The Votes Are In...and Everybody Loses

The votes are in, but we do not yet have a winner! No, I’m not talking about the United States Presidential Election, which is still a brain-numbing eight months away. Believe it or not, other countries have elections (they’re usually rigged) and a rather interesting one took place over the weekend (yep, it was rigged). That’s right, the absolute disaster of a nation known as Zimbabwe (or Rhodesia for all you former British colonists) voted in an absurd election over the weekend that will determine the fate of their once functional country. See, as stupid and frustrating as the United States election may seem sometimes, it's really not that bad compared to the elections of other nations, like Zimbabwe. At least in the United States election somebody (and some people) actually win and the voting is usually fair (unless it's decided by the Supreme Court). In Zimbabwe, well, not so much.

For a quick history lesson, following Zimbabwe’s independence in 1980, they quickly became one of the more successful African nations due to their abundance of arable land and their surprisingly well-run educational system. However, former hero, current President (in office since 1987), and future pariah Robert Mugabe managed to destroy all of that with amazing efficiency.

What started with absurd claims and mismanaged policy, such as Mugabe’s assertion that homosexuality didn’t exist in Zimbabwe before colonization, turned into an absolute nightmare following his 2000 land reforms. Mugabe was pissed that most of Zimbabwe’s arable land (the one that was making the country all that money and feeding all those people) was still being run by the few white people that had stayed after independence. So, Mugabe took it all away from them and gave it all to members of the black African majority. Problem was, these new farmers were pretty much just Mugabe’s friends and didn’t know how to farm (to be unbiased, Mugabe claims that Tony Blair used chemical weapons on the farms to incite instability). Either way, since that time the food production has substantially decreased, life expectancy has dropped like a rock, and unemployment has hit an unheard of 80%. Most impressive is their inflation, which is estimated at a ridiculous 100,500% (some project it at over 1,000,000%, but since inflation really has never been this high anywhere ever, a lot of this is speculation). This has led to Zimbabwe’s awesome $10,000,000 bill (not a typo), worth about $1 US.

Either way, Mugabe’s presidency was kind of up for grabs this weekend, which is surprising for a totalitarian regime. Two opposition parties, most notably Morgan Tsvangirai’s MDC, looked to stand a legitimate chance to take over the nation. Naturally, all parties involved claimed widespread fraud, likely all were right. Over 3 million more ballots were printed than people in the country and almost 9,000 addresses were registered to vacant land (mostly registered to the surprisingly powerful 1960’s dead, white Rhodesian voters). It doesn’t help that the election was outrageously confusing, with hundreds of local and parliamentary seats being voted on along with the Presidential vote. Shockingly though, Tsvangirai’s MDC is claiming a victory over Mugabe despite few votes having actually been counted. Surely Mugabe will accept this and step down, because that’s what democracy is all about right?

Unfortunately, he will most surely not. Mugabe has already declared the MDC’s claims of victory as tantamount to a coup and despite what results slowly come in (and who in Mugabe’s camp gets killed for botching such a seemingly easy to rig election) one would be foolish to expect Mugabe’s party to go down without a fight. So what does this mean? Well, think of the violence in Kenya last year (caused by a similar election) and times that by superhyperinflation (new word) and over 2 million refugees (that’s about 15% of Zimbabwe’s population) trying desperately to get into South Africa. Yeah, that’s bad.

So yeah, maybe the United States’ election has a lot of problems: it’s long (REALLY LONG), it costs a shitload of money, and the Electoral College is the stupidest thing not called a superdelegate. However, at least in the United States’ election at least 50% of the country can declare themselves a winner; in Zimbabe’s election, like most 3rd world democracies, the only sure thing is that nobody is going to win.


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