Jabulani Sibanda admit regime change is now a certainty!

The Zanu-PF war vet thug leader, Jabulani Sibanda, who earned notoriety for intimidating, beating, raping and suspected murders of innocent Zimbabweans in the pursuit of Mugabe and Zanu-PF's singular of object of ensuring there will be no regime change has finally come out to admit his thuggery.

"The conflict over internal party elections currently obtaining is a betrayal of war veterans' aspirations. It is criminal because the revolution is now devoid of any legality. They (Zanu-PF leaders) have committed a crime of unparalleled proportions," Sibanda told the Daily News.

"What we thought was that after campaigning so hard, spending months sleeping in the bush and subsequently winning elections resoundingly in 2013, that we would use the five years of Mugabe's reign to reorganise the party ideologically and structurally.

"We, however, discovered that the ideology had changed to that of scattering the masses, demobilising and intimidating them using politically borrowed State power," he said.

Soon after independence Mugabe and Zanu-PF made a conscientious decision to undermine the country's democratic institutions and ride roughshod over the people basic and fundamental freedoms and rights including the right to one-man-one-vote and even the right to life to establish a de facto one-party dictatorship. By the time Sibanda stepped on the national political stage in the run up to the 2008 elections till his summarily dismissal in 2014 the Zanu-PF dictatorship was well establish and so too was the party's thuggery and vote rigging.

Sibanda's suggestion that the intimidation of the masses started after the 2013 elections is nonsense; it is to be expected of thugs like him; they are mentally slow, easily fooled and duped but worst, of all, there are known to have a very selective memory in which they are the victim and not the thug!

"Yes, we have been betrayed and we do not regret ever working under Mugabe because some of us were not working for an individual's legacy but that of the nation. Remember when we were under the Ian Smith bondage, some thought that his system would not be dismantled but it was.

"So if it happened then it will certainly happen now. Intimidation will not work," said Jabulani with conviction.

How can intimidating the people and denying them a vote be in the national interest! Mr Sibanda and his fellow Zanu-PF thugs understood the primary objective was to ensure there was no regime change so that political power and the unfettered access to the nation's wealth and resource will remain firmly in the hands of the Zanu-PF ruling elite. Sibanda and his fellow thugs considered themselves fully paid up members of the ruling elite and thus their full share the looted wealth and political power.

Other than a select few of the thug ringleaders like Sibanda and Joseph Chinotimba most of the war vets got absolutely nothing. They would spear headed the violent seizures of the white owned farms, for example, and as soon as the white farmer is driven off the njambanja thugs were in turn be driven off the farm with not so much as a thank you!

The decades of mismanagement, corruption and looting have however taken their toll on the national economic forcing the nation cake to be shared out amongst the ruling elite to shrink; in recent years poverty has started knocking at the doors of even the ruling elite. As for the 16% or 2 million ordinary Zimbabweans on whose doors poverty started as far back as the 1990s, the rogue has since taken over completely, these people live in abject poverty; it is the people who have to knock before they enter.

As long as Mugabe and Zanu-PF remain in power the economic meltdown now gripping the nation is set to get worse because Mugabe, for all his arrogance and vote rigging expertise has since learnt that it cannot rig economic recovery. His $27 billion ZimAsset economic plan, design to throw lots and lots of money at the economic crisis without ever addressing the underlying problems behind the crisis, is dead in the water because no one was prepared to waste money funding such a hare-brain scheme.

Since Mugabe and Zanu-PF do not have the political will or vision to address the underlying problems of mismanagement and corruption – these are tied with the party's political patronage system that has kept Mugabe and Zanu-PF in power and thus it would political suicide for anyone in the party to dismantle that system, especially now when the party has become unelectable and is totally dependent on thuggery and rigging the vote to stay in power - fuelling the economic meltdown; the only way out is to elect a new government that does not have the same political baggage.

Even simpletons like Jabulani Sibanda can see that the present economic meltdown is not economically or politically sustainable and hence the reason why he is talking of the regime being dismantled just as Ian Smith was dismantled.

Regime change is written everywhere that even the seasoned thugs like Jabulani Sibanda who are known to be mentally slow in comprehending things now know regime change is as certain as the sun rising tomorrow.

What Mugabe and Zanu-PF must understand is that their entire political machinations to resist regime change have only succeeded in delaying it but now the time is up. The choice before them is to accept regime change now when there is still a chance of any orderly transfer of power. If the regime continue to drag its feet and the change is triggered by social unrest or rioting then Zanu-PF leaders must know that they will be nowhere for them to hide from the angry mob!    

------------
Nomusa Garikai can be contacted at zimbabwesocialdemocrats@gmail.com