The Public Order and Security Act gives untold power to the police, and many have claimed that President Robert Mugabe has used the country’s security forces to intimidate his opposition. Credit: Jeffrey Moyo/IPS

By Jeffrey Moyo
HARARE, May 21 2013 (IPS)

For the last month Gibson Severe and his wife, Merjury Severe, known opposition supporters from Hurungwe district in Zimbabwe’s Mashonaland West Province, have been hiding out in the country’s capital Harare.

The Movement for Democratic Change – Morgan Tsvangirai (MDC–T) supporters were forced to flee their rural home in Hurungwe district after Zimbabwe African National Union – Patriotic Front (Zanu-PF) militias threatened them for encouraging people to participate in the recently-ended mobile voter registration.

“It’s been a month since we left Hurungwe district after the Jochomondo militia, which has known links to Zanu-PF, besieged our rural home accusing us of encouraging people to register to vote for the MDC-T,” Gibson Severe told IPS.

Since last year, the Jochomondo militia has allegedly terrorised residents in Zimbabwe’s northern Hurungwe district, a Zanu-PF-stronghold, making it almost impossible for opposition parties to campaign in the region.

Merjury Severe told IPS that elections in this southern African nation have become associated with threats and violence.

“This is not the first time we have been subjected to intimidation. In the 2008 presidential runoff we were beaten up for being MDC-T sympathisers,” she said.

Zimbabweans will go to the polls sometime later this year to vote for a new president. Current President Robert Mugabe, 89, has been in office for 33 years in a reign characterised by corruption, oppression, forced land seizures and a failing economy.

However, Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai recently told media that the date for the elections would only be set after voter registration was completed. Although mobile registration has ended, voters can still register at the Registrar General’s office.

But as Zimbabwe’s first round of 30-day mobile voter registration ended on Sunday, May 19, the process was marked by long queues, slow registration and intimidation by violent gangs with suspected Zanu-PF links.

Pedzisai Ruhanya, director for the Zimbabwe Democracy Institute, an independent public policy think-tank, told IPS that the process had been fraught with chaos. “The mobile voter registration exercise was not done properly. It was chaotic and characterised by political gerrymandering.”

Zanu-PF-linked militias who call themselves Al-Shabaab, named after Somalia’s Islamic terrorist group, are alleged to have threatened the electorate in Midlands Province.

“The mobile voter registration exercise here irked Zanu-PF stooges who have directed their anger towards teachers in rural communities, fiercely warning them against voting for the (two) MDC formations,” a local councilor from Midlands Province told IPS. The MDC split in 2006 into the MDC-T and the MDC-Ncube, which is led by Professor Welshman Ncube.

Officials from Marondera, the capital of Mashonaland East Province, situated some 72 km east of Harare, said villagers were forced by suspected Zanu-PF-linked militias to participate in the voter registration process.

“People were being abused by Zanu-PF militias, who were singing liberation war songs and chanting party slogans, and forced into (going to) register to vote,” a local district official in Marondera told IPS.

Police from Mashonaland Central Province’s Bindura and Mazowe towns, which are located about 90 km north of Harare, said that people there still live in fear of a repeat of the violence that ensued during the country’s previous elections. Many are scared just to publicly support political parties.

“Nobody wears MDC-T shirts here after the 2008 violent elections that left thousands of people maimed. Zanu-PF is going to use this to win this election, by reminding people about the June 2008 atrocities,” a top police official told IPS.

Global rights group Amnesty International reported that the 2008 presidential runoff had been “held against a backdrop of widespread killings, torture and assault of perceived opposition supporters.”

Human Rights Watch said in its January 2013 report titled “Race Against Time: The Need for Legal and Institutional Reforms Ahead of Zimbabwe’s Elections,” that over 200 people died in the 2008 election violence.

So far, no arrests have been made in any of the cases of apparent intimidation. However, Zanu-PF spokesperson Rugare Gumbo dismissed the reports.

“There is nothing like terror groups linked to our party. Why should we beat people into submission when it’s well known that the MDCs have lost supporters to Zanu-PF?” Gumbo told IPS.

However, renowned political commentator Rejoice Ngwenya told IPS that

Zimbabwe’s mobile voter registration process was flawed.

“Mobile voter registration was disjointed and weak, perhaps deliberately. There is no voter education in Zimbabwe … the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission (ZEC) has neither the capacity nor the political will (to carry out voter education).

“But civil society organisations and political parties are giving it their best shot, although they still encounter a very uncooperative legislative piece – the Public Order and Security Act.”

The act gives untold power to the police, and many have claimed that Mugabe has used the country’s security forces to intimidate his opposition.

Local rights groups also expressed concern about the mobile voter registration.

“We embrace the exercise. But we are worried by the manner in which it was being conducted in rural areas, where Zanu-PF members were distributing membership forms, purporting to carry out voter registration,” David Chidende, programme manager for Youth Information and Education For Behaviour Change, a democracy lobby group, told IPS.

It is also alleged that in Zanu-PF strongholds there were large numbers of voter registration centres, while in MDC-dominated areas there were a limited few. Ruhanya said: “Perceived anti-Zanu-PF political activists linked to (both) MDC formations were given limited sites to register to vote.”

