Beginning on March 9, thousands of voters in Zimbabwe waited patiently in mile-long lines to cast their ballots. At the close of the election on March 11, after polling locations had been kept secret until the last minute and the number of polling stations in opposition areas had been halved, many of them discovered their time had been wasted.

This is how incumbent President Robert Mugabe, in power since independence in 1980, dealt with calls from Zimbabwe’s electorate and the international community for democratic elections. Elections were held, but they were far from free and fair.

If there is one thing that characterizes the independence movements in Southern Africa, it is that they are incomplete. From Tanzania to Angola, and as far south as South Africa, countries are struggling to take that crucial post-liberation step: multi-party democratic rule. Liberation parties still dominate politics even in countries that conduct relatively fair elections, like South Africa; and the desirability of contested elections is not widely agreed upon by southern African leaders. They often believe that those who facilitated liberation won the right to rule the country indefinitely; any who oppose them are trying to undo the revolution, undermine unity, or are the puppets of neo-colonialism.

The problem, as far as the incumbents are concerned, is that now electorates are demanding change. How will Africa’s aging liberation leaders cope with this growing desire for change? A look at the recent elections in Zimbabwe is not reassuring.

In the months preceding Zimbabwe’s election, Mr. Mugabe did everything in his power, short of conducting open massacres of the opposition, to ensure his victory. (Not that he is above mass violence: between 1980 and 1988 he approved the killing of more than 7,000 villagers, many of them unarmed, in the dissident Matebeleland province.) Since 2000, Mr. Mugabe has faced a renewed and serious challenge from labor leader Morgan Tsvangirai, head of the main opposition party, Movement for Democratic Change (MDC).

Mr. Tsvangirai’s campaign slogan was simple and effective: “Change,” to which Mr. Mugabe responded by pushing a cowed Congress to approve a law making it illegal to speak out against him. Mr. Mugabe’s campaign employed such time-honored tricks as paying bands of unemployed teenagers to roam the countryside harassing and beating opposition supporters, and inventing charges of treason against Mr. Tsvangirai his associates. Mr. Mugabe saved his best for the election itself, when the actual poll closures and vote-rigging took place. It is not surprising that UN elections monitors denounced the elections as unfair, nor that Western governments around the world condemned Mr. Mugabe’s strong-arm tactics and refused to recognize his victory.

WIN AT ALL COSTS

Mr. Mugabe appears determined to hang on to power even at the cost of a near total withdrawal of Western aid and foreign investment. By mid-February, a month before the elections, the EU and the U.S. each had imposed economic sanctions on Zimbabwe and slapped travel sanctions on leaders of Mr. Mugabe’s ZANU PF party. As the end of the elections have found a victorious and unrepentant incumbent, Zimbabwe found itself isolated from the international community. The Commonwealth (with the support of a reluctant South Africa and Nigeria) voted to suspend Zimbabwe’s membership on March 19. Europe and the U.S. have withdrawn all official government aid to the country.

All this came at a time of dire economic need. Since the late 1980’s the growth rate has continued to plummet at an abysmal annual rate of -6.1 percent this year; unemployment is over 50 percent; and inflation has almost doubled in three years to 60 percent. Government spending is double that of its tax revenue, and Mr. Mugabe is placating his military with wage increases and a costly participation (yet lucrative to the generals) in the Congo’s civil war.

Furthermore, Mr. Mugabe’s campaign promise to intensify his brutal land reform policy may guarantee support from rural voters, but it has cemented the already enormous loss of investor confidence and decimated agricultural productivity. Since 2000, Mr. Mugabe has sanctioned the acquisition, without compensation, of white-owned farms. White-owned farms were obtained through racial preference policies under colonial British rule, but they were at least productive: most of Zimbabwe’s industrial farming took place on white-owned farms. Under Mr. Mugabe’s land redistribution policies, much of the confiscated land was given to his political cronies and lies fallow today. Peasant families lucky enough to receive land cannot farm it productively due to their lack of the financial resources necessary to buy essentials like fertilizer or machinery.

As a result, production of maize, Zimbabwe’s main staple, has dropped significantly since 2000. A 2001 report from the United Nation’s Food and Agriculture Organization notes that, coupled with a long drought in the region, “the decrease (in food supply) was mainly due to a reduction of 54 percent in the area planted on the large-scale commercial farms, as a result of disruption by land acquisition activities.” By most estimates, crops this year should yield little over half of the 1.8 million tons of maize needed to feed the population.

