He has not been able to hold a rally in Murehwa South, which he took over in April from MDC candidate Golden Jiti. His predecessor, a black commercial farmer, was told his tobacco barns would be burnt unless he agreed to go on television and say he was quitting politics.”Morgan Tsvangirai [the party leader] has just called in his candidates and told us that we must each have two bodyguards with us all the time,” said Mr Nezi.He has a vivid memory of the shooting of an independent candidate near Harare, two days before the 1995 elections “They are totally capable of it,” he said. “Zanu-PF think terror is normal – they say it is the nature of African politics.”In Murehwa South, the home of Mr Nezi’s campaign manager, Francis Muronzi, in Munamba village was burnt to the ground last month and he commutes from Harare. He is staying in a safe house with his wife and four of their six children. “All that remains of my farm is ashes and my land is lying idle,” said Mr Muronzi who grew maize, potatoes, onions and sugar cane. “If the MDC loses the election, I will never be able to go back.”We travel in a car hired by The Independent so, relatively incognito, he can visit his mother in Munamba for the first time in a month.
This is a subsistence farming community of about 500 people, down a dirt track that deteriorates into a flooddamaged path. It announces itself only with polite graffito on a bridge – “pliz vote MDC”.Tap, tap, tap on the door: Magdalene Muronzi, in her seventies, sits in her hut scraping maize corns from dried cobs. “They have only just left,” says Mrs Muronzi, who survived a terrifying two weeks with Zanu-PF militants camped outside her house, waiting for her son to visit “It is not safe for you to be here They are in Munamba, about 10 of them. They have a gun – please leave.”But many of the villagers are clearly delighted to see Mr Muronzi and they assure him they will vote MDC. An old woman shows wounds on her back where she was beaten with rubber piping when Zanu- PF militants made house-to-house searches for MDCT-shirts and membership cards.One 12-year-old boy, Clifford, says he was banned from his football team for refusing to carry a Zanu-PF support card.Mr Muronzi knows the drill. “Everything the government has done for four months has been aimed at scaring people, even the invasions of white farms. The message they are sending to subsistence farmers like us is not that they will give us land but that, ‘Look, we were capable of taking the white man’s land, obviously we can take yours if you do not vote for us’.
The situation is more dangerous than during the liberation war in the 1970s.”Villagers who did not want to be identified tell us a political commissar has been taking everyone’s names. “We are to go to the headman’s house on Saturday morning at dawn and stand in a line,” they say. “There, our names will be taken again and we will walk in a line with the headman to the polling station to vote.”Mr Nezi says: “You are dealing with illiterate people who fear authority. Every time their name is taken by someone who can write, they believe they are being controlled. As they leave the polling station and go back to the orderly line, their names will be ticked off, one by one. Even if this is meaningless, they will be made to believe their choice is known.”He believes the MDC can win a majority of Zimbabwe’s 120 constituencies in Saturday and Sunday’s elections, but he is not sure about his own.”I really fear the intimidation of the voters has worked, especially among the rural women who are the majority of the electorate.
