The Return of the Jettisoned: ZANU-PF's Crack at ‘Re-Urbanising’ in Harare

After Zimbabwe's ruling party, ZANU-PF, lost the cities to the opposition in 2000, it mounted a spirited comeback bid. Nowhere was this more apparent than in Harare, the capital city, whose residents had overwhelmingly rejected the party in the parliamentary elections – a trend that was to be repeated with chilling regularity during the next four years. The party's attempt to ‘re-urbanise’ consisted of two strategies, namely, regaining control of institutions of local governance and getting re-elected into council and parliament. The former has been hugely successful while so far the latter has not yielded much. This article revisits the party's comeback bid and assesses its strategies in order to explain their contrasting fortunes. The discussion argues that the attempt to win elections failed because, in the first place, the party did not address the reasons for the hostility of the city's voters, and in some cases even exacerbated its alienation from the majority of these voters.