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The stayaway on Wednesday last week had mixed success.
A majority of shops closed, although several did open later during the day, and just over half of bank branches closed.
There were some who closed shop because of conviction, just as they were some who declined to work because of the same reasons.
This they are legally entitled to; the only problems they have are loss of business and civil action over failure to get to work, but no criminal action.
But it is now obvious that there was intimidation and, even more importantly, a vast rumour machine that people would be assaulted if they tried to get to work, business and schools “burned to the ground” if they opened, and buses damaged or burned if they operated.
This fear was a major reason for the “success” of the stayaway.
The general story doing the rounds was that young men were moving around in gangs in the days before Wednesday threatening violence.
Some cases are better documented than others but the Zimbabwean rumour machine supplied the rest. Several businesses sent out e-mails to their larger customers saying that to ensure the safety of staff and customers, they would be closing.
More banks stayed open. First they are legally obliged to, and secondly they have better security arrangements, so if trouble suddenly flared up they could cope.
Kombis were available, charging $2 at first and coming down to $1,50 during the day as more assessed the risks and took to the streets. The operators were more wary after the results of the industrial action against police roadblocks in eastern Harare on the Monday.
In the final result there was no report of serious violence, the threats being largely empty and built-up through rumour, although the police assurance that violence would not be tolerated obviously kept some hotheads a lot cooler.
We think that attempts to renew stayaways will suffer the same fate as the campaigns of the early 2000s when opposition leaders, through a series of stayaways, would make a difference.
Each stayaway in the series attracted fewer and fewer supporters and eventually the idea was dropped as useless, and indeed damaging to the organisers as it showed how little support they could muster.
In any case, it is difficult to understand how a stayaway is going to change anything.
It is easy to change the Government in a democracy; you win the most votes in a general election and the next election in Zimbabwe is in 2018.
Zanu-PF won the 2013 vote quite handsomely after a scare in 2008. The party simply ensured that its supporters and potential supporters registered for the vote and that they turned out on voting day, willingly.
It took a lot of organisation over a long period but paid dividends.
The registration drive obviously saw some opposition supporters being encouraged to register at the same time in the targeted groups, but the party, by carefully targeting, did have a substantial majority of the new voters or regularised voters who had moved home and now had their addresses and constituencies changed so they could vote without travelling long distances.
There is a tendency for those in a highly fragmented opposition, and their foreign backers, to assume that most voters think the way they do.
They are obviously wrong. If they want a change they need to stop wasting time on ineffective or illegal actions, and start figuring out rational policies that will attract voters, ensure that potential voters are registered, and encourage their supporters to take a couple of hours off on voting day.
Online Reporter
dyton mupawaenda