Harare - It was a strange protest on Friday. In some ways disappointing for the main opposition parties which joined forces against Zanu-PF in Harare for the first time.
Party leaders could not or would not join the few hundred tough, thin, veterans of more then a decade of anti-government protests who regrouped several times after police tear-gassed them early in the day.
The protests in Harare also saw violence from both sides - the police and opposition party supporters - but few turned up for this demonstration which began on the western edge of the city and was meant to move through some of the main roads into the city centre and end outside the Zimbabwe Election Commission.
But that never happened.
For the demonstrators, many hardened by years of protest and state violence, the day began badly. At least 100 riot police with their two water cannons descended on the small crowd which gathered on a huge field, nowadays known as Freedom Square, and hurled tear-gas at them, while lawyers at the Harare High Court were arguing in chambers that the demonstration for reform of election laws and against the Zimbabwe Election Commission should be allowed to take place.
At this stage there were about 200 people, most of them wearing the red T-shirt of the Movement for Democratic Change party, who had gathered to being their protest march, but did not yet have police permission to go ahead.
Police then fired more tear-gas into the grounds of the nearby Harare Magistrate’s Court where scores of protesters fled the first tear-gas. One of those was Sten Zvorwadza, chair of the National Vendors’ Union. “Why do we have to suffer this tear-gas from the police? No one was violent. We must be allowed to protest, it is in our Constitution,” he said. He was arrested earlier this month for a similar “offense”. He and several others who had fled the tear-gas said they didn’t support any political party, but hoped all groups opposed to Zanu-PF would unite against the ruling party and President Robert Mugabe.
“He must go. He is too old and we are too poor to have him rule us any more,” said an off-duty nurse, who asked not to be named. “I don’t want to protest. I just want peace but nothing is working in Zimbabwe. Most people have no jobs, and when we do earn, we can’t get our money out of the banks,” she said.
Zimbabwe has largely run out of its favoured currency, the United States dollar and all ATM machines are closed and banks are limiting customers to withdrawals of about R1200 per day
Other small groups of anti-government protesters were busy elsewhere.
They laid barricades along several main roads into the city centre paralysing traffic. People in red MDC T shirts, both men and women, threw rocks, stones, slabs of concrete, bits of pavements, branches of trees onto the streets. Some protesters also burned tyres in these roads. Never before have so many city roads been made impassable by protesters. And there were so few of them.
By mid-day, when the court granted permission for the demonstration to take place, many who had gathered in town waiting to begin marching to town, had moved away.
“They are hungry and have gone home,” said one man who said he was not a member of a political party, but was interested in the protest. “We don’t know where the leaders are. Also, the tear-gas is very efficient. We can’t stand the tear-gas,” he said. He lost his job as a technician in a cellphone company in 2014.
Small groups of mostly younger men swooped on shops in the densest and poorest parts of western Harare and looted.
“They mostly went for the Chinese and Nigerian shops as far as we can tell, plus a night club, and a food shop, and police were too slow to stop them,” said one MDC supporter who was worried about the violence.
“People will get hurt, this is getting dangerous,” he said. But several vendors also complained their goods had been looted and they had been unable to trade on Friday.
The police continued to throw tear-gas about until the hard copy of the High Court judgment was released. And then the police withdrew to the main road on the western edge of the city.
The demonstration and march through the city never took place, but a small group of people stormed down the street to the offices of the Zimbabwe Election Commission and threw stones at it.
By mid-Friday afternoon most shops in central Harare had closed.
But leaders of the main opposition political parties, Morgan Tsvangirai and former vice president Joice Mujuru, never showed up at the demo or in the streets and a large police truck with about 20 policemen parked outside the MDC’s headquarters in Nelson Mandela Road and remained there for several hours.
“We are sick and tired of this government because it has allowed everything to collapse,” said one man who claimed he had not been paid for the last four months. He would not say who he worked for but said he had to support three children. He lives in the dormitory town, Chitungwisa, south of the city. “We will continue to demonstrate until the old man has gone,” he said. “I am hungry. We are all hungry.”
By early evening the city was quiet but many taxis could not operate as the western part of the city was still littered with barricades.
But it was a normal day for others in the city and they gathered as usual at their favourite drinking spot, on the street, outside a bottle store on the east of the city in the early evening. “What protest?” said a man, in a suit, drinking a beer. He laughed and walked away and joined his boozing buddies leaning up against their 4 x 4’s.
Foreign Service