12 There is much more to the 1999 survey, and it is not our intention to review these, merely to give the flavour of the directions in which public opinion was going before the referendum on the constitution, and the 2000 General Election. The picture that has emerged from the 2004 survey is even less optimistic, and indeed suggests that Zimbabweans now have even less faith in the future of democracy than in 1999. The 2004 survey produced some rather perplexing findings. As the authors commented: Public opinion in Zimbabwe in 2004 is a paradox. On the economic front, people feel deprived. They regard economic conditions in a generally negative light and worry that – in the face of hunger, joblessness, and inflation – that their families are slipping into poverty. And they hold the government’s economic mismanagement responsible for perceived declines in public welfare. On the political front, however, Zimbabweans are adapting to Zanu-PF’s dominance. They are losing faith in multiparty democracy as a solution to the country’s woes and are increasingly tempted, perhaps out of weariness, to try a single party alternative. While ZANU-PF has not established itself as a widely trusted institution, Robert Mugabe’s popularity as president has gradually increased, especially when compared to low overt support for the opposition MDC and its leader. The changes since 1999 have indeed been massive. Zimbabwe has become the world’s fastest declining economy with one of the highest rates of inflation in the world. The country has gone from food exporting to needing food assistance for an estimated 5 million of its citizens, and this within the context of one of the highest rates of HIV infection in the world. Since 1999, Zimbabwe has witnessed two highly disputed elections, and these led to the withdrawal of most donor support and the imposition of targeted sanctions against many of the country’ top leaders. Despite all the negatives, the 2004 survey shows Zimbabweans accepting the status quo rather than change, and becoming even more pessimistic about the possibility of liberal democracy than 5 years earlier. Zimbabweans showed the largest decline in their faith in democracy of any African country in the survey. Support for democracy slipped 23 points from 1999, but it is also evident that this did not correspond to a renewed support for non-democratic alternatives as this rating did not appear to change over the survey period. Yet in the context of all of this objective misery, for which the people polled clearly blamed the government, there was an apparent increase in the popularity of the incumbent executive, Robert Mugabe, and the overall ratings for Robert Mugabe increased by 31 rating points over the survey period. This is something of a paradox, as the Afrobarometer authors commented above. In an effort to explain this paradoxical result, the Afrobarometer tested three possible hypotheses: · · The economic explanation: perhaps those people who benefited from ZANU-PF’s attempts at economic redistribution, or those who saw the economic downturn easing in recent times, were ready to give the president the benefit of the doubt. The political fear explanation: perhaps Zimbabweans felt so intimidated by ZANU-PF surveillance and control that they were unwilling to express political opinions honestly (especially in response to survey questions), and instead said what they thought the government wanted to hear. IDASA: Zimbabwe at the Cross-Roads: Views of Zimbabwean citizens on democracy and transitional justice.