Parliamentary election pits "Tony Blair" against Robert Mugabe

British Prime Minister Tony Blair is in for a hiding when he contests Zimbabwe's 31 March parliamentary poll, according to 65-year-old Thokozile Hlatshwayo, a subsistence farmer in rural Matabeleland. Although she has not voted in the last few elections, she is itching to cast her ballot in this month's poll, and aims to be among the first in the queue to register her support for the ruling ZANU-PF party. "He [Blair] should stay away from us. What does he want in our country? Why should he participate in our election?" For Hlatshwayo it's a simple choice: either ZANU, which fought for independence against white minority rule - and two years ago allocated her a plot of land under its farm redistribution programme; or the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), which she believes is led by the British prime minister. "Tony Blair is one of the whites we defeated in 1980, and I wonder what makes him think that he can win this election. He is up to no good. If he is voted into power, we know that he will take away our land and return it to a minority white population," she told IRIN. Hlatshwayo's confusion over the leadership of the MDC and its policy programme is understandable. She, along with many other rural Zimbabweans, have taken literally the government's campaign message that the election is between ZANU-PF and Blair's Britain - the former colonial power - which has been highly critical of President Robert Mugabe. At the launch of his party's manifesto last month, President Mugabe declared the parliamentary poll "a protest against Blair". He told supporters at a recent campaign rally: "You will be lost if you vote for the opposition because it would be as good as voting Tony Blair into power." Rarely does the ZANU-PF campaign make direct reference to Morgan Tsvangirai, the MDC leader, or the labour-backed party itself, analysts have noted. Tsvangirai told IRIN: "While they are busy denigrating Blair, we, as a people-oriented party, are talking about job creation and an end to starvation; we are not concerned about their smear campaign." However, in the drought-hit southern province, rural people, like Hlatshwayo, rely on the state-controlled media. The MDC also complain that their campaign activities have been frustrated by the police, who must approve all public rallies, while civic organisations involved in voter education have been constrained by an NGO bill that bans foreign funding for human rights and governance issues. IRIN was unable to get comment from government officials on Monday. "Government knows full well that no adequate voter education has been done to date and, to make matters worse, we are only left with a few days to go before the polls. Civic bodies have been barred from conducting this process under the yet-to-be approved NGOs Bill and, really, this is very sad," said Felix Magalela Mafa, the head of Post Independence Survivors' Trust, an NGO which works with victims of the government's counter-insurgency campaign in Matabeleland in the 1980s. The Zimbabwe Electoral Commission, in charge of running the poll, dispatched a voter education team across the country only at the beginning of the month - far too late for any meaningful work, the MDC has alleged. "With the anti-white animosity ZANU-PF has managed to instil into the hearts of its supporters, and the rhetoric that it has churned out for a long time now, it has managed to convince the vulnerable ones that the MDC is a British creation. So, to them the opposition has become synonymous with white rule and, in essence, I think this propaganda has worked wonders for Mugabe's party," commented political analyst and former war veteran Max Mkandla. The MDC ran ZANU-PF a close second in the last legislative elections in 2000 in a poll marred by violence. The MDC decided last month to lift an election boycott following the government's acceptance of Southern African Development Community electoral guidelines.