Opinion / Columnist
If Mugabe can rig economic recovery then he will make Grace President
05 Aug 2014 at 07:54hrs | Views
Ever since the news broke out that the incumbent Zanu PF Women League Chairperson, Oppah Muchinguri, will step down in favour of Grace Mugabe, the nation has been buzzing like a bee-hive on red alert. It is to be expected.
Zimbabwe is not just your run-of-the-mill one-party state; it is a one-party state in which the official opposition is hopelessly incompetent. Zanu PF "is blest with fools for opposition" as the Zanu PF chief propagandist Nathaniel Manheru so pithily put it. The party itself is not just your run-of-the-mill one-man dictatorship; it is a one-man dictatorship in which the other members are just as incompetent as the opposition leaders.
So Robert Mugabe is indeed blest with fools for opposition and fools for party members. When he says "Zimbabwe is mine!" he means it is the same sense that the Pharaoh of Egypt said "The slave is mine!" Everything in Zimbabwe belongs to Mugabe and for dispose of as he pleases. Zimbabwe is in this political and economic mess precisely because he has commandeering the nation's vast resources and wealth to gratify his insatiable hunger for riches and dished out the rest to his cronies at the expense of the masses now living in abject poverty. He has murdered over 30 000 innocent Zimbabweans who dared challenge his claim to absolute power!
The ordinary Zimbabweans have been reduced to mere serfs with no meaningful say in the governance of the country. Mugabe has denied even his own colleagues in Zanu PF an meaningful say, without appearing to do.
For the last 34 years Mugabe has had Vice Presidents, Ministers and Deputy Ministers and God knows what else besides and yet none of them had any real power to do anything. Indeed it is no secret that whenever Mugabe is out of the country there are no cabinet meetings. He did not trust anyone to tell the others what to do.
Vice President Mujuru, like VP Simon Muzenda before her, was certainly not appointed into that position for her intellect but the exact opposite. The two knew that and Mugabe has treated them more like one would glorified kindergarten head-boy or head-girl. He has done exactly the same with the rest of the Zanu PF leaders. None of them seemed to mind the demeaning illusion of power as long as they got a share of the looted wealth. But even the wealth did not last long; the gold turned to dust in their hands.
Zimbabwe was rich with a promising future when Mugabe took over in 1980. Years of mismanagement and corruption by Mugabe have seen the nation's wealth disappear like a pool of water in the dry summer heat. The advancing poverty and hopelessness has spared no one, not even Zanu PF grandees like the late Nathan Shamuyarira. For the last decade or so he lived in abject poverty and died a pauper.
He, like many other Zanu PF party loyalists, was allocated a farm, seized from a white owner but failed to make productive use of it. He thought he had it made when he moved in but production dropped from thousands of tonnes of maize or whatever to zero over night! "Munda hauzvirimi!" (A farm requires a farmer to be productive!) as my late mother would say!
Mugabe's 1980 promise of mass prosperity (Gutsa ruzhinji) has turned into mass poverty to millions of ordinary Zimbabweans and most the Zanu PF leaders themselves. Only Mugabe and a handful of others have prospered but even they must be very uneasy. Hosting a $5 million wedding and living in a $20 billion Blue Roof mansion when 98% of the nation's medicines are donor funded because the nation is too poor to pay for such basic necessities of life would make anyone with a sense of appropriate choke with the glaring injustice of it all!
How is it possible that Mugabe has conned Zanu PF leaders into believing that they had political power when none of them exercised any for 34 years; is a mystery.
How Mugabe has managed to con the same Zanu PF leaders and many of the hardliner party supporters into believing they were prospering when they were getting poorer and poorer these last fifteen years is yet another mystery.
Conning Tsvangirai and his MDC friends into doing nothing about implementing the reforms was not a really challenge for Mugabe given that Tsvangirai is without doubt one of the breathtakingly incompetent leaders of our time.
But now Mugabe is about to pull off the greatest con-job of his politic life; impose Grace Mugabe as Zanu PF party leader and president.
Zanu PF has just come up with a new rule barring anyone who has not held a party position for less than 15 years at provincial level from holding higher office. The rule was designed to stop "young turks" who were threatening to take over power from senior party members. Grace Mugabe is certainly a young turk but off cause the rule applies to everyone else but not her.
There is no doubt that Grace Mugabe would not have gone for the Zanu PF Women League chairperson post without the knowledge of her all-powerful and feared husband, Robert Gabriel Mugabe, the man who owns Zimbabwe! When Oppah Muchingura heard what was afoot, she quickly stepped aside!
