MDC to boycott future elections after another by-election trouncing - to what end and purpose

A Zanu PF candidate has won the Chitungwiza council by-election trouncing the MDC-T candidate 993 to 91.

In August 2014, following a string of similar trouncing, MDC leader Morgan Tsvangirai said his party would no longer take part in any by-election in the country due its skewed electoral systems.

So it had taken MDC until August 2014 to finally realise that Zimbabwe's electoral system is "skewed"? Everybody else had seen this a long time ago; the democratic reforms agreed during the GPA in 2008 were meant to address this very problem. MDC had five years during the GNU to implement the reforms and failed to get even one reform implemented. Not one!

"We are maintaining the position that we are not going to participate in any by election until the electoral reforms are done and one of those reforms is that we want a voters' roll," said MDC-T spokesman Douglas Mwonzora.

Now MDC tells the nation the party will not take part in future elections unless the electoral system is reformed; Tsvangirai does not say how the system will be reformed because he does not have a clue how that can be done now that the chance to do so has been lost!

Zimbabwe's best chance to end this Zanu PF dictatorship was during the GNU and the chance was wasted because of MDC's breath-taking incompetence. Now the nation is paying dearly for the folly of electing MDC. Anyone who follows MDC after this only shows that they are incapable of learning from the past mistake!
Boycotting elections will not achieve anything because there will always be some other opposition party who will be only be too glad to get the scraps Zanu PF give them.

The vote is the only weapon in the ordinary person's armoury with which to fight off those who are hell bend on denying him or her their democratic right to a meaningful say in the governance of the country and how its wealth and riches are shared out. The Zimbabwean voters have been denied a meaningful vote by this Zanu PF regime for all these 34 years; sometimes because the regime devised at sophisticated vote rigging scheme the ordinary villager could not counter, as happened last year. But when the voters through voter apathy chose not to vote; that is the waste case of the voter shooting themselves in the foot because no one in their right mind would give up their only weapon and let the thugs run riot.

An MDC boycott will result in increased voter apathy but the electorate must know they are as much to blame for this as the incompetent MDC leaders who created this problem by their failure to implement the reform because it was the voters themselves who elected these incompetent MDC leaders. The single import thing here is for the electorate to learn from their folly of following blindly. What better way to prove that they have indeed learnt the lesson than by refusing to follow MDC down this dead end of boycotting elections.

The people must show they are more determined than ever to have a meaningful vote and will cast a spoilt vote rather than not vote at all! This will make Zanu PF work even harder than ever to rig future elections. Cheating Tsvangirai and his wildebeest herd of followers who hardly know their left hand from their right is easy as we have seen. Cheating a savvy electorate who know the true value of their vote and are therefore more determined than ever that their vote will count – even as a spoilt vote – is a totally different kettle of fish!

Zimbabwe is in this political and economic mess because the people, the electorate, have been naïve and gullible to elect Mugabe, a corrupt and murderous tyrant, and then Tsvangirai, a blundering and incompetent idiot. What the nation needs to get out of the mess is a savvy electorate; smart enough to elect leaders with some common sense at least; smart enough never to give up their vote, their only means to ensure they have a meaningful say in the governance of the country!
Tsvangirai's call to boycott elections until the "skewed" electoral system is put right without offering any solution how that is going to be done is a call for voter apathy – the worst thing the country should be doing! MDC should have implemented the reforms to ensure the electoral system was not skewed but having failed to do so the party is blundering around making a bad situation even worse. Boycott to what end and purpose? Voter apathy will not get us out of this hell-hole but smart thinking will!