Who in Zanu-PF still wants Mugabe?

As Zanu-PF's damp squib "elective" congress droned to a disappointing close yesterday, the pertinent question of who exactly among the party's senior officials still wants President Robert Mugabe as the leader of the party and country became even more urgent.

The long-ruling nonagenarian and his enthusiastic wife Grace have expended so much energy over the past few weeks telling anyone who cares to listen that his lieutenants allegedly wanted to topple him from power and also send him to meet his Maker early.

To that extent, this past week, which some optimistic Zimbabweans thought could mark a rare auspicious point in Mugabe's 34 years of controversial rule, turned into a pathetic "sob opera" characterised by yet more empty sloganeering and mindless bashing of Vice President Joice Mujuru and her close allies — the alleged masterminds behind the murky plot to "assassinate" the geriatric.

As a result, scores of Mugabe's Cabinet ministers and more than 100 Members of Parliament belonging to the ruling party were barred from the "con-Grace", allegedly because they are part of the plot to do Mugabe in. No wonder a miffed Zanu-PF politburo member derisively called the congress a mere "Mugabe praise and worship show", because not one useful policy or governance idea was discussed to try and pull the country out of the dire political and economic quagmire that it finds itself in — all thanks to Mugabe and Zanu-PF's well-documented misrule.

What has made the ill-advised assault on Mujuru and her allies so difficult to understand is that no cogent reasons have been advanced for the putsch other than the untested allegations that they want to oust and assassinate Mugabe.

What hogwash.

Exactly 10 years ago, the "new" crown prince, Justice minister Emmerson Mnangagwa, and his supporters were equally decimated under the same tired claim that they wanted to oust Mugabe from power under what came to be known as the Tsholotsho Declaration.

Which all begs the urgent question of who exactly in Zanu-PF is loyal to Mugabe and still wants the nonagenarian to be the leader of the ruling party and the government — as it appears that every senior member of the party has been accused of treason at one point or the other, including this week's supposed "victors"?

Zimbabwe's biggest undoing is Mugabe's and Grace's strange belief that the country would cease to exist if the nonagenarian were not on the throne.

What claptrap.

The fact is that Mugabe has become the biggest impediment to progress and development in this country, with our only enduring memories of him having to do with his ineptitude and poor governance as a leader, the endemic corruption in the country that is synonymous with Zanu-PF, Gukurahundi, Murambatsvina, record poverty and unemployment, as well as a million other things that have gone wrong since 1980.

So, while Zimbabweans will give Zanu-PF's hardline hyenas their due credit, in the sense that they have done a complete and successful job of assassinating Mujuru politically, the nagging question remains: what next?

And for Gushongo, the equally critical question is, does he want anyone to succeed him at all, and has he in fact planted the seeds for his own and Zanu-PF's ultimate demise by annihilating the Mujuru camp now, and the Mnangagwa faction before that?

Indeed, it is also a fair question for Zimbabweans to ask Mugabe when the nation can expect him to make up his mind about the real cause of our country's never-ending political and economic problems?

For, and this is according to his heretical gospel, it was first Morgan Tsvangirai and white commercial farmers who were the reason for all of our myriad crises of the past 34 years.

Then it was the "racist" West and their "evil" sanctions who were causing all of our problems — all this despite the fact that our rulers are always very happy to receive desperately-needed food and medicines when these are donated to us by the same evil Americans and British.

Then it was Mnangagwa and the Tsholotsho gang; and now, it is the Vice President of the Republic who was put in that lofty position by none other than Mugabe himself when he descended on Mnangagwa!

It boggles the mind. Of course, and as already stated above, the truth of the matter is that our myriad and seemingly intractable problems since our Uhuru from Britain in 1980 have got absolutely nothing to do with any of the scapegoats mentioned above.

Indeed, our misery has everything to do with Zanu-PF's misrule and the gross corruption of the party's bigwigs across the board.