Thursday sees elections for 120 seats in the Zimbabwe parliament. Another 30 are appointed by the President, Robert Mugabe.
Mugabe is one of the last of those African leaders who swept to power after independence from a colonial power who descended into corruption, megolomania and oppression. Previous elections have been marked by violence but this year it has been less overt. To a large extent that is not needed, the reign of terror has become more subtle.
The main opposition group, the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) is standing in the elections to try to stop Mugabe's ZANU(PF) getting the majority needed to change the constitution. Mugabe is now elderly and his cronies will be wanting to put in place measures to protect the loot they have got from plundering the country.
Probably Mugabe's most famous policy has been the driving of (mostly) white farmers from their holdings. Some of the confiscated land has been divided and given to "war veterans", the vast majority of who are too young to have fought against the white minority regime. Many of the most profitable farms round Hararae have been given lock stock and barrel to senior ZANU party officials. Some of these continue to produce crops but neglect and lack of expertise has resulted in a drastic reduction in output even in good years. Recently a prolonged drought has further reduced production.
As well as driving the white owners from the farms, frequently the black farm werkers were expelled from their housing. The large farms were often quite complex societies almost akin to the large plantations in the southern USA. The workers often had simple housing with a bit of garden space to provide food for their families. In what was almost a feudal system, the farmers also provided health care and education for the workers and their families. While this was far from ideal, the welfare provided was an effective system of providing a good if modest living for the majority of the workers. After sometimes generations of relations between the owners' families and the workers' produced a benign or even benevolent system.
Without training, those given small plots of land to work have frequently been unable to produce sufficient to provide a cash income. Often the new black landholders were given the less productive farms and barely produce enough to feed their families. A country that was able to feed itself and neighbouring countries and produce cash crops like tobacco has become a net importer of food.
Food is also being used by Mugabe as a weapon against his opponents. NGOs and charities have been virtually excluded from the country and food distribution is in the hands of ZANU. In the run up to the election, access to food aid or even retail food stores has been restricted to ZANU members or those who can show a stamp on their ID cards verifying their attendance at ZANU rallies.
Rural africans are quite used to coping with food shortages and have strategies for dealing with it. In the good times the staple mealie is supplemented by meat. When that gets expensive a peanut sauce on its own provides protein. In bad times maybe only salt serves as the essential addition to keep the mealie platatable and keep off starvation and is supplemented by gathering edible roots, berries and leaves from the bush. Of course in both the towns and even rural areas these hunter/gatherer skill have been lost or are impratival.
Thousands have fled the country to try to get a living elsewhere, frequently to South Africa whose borders are protected like the USA's with Mexico. Each morning a sad little ceremony occurs as bus loads of illegal immigrants are deprted back accross the Beit Bridge into Zimbabwe. Despite the captures, the Zimbabwe diaspora is estimated at 2 million. Recent measures by Mugabe has removed their voting rights, one of several measures that he has taken to ensure his election success.
The register of electors in ZANU supporting areas is suspected to be padded with tens of thousands of dead who will rise from their graves to vote for Mugabe. Constituency boundaries have been redrawn and distributed so fewer seats are in the urban areas that are MDC strongholds and more in rural areas supporting ZANU.
Mugabe is rabidly homophobic and often rants against the presence of gay ministers in Blair's government as part of his "Anti Blair" election strategy. The BBC has been banned from the country for years but has in the past sent in undercover reporters. Murdoch's Sky News has been let in but appears to be qute restricted in the amount of criticism it can offer. Unusually the MDC has been allowed some advertising on state controlled broadcast media. The few remaining weekly newspapers sympathetic to the MDC are harrassed. One daily paper has been banned and its reporters opperate a web based service from a secret location in Johannesburg, South Africa.
The elections do not comply with the guidelines of the regional organisation, the Southern Africa Development Community but Mugabe is still inexplicably supported by South Africa's President Mbeke who is proving to be a very unworthy sucessor to Nelson Mandela. The EU has condemned the elections as "phoney" and the Archbishop of Bulowayo has condemned the process.
More details on the BBC site which has extensive coverage including a blog which has to be written under an assumed name:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/africa/4391087.stm