Coltart's work of fiction

The book written by David Coltart titled, The Struggle Continues: 50 years of tyranny, is revealing itself to be a work of a spiteful politician who has failed to have his way in the jungle of politics.

From the reviews so far published about the book, Coltart is surely seeking to denigrate his political nemesis by publishing falsehoods about them, while depicting himself as the knight in shining armour.

It is clear that Coltart has positioned himself as the resident advocate of the evicted commercial farmers.

His job is to continue projecting the progenitor of the Land Reform Programme, who is President Robert Mugabe, as a tyrannical and undemocratic leader.

By continuing to besmirch President Mugabe, Coltart hopes that by association, all programmes instituted by the President, including the Land Reform Programme, would be similarly tainted, with a possibility of being reversed if there was to be a change of regime.

So after trying all political tricks during his short stint as a legislator and a Cabinet Minister, Coltart eventually decided to fabricate events that he compiled into a book.

In sync with the opposition anti-Mugabe chorus, he decided to continue questioning the electoral legitimacy of President Robert Mugabe, hence in some parts of his fictional book, he wrote about an instance where President Robert Mugabe was supposedly offered asylum by the former Senegalese President, Abdulaye Wade after the 2008 harmonised elections.

When one reads this part of the book, its unsubstantiated nature becomes clearer.

Coltart talks of a private meeting held after the first round of the 2008 harmonised elections in which he, together with Tendai Biti, met with Wade, who reportedly excoriated President Mugabe for his purported deficiency in handling human rights matters in the country.

This part of the book dovetails with the pervasive western-led crusade to cast aspersions at President Robert Mugabe's leadership and continuously project him as leading the country without the people's electoral mandate.

The President is cast as supposedly unwanted in his own country, a leader with no popular support and a candidate for asylum.

Sadly, this is in stark contrast to results of several elections and public surveys that have consistently demonstrated that the President is ever-popular and the people's choice.

In the case, it will be trite to mention that their credibility has been vouched for by several observer missions, including the AU and the SADC missions.

It is therefore pure mischief for people like Coltart to keep on questioning the legitimacy of President Mugabe's leadership by concocting some far-fetched events in Senegal.

If this Senegal figment had truly happened as cited by Coltart, it should have made headline news in the ever-critical private press.

The question then is why the event remained a secret for so long, waiting only to be conveniently divulged by Coltart when it could have long-back re-enforced the opposition's weak and depleted propaganda arsenal?

For all we know, Coltart is simply seeking to resuscitate his evanescing political career after facing electoral defeat at the hands of Thabitha Khumalo of the MDC-T in 2013.

He is also an anti-Land Reform Programme activist, who still dreams of the reversal of the agrarian programme.

Due to all these shortcomings, Coltart's book should be dismissed as a compilation of unsubstantiated falsehoods and personal opinions of the writer.

In fact, it is a work of fiction.