Government officials admit that three quarters of the population live in poverty, and that for the average worker, wages are lower now than they were under colonial rule. Add this to the highest HIV infection rate in the world, and it is no wonder that the people are demanding a change.

A MODEL FOR SOUTHERN AFRICA?

The world has watched Zimbabwe’s elections closely, and many wonder how they bode for other southern African liberation leaders, many whom face elections in 2004. The elections monitoring delegation from the Organization of African States almost unanimously (with the only opposition coming from Namibia) declared the elections free and fair. It is puzzling that both South Africa and Nigeria, whose elections monitors were both in this camp, voted less than a week later to suspend Zimbabwe’s membership in the Commonwealth.

It has been posited that the southern African nations feel compelled to show a united front and prefer to conduct their diplomacy in private instead of in front of the global media. This may in part be true, as shown by the subsequent number of private meetings between Mr. Mugabe, South African President Thabo Mbeke, and Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo. And there is certainly a lot of respect for a man who struggled for many years to oust the British, as Mr. Mugabe did. He also has provided a great deal of support for neighboring liberation movements.

Namibia and South Africa are both scheduled for elections in 2004, and both are still ruled by their original liberation parties-SWAPO in Namibia and the African National Congress (ANC) in South Africa. Mr. Mbeki’s reluctance to criticize openly Mr. Mugabe’s electoral tactics could be interpreted as a dangerous hint of what is to come for South Africa’s democracy, should he face serious opposition.

Namibia’s president, Sam Nujoma, has been in power since 1990 and it is unclear whether he will respond favorably to opposition. In 1998 he changed the Namibian constitution to extend the number of presidential term limits, allowing him a third consecutive term. Like Mr. Mugabe, he ushered through legislation restricting press freedom. In the year prior to the 1999 election, The New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists noted at least six incidents of legal intimidation of journalists who spoke critically of the Mr. Nujoma. Given his apparent unwillingness to relinquish power, it is telling that the sole objector to the Zimbabwe elections was Namibia. Kaire Mbuende, the leader of the observer team from Namibia, said, “To those of us to whom this hasn’t come, this election is a warning: adapt or die. The challenge for the liberation parties is to be relevant to the new environment.”

The situation in Angola, the most war-torn country in the region, is even more dismal. Angola’s civil war erupted again after its first multiparty elections in 1992, when President Jose Eduardo Dos Santos (first elected under a one-party system in 1979) refused to hold a run-off with Jonas Savimbi, the head of the UNITA party, after a close election. The recent death of Mr. Savimbi in armed conflict has led to a peace agreement between UNITA rebels and the Dos Santos government, but the next elections have yet to be announced. Some people fear that the ruling party alone will now be able to shape Angola’s future without the input of other factions of society.

Tanzania’s government in Zanzibar is likewise run by its original liberation party, and has conducted two contentious elections since 1995. The ruling party won each time, and international elections observers voiced concern over “voting irregularities” similar to those in Zimbabwe: polling stations opened late or not at all, vote rigging, and so on. Bomb and arson attacks on government buildings followed the October 2000 elections. A protest in January 2001 left at least 35 members of the opposition party dead and 600 wounded when police fired indiscriminately into the crowd of protesters. The ruling Chama cha Mapinduzi party has yet to reprimand police and security forces for their abuses on that day; Human Rights Watch estimates that over 2000 Zanzibaris fled to Kenya in 2001.

Clearly, many of southern Africa’s liberation movements have failed to bring their people the real fruits of independence: the right to choose their governments, and hold them accountable for furthering the well-being of the population. Indices of economic development in Africa lag behind those of most every other part of the world. Angola has oil reserves, and many other southern African countries enjoy an abundance of natural resources. It is up to the governments to ensure that these resources are properly exploited and the benefits not only distributed fairly among the population, but also used productively to build needed infrastructure for education and public works projects.

If these are not priorities for southern African governments, no amount of development aid will help them. Electorates must be able to hold their governments accountable for these responsibilities. The New Partnership for African Development is a step in the right direction: Headed by Senegal, South Africa, Nigeria, Egypt, and Algeria, it is a plan to achieve sustainable development on the continent by ending conflict, improving economic and political governance, and strengthening regional integration. Through cooperation and a true commitment to democratic change, the countries of southern Africa have a chance to provide their people a way out of the desperate situations that many find themselves in.