Zanu PF resisting reforms because 'we want development' said Grace

Mugabe and Zanu PF have hijacked the people's struggle for national independence, freedom and human rights to redefine it in its narrowest format of a racial struggle to remove the whites and replace them with Zanu PF approved blacks. The regime has denied the people their fair share of the nation's riches and even to the bare necessities of life like clean running water, health and education services.

The regime has air brushed the people's hopes and dreams for freedom and human rights including the right to a meaningful say in the governance of the country and even the right to life. After 35 years of independence the country is yet to hold free, fair and credible elections; the people have been denied a free vote in pursuance of Zanu PF's "no regime change" mantra.

"If you understand the history of this country, you will never vote for MDC," said Grace Mugabe yesterday in Binga.

Binga and a few other areas in Zimbabwe were the lucky ones to have ended with MDC MPs and councillors after the 2013 elections; the elections were rigged but, admittedly, it would not have been prudent for Zanu PF to win all the available seats.  

"If you continue supporting Tsvangirai, you will stay like this (poor)," Grace threatened. "We have had more than twenty by-elections but Tsvangirai and his party have been boycotting. Zanu PF is winning and they cry foul. They are saying let us amend the constitution. We need development. We cannot focus on the constitution always."
 
Grace's threat was not an empty threat. Grace was in Binga "on a mission to capacitate developmental projects, especially the Bulawayo Kraal Project" reported The Herald. For 35 years the regime and its propagandists in the Zanu PF control public print and electronic media had never tired of reporting of development projects and yet the nation has been sinking remorselessly into the economic abyss dragging the people with it.

The poverty is everywhere in Zimbabwe; life expectancy, the qualitative and quantitative measure of the standard of living, has dropped from 68 years in 1980 to 34 years in 2008.

The amendments Grace was referring are the democratic reforms everyone agreed and signed onto, including by her husband, Tsvangirai, Mutambara and former South African President Thabo Mbeki, in the 2008 Global Political Agreement as necessary for free, fair and credible elections. Sadly MDC failed to get even one of these reforms implemented during the GNU.

Mugabe took full advantage of MDC's betrayal of the people of Zimbabwe and SADC Heads of State, who had tried their best to warn MDC not to take part in the election without implementing the reforms. The people's right to free and meaningful elections is the basis of good governance and is the root cause why Zimbabwe is in this political and economic mess.

The converse is equally true; there only way out of the political and economic mess the nation now finds itself is by ending the bad governance by holding free, fair and credible elections.

The people have waited for their first free, fair and credible elections, all the democratic reforms necessary must be implemented as a matter of urgency. We must reject all Mugabe and Zanu PF's attempts to short change the nations again and try holding the next election with no reforms implemented of the feeble grounds "We need development. We cannot focus on the constitution always," as Grace said.

Since when has granting the people their basic human rights become an impediment to development!  After 35 years of being cheated and denied, we demand that all our human freedoms and rights and dreams and aspirations independence fully honoured now!