, until one side broke and the slaughter began. Everyone understood this, which tended to make them fight as long as they could. The ‘winners’ were too tired for the obligatory rape and pillage due the victor. This more or less made the whole thing pointless.
So some genuis came up with the idea of comparing the numbers of men involved to see who would win, and determining the victor without going thru all the work of a battle. Considering that this left the winners with the energy to enjoy their obligatory rape and pillage, and the losers alive, it was met with approval by both sides. This is why the raped and pillaged didn’t get a chance to vote in early elections. To much chance of them inventing the filibuster and throwing sand in the gears.
Maybe the first real example of a ‘force mulitplier’ was the stirrup. With the stirrup, one man on a horse could defeat many times his number of unmounted men or men without stirrups. Sort of blew the whole one man, one vote thingie right out of the water. So the vote morphed into a vote for mounted men with stirrups and that soon became mounted men with sturrips wearing armor and carrying real long pointy sticks. This giving us the idea of an Arms Race and formalizing the concept of discrimination.
Anyway after a couple of thousand years of progess we have evolved to the point where we have a ……..Mugabe? If that isn’t a good reason to get stinking drunk, nothing is.
But on the upside, nowdays we have JADAM’s, which are even better then stirrups. The solution to the Mugabe problem is just the push of a button away.
Yes danny, you are being naive. Snout counting is just a replacement for shooting or stabbing. The underlying theory is that if the voters were all armed with swords and pikes or muzzle loaders, then the results would be the same as the vote. Remember voting predates the concept of ‘force magnifier’. Back in the days when wars were fought with pointy sticks and bronze swords, the local diety truly was on the side which could bring the most spearcarriers to the battle. Casualties were normally a 1 to 1 ratio, until one side broke and the slaughter began. Everyone understood this, which tended to make them fight as long as they could. The ‘winners’ were too tired for the obligatory rape and pillage due the victor. This more or less made the whole thing pointless.
So some genuis came up with the idea of comparing the numbers of men involved to see who would win, and determining the victor without going thru all the work of a battle. Considering that this left the winners with the energy to enjoy their obligatory rape and pillage, and the losers alive, it was met with approval by both sides. This is why the raped and pillaged didn’t get a chance to vote in early elections. To much chance of them inventing the filibuster and throwing sand in the gears.
Maybe the first real example of a ‘force mulitplier’ was the stirrup. With the stirrup, one man on a horse could defeat many times his number of unmounted men or men without stirrups. Sort of blew the whole one man, one vote thingie right out of the water. So the vote morphed into a vote for mounted men with stirrups and that soon became mounted men with sturrips wearing armor and carrying real long pointy sticks. This giving us the idea of an Arms Race and formalizing the concept of discrimination.
Anyway after a couple of thousand years of progess we have evolved to the point where we have a ……..Mugabe? If that isn’t a good reason to get stinking drunk, nothing is.
But on the upside, nowdays we have JADAM’s, which are even better then stirrups. The solution to the Mugabe problem is just the push of a button away.
whoops!
I notice that, according to the CIA World Factbook, all the “predator democracies” mentioned in the Social Affairs article linked to in this post are dominated by communists, socialist, or nationalist parties. Surely, that’s a factor in the poor records of their democracies?
On reflection maybe this is the worst kind of half-arsed comment, but…
Masty’s article has a point or two IMO. The connection between democracy and rent-seeking must have an instant, hundred-fold familiarity to regulars here, and yet I think there are still interesting things which both Brian’s post and Masty’s article hint at. But I follow veryretired’s point that democracy per se is not the real villain.
The importance of constitutional form deserves a mention in any comparative discussion of successful and unsuccessful democratisation. A constitution should place limits on the scope of state power (and thus, limits on the damage that can be done by corruption), and yet, for such a constitution to be successfully envisioned and implemented, it is often said that the right kind of sociocultural ‘conditions’ are essential (or maybe Perry would say ‘metacontextual memes’). David’s comment is getting at this.
I recall someone recently reminding me of the pointed question that if poor countries are ‘not ready’ for democracy now, when will they be ready? I have a certain sympathy for the activist sentiment here – to me, the opposite notion of culturally entrenched attitudes and values that might fuck up any new (or imposed) constitutional arrangements smells to me of a kind of pessimistic romanticism (i.e. bullshit). To believe in the free-will and rationality of the individual is to deny the necessity of his psychological enslavement to the past and to habit is it not?
Perhaps the key to successful democratisation lies not so much in entrenched cultural values or ‘directions’ but in the little everyday things and the frustrating slog of the contingent successes and failures of drafting appropriate constitutional forms and even ordinairy legislation that sit somewhere in a shared space between what is practical and what is ideal.
I wish the Iraqi’s will draft a decent constitution, though on reflection, perhaps the US should have had more of a hand in the nature of that constitution – as they did in the cases of Germany and Japan. And what has happened to the MDC in Zimbabwe in this last election is a shame.
To answer the question Brian titles his post with: just pain! But then again, children don’t see themselves growing…
Some of us in the “pro-war blogosphere” have been writing about this stuff since before 9/11.
I think that whereas SJ Masty tends towards the view that these countries ‘drift’ out of democracy Zimbabwe really wasn’t really a democracy to begin with, and certainly hasn’t been one since.
It was pretty clear from the outset, following the Lancaster House Agreement, that Mugabe’s ZANU was going to win by a colossal landslide and that the then principle opposition, Nkomo’s ZAPU, would rapidly become run down. It took less than 2 years for Mugabe to instigate the massacres in Matabeleland, have the gall to blame it all upon Joshua Nkomo and then use that as an excuse to remove him from any form of parliamentary process.
I do still think that, if anything, we should be ashamed and disgusted at our own politicians’ conduct in continuing to support this ‘aping’, of our concepts of a democratic form of government, in Zimbabwe for the past 25 years. Carrington, in his autobiography, did a rather bad handwringing job, claiming it was never his fault that Mugabe won from the outset and that nobody could have forseen that the country would revert to what essentially very quickly became a tribal system with the whites caught in the middle.
Lord Soames (Nicholas’ father) was the only one, if I recall correctly, to voice his doubts about what was being rushed into – that you could not take North Korean-trained terrorists (ZANLA) or Soviet-trained terrorists (ZIPRA) and make them respectable politicians overnight, simply by using British bobbies to oversee these men dumping their rifles at central collection points and give them a few dollars in compensation. Which leads me into one other question – when did Mugabe promise his followers that one day they would have the white man’s land? Did he make the promise during or before the time of the Lancaster House talks or afterwards?