IRIN Focus on electioneering

The crowd inside the Blue Bar, a dilapidated tavern in the impoverished Zambian farming community of Lubombo, was getting increasingly boisterous as the afternoon progressed - but no one seemed to be drinking much. Instead, the intoxication appeared to stem from the promise that the big city men on the makeshift podium represented rather than alcohol consumption. “The MMD [the ruling Movement for Multiparty Democracy] has destroyed agriculture,” asserted the speaker, a dapper official of the opposition Forum for Democracy and Development (FDD). “FDD will rebuild it”. Although the audience applauded dutifully, the 200-odd men and women cramped on the dusty floor seemed not particularly interested in the speakers words. The cynical observer would say the crowd in the Blue Bar was not really their for the speeches, but to reap the rewards of attendance. The dirt-poor farmers were well aware that, before the close of the meeting, the men from Lusaka would dish out gifts of money and clothing to the party’s newly converted. “It is a pity, really,” Suresh Desai, a member of the FDD national executive, ruefully told IRIN later, “but this is the nature of Zambian politics today. No one will attend your meetings unless you promise them some kind of material reward”. Gary Nkhombo, the party’s parliamentary candidate for Mazabuka, an agricultural town some 120 km south of the capital, learnt that the hard way. Two years ago, Nkhombo, an upcoming Lusaka businessman, contested the Mazabuka parliamentary seat on the ruling party’s ticket, but lost to the opposition United Party for National Development’s (UPND) more aggressive candidate. Both FDD and UPND are breakaways from the ruling party. Both are widely expected to present a serious challenge to President Frederick Chiluba’s MMD in presidential and parliamentary elections scheduled for the year-end. This time around, Nkhombo is taking no chances after his humiliating defeat in 1998. Before driving to Lubombo, he spent the morning traversing other rural wards in the sprawling Mazabuka constituency, distributing bicycles - a luxury item in rural Zambia - to his campaign agents and dishing out alms to hungry supporters at each stop. At one village, a campaign agent told him bluntly that the community would vote for him – but only if he gave them fertiliser ahead of the planting season and helped them set up a piggery. Fred Nchongani, a potential voter in Lubombo, summed up the general attitude in the area. “If they want our support, they must help us”, he said. “If they want to eat alone, they must stand alone”. Nchongani is a man who backs his words with action. In the 1996 general elections, he voted for the ruling party. Two years later, disgruntled with the party’s failure to deliver on its extravagant campaign promises, he voted for the UNDP candidate in a parliamentary by-election. This year, he will vote for FDD in the hope that, unlike the other parties, it will address his specific material needs. Political observers believe that there could be hundreds of thousands of other Zambians that behave like Nchongani. “Practically all the parties try to buy votes in all parts of the country,” Lee Hamusonde, the executive co-coordinator of the Lusaka-based Southern African Center of the Constructive Resolution of Disputes (SACCROD) told IRIN. “We have established, for example, that MMD routinely dishes out money to intending voters, while UNIP (the opposition United National Independence Party) buys them beer before an election”. Perhaps such an attitude is not surprising among rural Zambians, most of who have been rendered destitute by a decade of irregular weather patterns, foot and mouth disease, and government neglect. According to UNDP for example, only 35 percent of rural dwellers have access to safe drinking water. For them – as for the other 80 percent of Zambians who live below the poverty datum line – ideological and moral considerations pale besides the desperate preoccupation for physical survival. But while the poor could be excused for expecting a measure of material relief from the ambitious that seek their vote, political analysts fear that some unscrupulous politicians are deliberately creating a culture under which political support is bought and the monied manipulate the electoral process. The ruling party is widely seen as the main culprit in this regard – and there is some evidence to support this perception. Last week, for example, a High Court tribunal found two members of the Chiluba cabinet guilty of diverting two billion kwacha (about US $55 000) from state coffers to fund an MMD national convention. According to evidence heard by the tribunal, much of the money was dished out to convention delegates to win their support for a Chiluba bid to run for an unconstitutional third term. The tribunal has recommended that the two cabinet ministers – Peter Machungwa and Golden Mandandi – be expelled from parliament and prosecuted in a court of law. However, Chiluba has chosen only to suspend them from the cabinet. Similarly, last month, opposition supporters in Lusaka apprehended a number of MMD supporters who carried more than one voters card each during a crucial by-election in the shanty township of Chawama, presumably intending to swell the ruling party’s vote. At the same time, opposition leaders claim to have uncovered a plot under which the MMD is buying voters cards from opposition supporters for redistribution to its own supporters - and to ineligible foreigners along the country’s borders with Angola and the Democratic Republic of Congo - who will be paid to vote for the party. The ruling party, however, denies the allegations. But independent observers believe that if the actions of both the ruling and opposition parties persist, this year’s elections will be the dirtiest since plural politics were reintroduced in 1991. “Our politicians are developing a very bad electoral culture,” said Hamusonde. “Their style of campaigning in which votes are swapped for alms makes people regard voting not so much as a civil right but as something they can sell”.