The nation is abuzz because everyone knows if it is Mugabe's wish for Grace to succeed him then it is as good as done for no one in the party will dare oppose him. Of course everyone is worried sick because in a one-man dictatorship the time to change leader is ripe with uncertainty and dangers. Past loyalties count for nothing; everyone must demonstrate anew their allegiance. For some it will be musical chairs, others pass the parcel in the dark and for the unlucky ones it is murder by a thousand cuts!
Whatever Mugabe is planning for his wife, be it that she should be the king-maker or have the presidency herself many unworthy individuals will be rewarded, a favour they will be expected to pay back in blind loyalty to her, and many worth individuals will be sacrificed because they are a threat to her hold on power.
If the likes of Mai Mujuru and Mnangagwa had been competent individuals then they should have taken Mugabe to task years ago for single-handedly turning the country from a rich and prosperous nation into the impoverished nation it is today. For corrupting the party's ideals of freedom, justice and human dignity for which so many died for during the liberation struggle into the corrupt and murderous party Zanu PF is today.
Since the rigged 2013 elections Zanu PF has failed to rig economic recovery and as long as the economic meltdown continues the party's continued rule is doubtful. The only way to end the economic meltdown is by holding free and fair elections.
Not even the most naïve of Zanu PF's hard-line supporters are under any illusion that Zanu PF would ever win free and fair elections. The chance of the party being able to pull-off yet other rigged elections as happened in the past is remote. The emerging opposition is not going to be so easily bamboozled as Tsvangirai and MDC.
Yap, Mugabe is sure lucky to have such incompetent Zanu PF party leaders; it should be him who should have been on his back foot for destroying the nation and making Zanu PF unelectable. Instead he has the lot of them running round like headless chickens fearing for their political and economic survival and possibly even their very lives. Zanu PF is in terminal decline and he is selling it to his followers as if it is the healthiest political party in the whole world.
Mugabe conned Tsvangirai into doing nothing about the reforms conned Mai Mujuru and Mnangagwa into accepting the roles of glorified kindergarten head girl and head-boy for donkey years. And now the greatest con man of our time is may pull-off his greatest con-job of all impose his wife as Her Excellency Grace Mugabe, President of the Republic of Zimbabwe!
The only fly in Mugabe's ointment is the economic meltdown; if only Mugabe could rig economic recovery, for without it not even Mugabe himself is certain his rule will last for another year much less to 2018 for his wife to stand as the Zanu PF presidential candidate!
Contact author: zimbabwesocialdemocrats@gmail.com
Zimbabwe is not just your run-of-the-mill one-party state; it is a one-party state in which the official opposition is hopelessly incompetent. Zanu PF "is blest with fools for opposition" as the Zanu PF chief propagandist Nathaniel Manheru so pithily put it. The party itself is not just your run-of-the-mill one-man dictatorship; it is a one-man dictatorship in which the other members are just as incompetent as the opposition leaders.
So Robert Mugabe is indeed blest with fools for opposition and fools for party members. When he says "Zimbabwe is mine!" he means it is the same sense that the Pharaoh of Egypt said "The slave is mine!" Everything in Zimbabwe belongs to Mugabe and for dispose of as he pleases. Zimbabwe is in this political and economic mess precisely because he has commandeering the nation's vast resources and wealth to gratify his insatiable hunger for riches and dished out the rest to his cronies at the expense of the masses now living in abject poverty. He has murdered over 30 000 innocent Zimbabweans who dared challenge his claim to absolute power!
The ordinary Zimbabweans have been reduced to mere serfs with no meaningful say in the governance of the country. Mugabe has denied even his own colleagues in Zanu PF an meaningful say, without appearing to do.
For the last 34 years Mugabe has had Vice Presidents, Ministers and Deputy Ministers and God knows what else besides and yet none of them had any real power to do anything. Indeed it is no secret that whenever Mugabe is out of the country there are no cabinet meetings. He did not trust anyone to tell the others what to do.
Vice President Mujuru, like VP Simon Muzenda before her, was certainly not appointed into that position for her intellect but the exact opposite. The two knew that and Mugabe has treated them more like one would glorified kindergarten head-boy or head-girl. He has done exactly the same with the rest of the Zanu PF leaders. None of them seemed to mind the demeaning illusion of power as long as they got a share of the looted wealth. But even the wealth did not last long; the gold turned to dust in their hands.
Zimbabwe was rich with a promising future when Mugabe took over in 1980. Years of mismanagement and corruption by Mugabe have seen the nation's wealth disappear like a pool of water in the dry summer heat. The advancing poverty and hopelessness has spared no one, not even Zanu PF grandees like the late Nathan Shamuyarira. For the last decade or so he lived in abject poverty and died a pauper.