A Zanu-PF central committee member told IPS on the condition of anonymity: “Officials were first registering voters in constituencies where Zanu-PF mobilised supporters to register in their numbers.”

Once Mugabe approves the country’s new constitution, a second round of voter registration and inspection will take place.

“We still have an additional 30-day voter registration period provided for by the draft constitution,” ZEC chairperson, Justice Rita Makarau, told the local Financial Gazette newspaper.

Ruhanya urged authorities to conduct the next round of voter registration exercise differently “in order for Zimbabwe to have free and fair elections.”

Hard times have hit Zimbabweans and forced disadvantaged children to earn a living as vendors in downtown Harare. This 16-year-old boy sells sweets and popcorn to earn a living. Credit: Jeffrey Moyo/ IPS

By Jeffrey Moyo
HARARE , Apr 5 2013 (IPS)

Susan Sithole* is 14 and should be in grade nine or Form Two, according to Zimbabwe’s education system, learning her lessons in Mathematics, English and other subjects.

But instead, you can find her at the corner of Leopold Takawira Avenue and Robert Mugabe Street in downtown Harare, selling cigarettes, sweets and cellphone recharge cards, learning the harsh lessons of commerce and survival.

Sithole, who lives in Harare’s Machipisa low-income suburb, told IPS that the 25 dollars she earns weekly is not enough to pay for her upkeep and still have enough left over to send back to her poor parents in Chipinge, a district over 500 kilometres east of Harare.

“My parents posted me to relatives here to find something to do after they failed to raise school fees for me,” Sithole told IPS. So instead of continuing in school to grade nine, she was forced to drop out in the middle of grade four and come to Zimbabwe’s capital city.

Even if she could afford to return to school, she said that at her age she feels shy to return to her studies in a class of children who will be at least five years younger than her.

According to statistics released in January by the Coalition Against Corruption, Sithole is only one of about 63,000 children under the age of 15 nationwide who are forced to work at vendors, mostly in Zimbabwe’s border towns. This was a marked increase from the 42,000 child vendors reported in 2010 in this country of nearly 13 million people.

Some say that the Zimbabwean government’s ban of non-governmental organisations last February may have increased the number of child vendors in this southern African nation as many of these organisations once paid the school fees of disadvantaged children here, especially those in rural areas.

“The government banned local NGOs here that used to pay school fees for disadvantaged children, as they suspected that the organisations harboured political motives. It left many children with no option except to turn to vending,” an official at the government’s Manicaland Provincial Social Welfare Offices in Mutare, the country’s third-largest city, told IPS.

President Robert Mugabe’s ruling Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front banned 29 organisations in April 2012, claiming that they had been working towards regime change.

Officials from the National Association of Non-governmental Organisations (NANGO), who spoke on the condition of anonymity, told IPS that since the NGO ban, disadvantaged school children have been unable to pay their school fees of between 30 to 35 dollars per term for primary school.

Over 850,000 underprivileged school children had been supported by NGOs prior to their banning last year, NANGO officials told IPS.

And 30 dollars is considered a huge sum in a country where, according to figures from a 2010 United Nations Children Fund report titled “Child-Sensitive Social Protection in Zimbabwe”, almost half of the population lives below the country’s poverty line of 1.25 dollars a day. In addition, the unemployment rate was 94 percent in 2009, according to the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. A great majority now work in the informal sector.

“The situation is really pathetic for the children we used to support,” an official from Action Aid International Zimbabwe told IPS on the condition of anonymity. “Right now, as I speak to you, our organisation has received reports that over 10,000 pupils have since dropped out of school after failing to pay their school fess. It is a situation bound to plunge poor pupils further into destitution.”

Social worker Givemore Zinyoro told IPS that children selling goods and wares by the side of the road amounted to child labour and accused the government of being lax in addressing rising cases in the country.

“When children venture into vending, that certainly amounts to child labour, which by international statutes is unlawful,” Zinyoro stressed.

Philip Bohwasi, chairperson of the Council of Social Workers in Zimbabwe, said the increase in the number of children selling goods to earn a living pointed to a deepening economic and social crisis.

“It is a reflection of the current state of society, where our country continues to fall deeper into economic and social crisis. More than 84 percent of the population is jobless – it is not only about child vendors.

“Most families are finding it hard to put food on the table and everybody, including underage children, wakes up every morning to eke out a living doing something,” Bohwasi told IPS.

Zimbabwe is still recovering from an economic crisis. Between 2003 and 2009, the country had one of the worst rates of hyperinflation in the world – its year on year inflation was reported as 231 percent. Prices of goods doubled here everyday and the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe was forced to issue a 100 trillion Zimbabwean dollar note.

A top government official with the Ministry of Labour and Social Services, who asked for anonymity, told IPS that the government was not able to combat the crisis facing poor children in this country.

Economist John Robertson, from Robertson Economic Information Services, pointed out that Zimbabwe’s economic crisis had weakened the government’s capacity to combat child labour.

“Without money to finance vital programmes in labour sectors, the government is living from hand-to-mouth amid donor fatigue. There is a need to revive the economy before addressing issues of child labour,” Robertson told IPS.

*Name changed to protect identity of minor.