The media gave us Mujuru

For a person holding a doctorate degree, one would expect a polished delivery in terms of detail and simple pronunciation of the Queen's language.

It is not clear whether opposition leader Joice Mujuru's dance with known hostile retrogressive forces is out of a desperate quest for relevance or it's indicative of how her unsophisticated mind had long sold out to the devil.

Either way, devoid of all State apparel, Mujuru's recent jaunt to London has proved that she is nothing more than a mere media construct.

In sheer exposé of her unrefined mind, Mujuru told attendees at an event organised by the London School of Economics and the United Nations to mark International Women's Day in London that her ascendance to succeed President Mugabe was truncated by chauvinists within the revolutionary Zanu-PF.

"When it became apparent that I was the clear successor to President Robert Mugabe, men seemed not ready for that, although the nation had fully endorsed my candidature," Mujuru said in naïve attempt to legitimise her presence and give some measure of credence to her tawdry political tale.

Even with the her hosts' known hostile stance against Zimbabwe, it is given that none would have been so gullible as to believe such gibberish.

At what stage did it become apparent that Mujuru was the clear successor?

As a minister and Vice-President, Mujuru had always served at the mercy and fatherly benevolence of President Mugabe.

For anyone to imagine an obviousness in a political entity governed by the constitutional dictates and without any reference to empirical data only serves to expose that she is of not so lucid mind.

And to further suggest that the "nation" had endorsed her as the heir apparent to President Mugabe without any reference to a survey, election or even opinion poll further illustrates Mujuru's warped thinking.

Everyone knows that the President appoints people from elected Central Committee members to lead various departments in the Politburo; and when it comes to the Presidency, one has to be subjected to an elective Congress and approved by delegates as leader.

It is thus strange for Mujuru to claim that the "nation" had endorsed her candidature in the absence of any formal process.

This is the kind of hallucination associated with individuals who are haunted by their apparent frailties and seek to present themselves as victims of some imagined grand scheme.

Media reports on the London event were less sympathetic to Mujuru, whose presentation was described by one columnist as "dreary, flawed and yawn inducing".

For a person holding a doctorate degree, one would expect a polished delivery in terms of detail and simple pronunciation of the Queen's language.

However, her constant mispronunciations and irredeemable reading left the few Zimbabweans in the audience cringing.

What is clear from Mujuru's recent London jaunt and all other platforms where she has tried to sell herself as presidential material is that she has all along benefited from a sympathetic private media that constructed a favourable identity but cannot sustain the charade much longer.

Media construct social reality.

In the construction of that social reality, the media wilfully and unwilfully created the image of a woman who had defied odds to reach the upper echelons of power.

It was simple.

All too often, the media are good at giving audiences versions of reality and not reality itself. Images or identities are created by producers and the audiences are saturated with images that may have no bearing to reality.

The image of Mujuru, which the ruling party was complicit in its construction, was that of an ex-guerilla fighter who joined the liberation struggle as a naïve, illiterate village girl from Dotito.

Exposed to the vagaries of the war, the village girl soon became conscious and transformed herself into a fearless freedom fighter who gunned down an enemy helicopter.

And after the war, the naïve illiterate village girl becomes the youngest female Cabinet minister and through her own sheer resolve reached self-actualisation by first enrolling for Ordinary and Advanced Level before getting a university degree.

But those who recruited her know how she thrived more through interpersonal associations than meritocracy.

Even though there were times when her frailties were exposed, Zanu-PF camouflaged them, probably with the hope that with experience her unrefined traits would diminish.

This was not to be.

Many will remember how she undexterously derided the late Vice-President Joshua Nkomo after differing with him on some contracts to be given to a businessman.

They will also remember how she went against Government policy and called on the media to cover up reports of corruption.

Addressing the Mashonaland West Zanu-PF Provincial Women's League conference in February 2014, Mujuru said graft cases should not be discussed in the media.

Some within and outside Zanu-pf called for her immediate resignation but again it was the benevolence of President Mugabe that saved her skin.

It is thus not surprising that devoid of all the State camouflaging, the identity that the media had constructed around Mujuru is falling apart, exposing one who despite her numerous years in Government has remained at core a naïve, illiterate village girl.

No one is convinced that she capable of articulating any policies beneficial to the well-being of Zimbabweans.

Even Messer's Rugare Gumbo and Didymus Mutasa, who had taken it upon themselves to be the buffer in the continued camouflaging Mujuru's incapacities, soon got disillusioned by someone who seems to be sustained by fantasy in the same way that alcohol convinces some that they are good looking regardless of how aesthetically challenged they really are.