Famous last words

I’m in two minds this week. Posting something completely unrelated to the most compelling and important events unfolding in our region for the past few years, would just feel irrelevant and out of touch. At this time, how can I write about anything but Zimbabwe? But on the other hand, how can I write about Zimbabwe? I’m no Zimbabwe expert. I don’t live there, never have, and have only visited once.

But of course, the events unfolding north of the Limpopo are on everybody’s minds. What happens there has meaning for all of us, and will affect us all in some way or another.

I’ve been catching the news as much as I can: BBC, CNN, Al Jazeera, and SABC (mostly radio). It’s history in the making. But none of the international broadcasts brought this home to me as powerfully as Keithg’s blog posting on the Citizen Journalism in Africa portal (http://www.citizenjournalismafrica.org/blog/%5Buser%5D/02-apr-2008/727) with his entertaining account of queuing nervously, and then shaking so much he could hardly make his mark.

And this got me thinking about how unsatisfying the standard broadcast fare can sometimes be: reports from the scene, interspersed with endless interviews with analysts. Now, I’ve been in broadcasting. I’ve sat in a radio studio and interviewed analyst after analyst as we tried to fill all the extra air time dedicated to the coverage of national or local elections here in South Africa. As time goes by, you run out of things to say, and questions to ask. But results are slow in coming, and you must fill the time, so on you ask, and on the analysts drone – each one pretty much repeating what the one before has said, and the one before her.

At a time like this the analysts become very important. In the absence of any concrete developments – delays, waiting and confusion – all we can do is wonder what’s going on and what it all means. So we turn to the political scientists and other professional observers.

The problem is, they can so often get it wrong. While we still wait for a definitive result in the presidential election, I feel confident in saying that many of the analysts – at least outside Zimbabwe – were wrong about one thing – that Simba Makoni and not Morgan Tsvangirai was the great hope for these elections. While, as I write, Tsvangirai may or may not have won, it is clear that if there is a run-off it will be him, and not Makoni, who moves ahead to the next round. Indeed, Makoni seems to have fared fairly poorly, given the high hopes pinned on him.

For example, on the 7th of February, Trevor Ncube hailed Makoni as the “best prospect for change that Zimbabweans have been presented with in a very long time.” (http://www.thoughtleader.co.za/trevorncube/2008/02/07/simba-makoni-a-gli...) Newspapers such as The Monitor in Uganda, asked whether Makoni could succeed where Tsvangirai had failed. (http://allafrica.com/stories/200803181154.html). These sentiments echoed others I had heard, in the media, and in one or two meetings, where Zimbabwe experts insisted that change would not come from the MDC, and that the best bet would be to encourage some kind of a split within Zanu-PF. So strong was the belief that Makoni was the best hope, that Tsvangirai was harshly criticised for refusing to join the Makoni camp. (For an example, see: http://allafrica.com/stories/200802111707.html).

Things in Zimbabwe are very uncertain, but if the official results end up showing that Tsvangirai has lost, the predominant feeling will no longer be that he is a failure – but that victory has been stolen from him.

Of course this is nothing new. Pollsters and predictors and analysts often get it wrong. One of the most famous examples occurred during the Presidential election in the US in November 1948, when the front page headline of the Chicago Tribune yelled, “Dewey Defeats Truman”. Unfortunately for that newspaper, they were dead wrong. They had to quickly issue a second edition without this proclamation, once their error became clear. There’s a photograph of a beaming President Truman holding this premature prediction of his defeat. (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dewey_Defeats_Truman)

In the Zimbabwean case, two analysts who didn’t get it wrong are were Mcebisi Ndletyana and James Muzondidya of South Africa’s HSRC (http://www.hsrc.ac.za/HSRC_Review_Article-90.phtml). They warned that a lack of time and a strong grassroots base would count against Makoni.

So those two can pat themselves on the back. The rest of us – the analysts who were so mistaken, and those of us who believed them – will have to accept that we can no longer laugh so hard at the likes of the likes of Thomas Watson, former chair of IBM who in 1943 said, "I think there is a world market for maybe five computers.”