Zanu PF 'connect' with voters through 20 kgs input - now demand 20kgs of reforms

ZANU PF politburo member and cabinet minister Jonathan Moyo has admitted his party abuses government programmes to gain advantage over opponents he scorned for attempts to connect with land dependent villagers through "hash tags".

He added, "We relate to them every day. We don't have to hash tag them. We don't have to telephone them, we interact with them and say ‘here is your 20kgs of inputs, how are you doing'.

If this was indeed the case, Zanu PF connected with all these rural voters then why does the party need the 20 kgs of inputs in one hand and a whip in the other? Why does the party deny all those suspected of supporting anyone else the inputs if it was so cocksure its caring attentiveness is working? Why does the party need to bribe or frog march the populous to attend party rallies and to ensure they vote for the party? Why did the party punish the people 2008 when they dared reject the party in the barbarism of the 2008 presidential run-off operation "Mavhotera papi!" (Whom did you vote for!)?

"What was accomplished by the bullet cannot be undone by the ballot!" thundered President Mugabe, to encourage the Zanu PF thugs, war veterans and security services personnel from the Army, Police and CIO deployed in operation Mavhotera papi to harass, beat, rape and even murder ordinary people. Over 500 were murdered in the three months of the "declare war on the people", as Morgan Tsvangirai called it. Was that necessary for a party that is connected to the voters?

Why is Zanu PF always reminding the people of the horrors of 2008 if the elections results do not go its way?

Of course, it is an insult to the rural people that they are happy with their miserable lives in which basic services like education and health have completely collapsed. If urban hospitals like Mpilo and Harare Hospitals are running out of basic drugs like painkillers how much worse off are the hospitals and clinics in the rural back waters. These people too still dream of a free, just and prosperous Zimbabwe.

These people would not need the 20kgs input they were employed. With unemployment at 90% plus the rural people are at the coal face of the abject poverty gripping Zimbabwe.

Professor Moyo also denied that Zimbabwe was fragile state, insisting "fragile states are not stable, they don't have order". "One country that has stood out certainly in this part of the whole in terms of order and stability is Zimbabwe."

Zimbabwe has all the ingredients to make a fragile state, growing poverty and hopelessness. It is the growing poverty that is fuelling the dog-eat-dog fighting going on in Zanu PF itself as party member fight over the fast shrinking national cake.

Even those who have amassed a lot of wealth, like Grace Mugabe, are fearful of losing it all in the midst of the growing poverty. She does not have to look far to see what happens to Zanu PF chefs who have lost power; Joice Mujuru, whom Grace herself "baby dumped" is already having poverty related sleepless nights as the billions of dollars she and her late husband looted are fast disappearing like a pool of rainy water under the scotching hot sun. Hence the reason why Grace is fighting like a wild cat to succeed her husband as president, this is the only way she can be certain to hang on to her ill-gotten wealth.

Zimbabwe's economic meltdown which has resulted in the 90% unemployment rate making Zimbabweans the poorest people in Africa is socially, politically, economically and morally unsustainable. This is what makes Zimbabwe a fragile and unstable nation. There are two reasons the corrupt and tyrannical Zanu PF regime has not been toppled for the last 37 years:

1) Zimbabwe is a Police State on the same lines as North Korea, the people have been brow beaten into submission by such events as Gukurahundi, operation Mavhotera papi and the ever harassing presence of the CIO operatives. Zimbabwe has CIOs "everywhere", as former CIO Boss, Didymus Mutasa once boasted; numbering more than nurses, doctors and teachers put together!

2) President Mugabe has had the great fortune to be surround by some of the most corrupt and incompetent politicians, both within his own party and in the opposition, whom he has bribed and bamboozled in equal measure to establish and retain his de facto one party dictatorship for all these years.

Still no amount of brutal force or useless politicians will stop the disintegration of Zanu PF which has already started with all the infighting going on already in the party. The party is rotten to the core and the centre cannot hold. The people's anger, bottled all these year, at being denied their freedoms, human rights and dignity will finally burst one of these days and sweep aside the corrupt and tyrannical Zanu PF dictatorship.

Professor Moyo was very dismissive of the opposition's effort to build a coalition.

"One day it looks like, yes, they have succeeded the next day, no, they don't know how to do this (coalition) but they have signalled that this is the most important thing for them to do.

"So, we are all watching and they are likely to spend all the time until the nomination sits trying to build that coalition but it is about election."

The truth is it is none other than Zanu PF itself that has done everything in its power to encourage the opposition to go down this coalition route. The alternative route was to demand the implementation of the democratic reforms designed to ensure the elections are free, fair and credible. Just to be absolute sure the opposition does not do the obvious thing and boycott elections to press for reforms, Zanu PF has been giving away a few gravy train seats to those who contest the flawed elections.

The expose of the madness of contesting election with no meaningful democratic reforms in place is the single greatest worry for Zanu PF today. The last thing the party want is Tsvangirai and his opposition friends being denounced as sell-out, a totally discredited opposition, even if they still contest the flawed elections, will not give Zanu PF the legitimacy it needs. If next year's elections are once again, as happened in 2008, judged not free and fair; President Mugabe and his Zanu PF friends will know that this time the game is up. For they know that this time they will not cheap or bamboozle anyone to stop the reforms being implemented in full as they did during the GNU.

There is a growing number of Zimbabwe who are determined to see meaning reforms implemented BEFORE the next elections; for we know Zanu PF has been winning elections not because it is connected with the voters but rather its wide-ranging ability to rig the vote. There is something for you, Professor Moyo, and everyone in Zanu PF including his Excellence President Mugabe and his wife to chew on. No one in Zanu PF cares one way or the other if the opposition's grand coalition ever comes into being or not; what everyone in the party would be worried sick about is having the reforms implemented!

Just to be absolutely clear, Professor Moyo; the reforms are on the national agenda and there they will remain until they are implemented!