He, like many other Zanu PF party loyalists, was allocated a farm, seized from a white owner but failed to make productive use of it. He thought he had it made when he moved in but production dropped from thousands of tonnes of maize or whatever to zero over night! "Munda hauzvirimi!" (A farm requires a farmer to be productive!) as my late mother would say!
Mugabe's 1980 promise of mass prosperity (Gutsa ruzhinji) has turned into mass poverty to millions of ordinary Zimbabweans and most the Zanu PF leaders themselves. Only Mugabe and a handful of others have prospered but even they must be very uneasy. Hosting a $5 million wedding and living in a $20 billion Blue Roof mansion when 98% of the nation's medicines are donor funded because the nation is too poor to pay for such basic necessities of life would make anyone with a sense of appropriate choke with the glaring injustice of it all!
How is it possible that Mugabe has conned Zanu PF leaders into believing that they had political power when none of them exercised any for 34 years; is a mystery.
How Mugabe has managed to con the same Zanu PF leaders and many of the hardliner party supporters into believing they were prospering when they were getting poorer and poorer these last fifteen years is yet another mystery.
Conning Tsvangirai and his MDC friends into doing nothing about implementing the reforms was not a really challenge for Mugabe given that Tsvangirai is without doubt one of the breathtakingly incompetent leaders of our time.
But now Mugabe is about to pull off the greatest con-job of his politic life; impose Grace Mugabe as Zanu PF party leader and president.
Zanu PF has just come up with a new rule barring anyone who has not held a party position for less than 15 years at provincial level from holding higher office. The rule was designed to stop "young turks" who were threatening to take over power from senior party members. Grace Mugabe is certainly a young turk but off cause the rule applies to everyone else but not her.
There is no doubt that Grace Mugabe would not have gone for the Zanu PF Women League chairperson post without the knowledge of her all-powerful and feared husband, Robert Gabriel Mugabe, the man who owns Zimbabwe! When Oppah Muchingura heard what was afoot, she quickly stepped aside!
The nation is abuzz because everyone knows if it is Mugabe's wish for Grace to succeed him then it is as good as done for no one in the party will dare oppose him. Of course everyone is worried sick because in a one-man dictatorship the time to change leader is ripe with uncertainty and dangers. Past loyalties count for nothing; everyone must demonstrate anew their allegiance. For some it will be musical chairs, others pass the parcel in the dark and for the unlucky ones it is murder by a thousand cuts!
Whatever Mugabe is planning for his wife, be it that she should be the king-maker or have the presidency herself many unworthy individuals will be rewarded, a favour they will be expected to pay back in blind loyalty to her, and many worth individuals will be sacrificed because they are a threat to her hold on power.
If the likes of Mai Mujuru and Mnangagwa had been competent individuals then they should have taken Mugabe to task years ago for single-handedly turning the country from a rich and prosperous nation into the impoverished nation it is today. For corrupting the party's ideals of freedom, justice and human dignity for which so many died for during the liberation struggle into the corrupt and murderous party Zanu PF is today.
Since the rigged 2013 elections Zanu PF has failed to rig economic recovery and as long as the economic meltdown continues the party's continued rule is doubtful. The only way to end the economic meltdown is by holding free and fair elections.
Not even the most naïve of Zanu PF's hard-line supporters are under any illusion that Zanu PF would ever win free and fair elections. The chance of the party being able to pull-off yet other rigged elections as happened in the past is remote. The emerging opposition is not going to be so easily bamboozled as Tsvangirai and MDC.
Yap, Mugabe is sure lucky to have such incompetent Zanu PF party leaders; it should be him who should have been on his back foot for destroying the nation and making Zanu PF unelectable. Instead he has the lot of them running round like headless chickens fearing for their political and economic survival and possibly even their very lives. Zanu PF is in terminal decline and he is selling it to his followers as if it is the healthiest political party in the whole world.
Mugabe conned Tsvangirai into doing nothing about the reforms conned Mai Mujuru and Mnangagwa into accepting the roles of glorified kindergarten head girl and head-boy for donkey years. And now the greatest con man of our time is may pull-off his greatest con-job of all impose his wife as Her Excellency Grace Mugabe, President of the Republic of Zimbabwe!
The only fly in Mugabe's ointment is the economic meltdown; if only Mugabe could rig economic recovery, for without it not even Mugabe himself is certain his rule will last for another year much less to 2018 for his wife to stand as the Zanu PF presidential candidate!
Contact author: zimbabwesocialdemocrats@gmail.com
Source - Wilbert Mukori
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