By Don Chigumba | Pastor Evan Mawarire and crew are planning to launch a Political Coalition For Independent Council Candidates (POVO) at Harare Gardens on 29 March 2018. The main agenda of POVO is to field independent candidate for Harare council election. This piece therefore seeks to critically analyze the probable performance of POVO and other independent candidates who are going to participate in parliamentary election of 2018.
It is an open secret that POVO is a Facebook/Social Media Movement, consists of cute and handsome young women and men, eloquent in Western English. The coalition of independent candidates movement started in Kenya just before the 2017 elections. However, the coalition performed badly because they failed to win more than 1% of the entire seats of the 2017 elections in Kenya. Therefore the POVO movement in Zimbabwe should be very careful because their model failed to perform on the ground.
History has proven that, the success of a political party depends on its grassroots support base. The 2018 elections are going to be important for political analysts/researchers because they will be able to test the effectiveness of social media on political success. They will be able to quantitatively confirm the significance of these social media movements on political arena. It is true that POVO and other independent candidates lack grassroots support, a situation that is likely to negatively affect their political progress.
Apart from the poor grassroots support, POVO does not have a political philosophy. I define philosophy in this peace as political identity/ideology. There is no movement which can survive without a philosophy. The ZANU PF’s ideology under R.G Mugabe had a philosophy linked to local and black empowerment and that made it survive from 1999 up to the point of the military coup. ZANU PF under ED seems to be reversing the gains of R.G Mugabe’s black/local empowerment with new philosophical paradigm that is not yet clear to us.
ED’s reversal of R.G Mugabe’s ideological political philosophy is likely to deal ZANU PF party a heavy blow. We used to know ZANU PF through their chaotic land reform program. Today, ZANU PF under ED is failing to come up with a unique campaigning tool that can convince voters. ED’s ZANU PF of today seems to be gravitating towards MDC’s political ideology that is largely Western. ED has observed the importance of international community in running African economies and has started to reverse all what Mugabe started with his local/black empowerment philosophical ideology.
Just like ZANU PF, POVO will find it difficult to complete in the 2018 election because of the political philosophical ideology confusion. Where are the POVO members coming from? There are two schools of thought, first, majority of these POVO and independent candidates are alleged to have emanated from ZANU PF. They were in one way or another connected to ZANU PF since 1999 and the poor performance and ill-treatment of youths by ZANU PF forced them to jump the gun. Finally, another school of thought is that part of these POVO and independent candidates originated from Diaspora and social media gave them confidence to think that they can get political space in Zimbabwe.
POVO’s political ideology if well informed should be biased towards the youths in order for them to be different from ZANU PF. However, MDC Alliance will be their threat because it is a party full of youths and led by the young president. This will make it difficult for POVO coalition to survive within the political arena.
All in all, in terms of political ideology, POVO and ZANU PF are like an airplane without a ‘blackbox’. They need to define and sell their ideologies to the electorate on time. ED’s ideological position is becoming more Western than the original R.G Mugabe’s political philosophical position. For ED, going for 2018 election is a huge experiment and he should be extremely careful.
Conclusion
Majority of the independent candidates of 2018 elections are rooted on the social media i.e. Facebook, twitter, etc. They have to be very careful because social media in Africa has not yet been used in favor of independent candidates. Therefore, POVO should craft its unique political philosophy in order for it to avoid embarrassment, they need to come up with an attractive manifesto too.
I wish POVO success in their endeavors. They should not lose hope but keep moving by any means because Rome was not built in a day. However, POVO should work on how they are going to ideologically differentiate themselves from ZANU PF and MDC Alliance. POVO and other independent candidates should change their mindsets, a political game is beyond social media and should therefore leave a large space for disappointment.
Don Chigumba is a mixed methods research specialist, can be found on twitter