Contestation of political power in Zimbabwe under the Covid19 lockdown

Abstract

The post-2018 election period has brought back the political polarisation associated with the Mugabe-Tsvangirai rivalry, which had been reignited by the events of November 2017, which led to the fall of Mugabe. The political overtures that the newly elected president, Emmerson Mnangagwa, attempted to give to Chamisa were snubbed by the opposition. In the wake of these political contestations, Covid-19 became a global pandemic that also affected Zimbabwe. Like other countries globally, Zimbabwe instituted mitigation measures, central to which were lockdowns that restricted the movement and curtailed on certain freedoms. The government was accused of using these limitations on freedoms to dismantle the strong opposition from the Movement for Democratic Change - Alliance (MDC-A) and its allies in civil society while propping up pliant and insignificant opposition political parties. The government also sought to increase its visibility on the ground while overshadowing the opposition. While this was the popular narrative, the opposition also took active and reactive measures to the action government took to prop itself up and portray the government in bad light. All this action amounted to the use of Covid–19 politics as political capital from both sides of the political divide. This paper analyses the use of the pandemic for political gain and concludes that all sides had their share of blame for the government’s actions, which only become more visible because of its control of state coercive apparatus. This paper is purely a desk research paper, using credible internet sources. Other sources used include legal documents from Zimbabwe as well as televised and written news which were also used in the form of a virtual observation of the events by the author, even though the sources could not be used independently, given the disjointed nature of global news that follows multiple events without in-depth coverage of most of them, of which Zimbabwe was one of such cases.

Key words: Covid-19, Emmerson Mnangagwa, MDC–A, Nelson Chamisa, ZANU–PF, Zimbabwe.