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Mugabe tells Japan the West want regime change not Zimbabweans - it will take street protest to be heard

16 Mar 2015 at 20:10hrs | Views
Mugabe tells the Japanese TV station that is the West and not the Zimbabwean people who have sort regime change all these years.

"They [West] want things done their own way... They want regime change in Zimbabwe. They want me to go, them and not my people," Mugabe was quoted as saying on Japanese TV. The Japanese people know Mugabe is a corrupt tyrant who has rigged past elections to be so easily fooled.

Most people who know anything about Zimbabwe's political history would know about how you, Mr Mugabe, resorted to wanton violence is the presidential run-off in 2008 to win the elections. Not even the SADC or AU election observer teams known for turning a blind eye to Africa's greatest failure since independence – failure to hold free, fair and credible elections and give their own people a meaningful say in the governance of the country – they could not do so for Mugabe. Even by Africa's very low electoral standards Mugabe had gone beyond the peril.

It was not the West who wanted regime change then but ordinary Zimbabweans. And Mugabe had resorted to brute force to deny them regime change.

It was SADC who had engineered the GNU to give him softer landing. After rejecting the 2008 election result the logical solution would have been to hold the elections again under international supervision to stop the violence and vote rigging. Mugabe would have lost those elections. The GNU was to save Mugabe having to face that grime prospect of being rejected by the voters whom he had abused and brutalized.

The GNU was tasked to implement a raft of democratic reforms designed to ensure the next elections were free, fair and credible. Sadly for the people of Zimbabwe, but good fortune for Mugabe, MDC under the leadership of Morgan Tsvangirai failed to get even one democratic reform implemented.

Mugabe was able to bribe Tsvangirai and his MDC friends into doing nothing about the reforms. The MDC leaders were breathtakingly incompetent not to realised the critical importance of the reforms for not just the July 2013 elections for all future elections.

Without any reforms, Mugabe was able to blatantly rig the vote; spending $13 million to pay an Israeli company, Nikuv, to tamper with the voters roll; millions more bussing Zanu PF party youths from one polling station to the next casting multiple votes at each station; etc. Mugabe has stubbornly refused to realise the voters roll because it is the smoking gun to the vote rigging.

It does not matter how many times Mugabe denies it; the people of Zimbabwe have regime change in search of an alternative government best able to deliver their political and economic aspirations of freedom, justice, liberty and economic prosperity. Mugabe has systematically denied the people regime change by failed to hold free, fair and credible election is all his 35 years in power.

Decades of economic mismanagement and corruption have however taken a heavy toll on the national economy; the economy is now in total meltdown and Mugabe does not know what to do. Mugabe thought he could rig economic recovery after rigging the 2013 national elections with his ZimAsset recovery plan which proposed to throw $27 billion at the economy without addressing any of the underlying causes.

After one and half years since the rigged July 2013 elections it is clear ZimAsset is dead in the water because Mugabe failed to get anyone to bankroll it.

Mugabe does not the political will to address the underlying problems behind the economic meltdown; he never had because both mismanagement and corruption date back to soon after independence. So as long as Mugabe and Zanu PF remain in power the economic meltdown will only get worse not better.

So many companies have closed, down unemployment has soared to 90% plus, 16% of the people now live in abject poverty, government itself is spending 80% of its collected revenue in paying wages, etc. What is clear as day is the economic situation cannot go on for much longer.

The only way out is for Mugabe and Zanu PF to step down.

After 35 years of using all manner of dirty tricks to deny the people of Zimbabwe regime change; it is going to be the economic meltdown that will force Mugabe to think the unthinkable and accept the unacceptable - regime change!

Of course the people wanted regime change because Mugabe had failed to deliver the economic prosperity on the economic front and the freedom and liberty on the political front.

The economic hardships have reached alarming levels that it is a matter of months before the people's anger with the regime finally burst and they demand regime change. When that happens, the people's anger will neither be contained nor their demand for regime change by denied. Only then will Mugabe accept that it is the people of Zimbabwe and not the West who want regime change and had been clamouring and many have even died for it all these years!

Source - Wilbert Mukori
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