Has there been any progress on democratic reforms; security sector, new constitution, media, etc, etc.? Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai answered: “No!”
Has there been any progress in cleaning up the civil services to get rid of the “ghost workers” everyone knows to be Zanu PF militia responsible for all the political violence of 2008 and the on going violence? The PM once again answered “No!”
At least he is being honest. Until a few months ago he was the one telling the whole world the GNU was “working”. His continued snag demeanour shows he does not even comprehend historic position he occupies and therefore the enormity of his blundering.
Tsvangirai acknowledges, this is the very first time that I have ever heard him do so, that after the sham June 2008 presidential run off Mugabe had literally hang himself. “When we won the election in March 2008, they [other African leaders] were convinced that we had won and that’s why they said they couldn’t recognize what Mugabe had done in June 2008,” admitted Tsvangirai.
So without the GPA Mugabe would have never been accepted as State President, not even by his follow SADC Heads of State. So why in did he let Mugabe off the hook by signing the power sharing agreement? A one sided agreement giving Mugabe all his tyrannical powers at that!
If Tsvangirai had not signed the GPA, Mugabe would have been left with the simple choice of either accept he lost the election or hold fresh elections – in which he would not be able to use violence and therefore was certain to lose.
Two and half years after the formation of the GNU, Tsvangirai himself acknowledges that none of the necessary reforms to create a democratic Zimbabwe have been achieved. On the other hand Mugabe has been able to carry on with his tyrannical agenda of political violence and lawlessness to retain absolute power. Mugabe is politically stronger now than he was after the sham June 2008 elections.
Champions of none-violence to end an unjust system like Gandhi and Dr Martin Luther King must be turning in the grave when none-violence is used as the excuse for incompetency and failure. Gandhi is known for his public burning of the Passes Indians were being asked to carry forcing the authority to scrap the idea. Dr King bus boycott ended bus segregation in the racists American South States. What has Tsvangirai ever done?
A few years ago MDC threatened to bring the people out on the street in match against Mugabe’s repressive regime in the so called “Final Push”. It turned out to be a complete flop!
To protest against Mugabe’s repeated failure to honour his part in the power sharing agreement Tsvangirai announced that he and his MDC Ministers would not attend cabinet meetings. He was not withdrawing from the GNU only boycotting its cabinet meetings, he explained. Whilst many people agreed the situation demanded action, it was hard to see what this one-leg out and one-leg in posturing was meant to achieve. In typical Tsvangirai blundering and grand standing style he ended the boycott although it was clear Mugabe not conceded to any of MDC's wish-washy demands!
“I think essentially it was a good decision,” was Tsvangirai’s reply to the question whether he thought the GNU was a good idea. Even with the benefit of hindsight, he still maintains this mindboggling blunder was a good decision. History has a nasty habit of casting some individuals in a role far beyond their intellectual ability in the end they neither appreciate their critical importance nor the enormity of their failure.
“I have degrees in violence,” Mugabe has often boasted. He might as well boast, the ease with which he has been able to twist Tsvangirai round his little fingers would certainly students of violence envious where it not for the fact that the tyrant’s adversary is himself a flawed and indecisive character.
“If he (your enemy) is taking his ease, give him no rest,” wrote the Chinese military strategist, Sun Tzu.
If by signing the GPA Tsvangirai thought Mugabe would end the violence and repression so that he, Tsvangirai, would take it ease; he was in for a surprise alright. Mugabe step up the violence; Tsvangirai, his MDC leaders and supporters and the ordinary Zimbabweans have beaten, harassed, arrested on one trivial charge after another. Tsvangirai has responded to it all by condemning one act of violence after another, running from one courtroom to the next to pay bail for arrested members and burying the murdered one along the way.
The reality is with all this brutal repression by Mugabe a modern day Dr Martin Luther King, in whose image Tsvangirai models himself, is spoilt for choice of subject matter on which to make his none-violence stand. Dr King must be turning in his grave to hear Tsvangirai speak. Is it no bad enough that none violence should be used an excuse for doing nothing without the pretentious proponents of the philosophy ending as the best PR the tyrants could ever wish for!
Tsvangirai’s blundering is comparable to the incompetency of Edward Montagu, the second Earl of Manchester, the General of the Parliamentary Army at the start of the English Civil War. Oliver Cromwell’s criticism of Earl was legendary. “His failure to pursue this war with the urgency it deserved has tried my patience and that of the hard pressed army,” Cromwell complained. “It would be better if they joined the King’s side!”
In 2008 Zimbabweans risked their very lives in voting for Tsvangirai and MDC. Mugabe was to punish them for this, as the events of April to June 2008 were to show. Zimbabweans voted for Tsvangirai not because the people had confidence in his ability as a leader. They voted for him because they were desperate for change.
“Mugabe would lose the election to a donkey in a free vote!” wrote Jonathan Moyo, a former Mugabe Minister of Information and party strategist, underlining the Zimbabwe electorate’s desperation.
Zimbabweans will once again risk everything to bring an end to this repressive regime that has left them economically destitute and robbed them of hope and human dignity. There will be regime change regardless of Mugabe’s continued brutality and regardless of the wasted opportunities for change by the blundering of flawed leaders like Tsvangirai.
No doubt Tsvangirai would want to attribute the demise of this Zanu PF dictatorship to none-violence political posturing. For the last thirty years the nation has endured Mugabe’s liberation war hero lectures and anti-white rhetoric. The evidence on the ground tells the truth and the exact opposite; that he never sort to liberate the nation but to replace white-colonial oppression with his own even more oppressive and corrupt regime. And so too with Tsvangirai, the world know him to be a blundering idiot who in 2008 allowed Mugabe back into State House through the back door!
After thirty years of mismanagement and rampant corruption that had resulted in a total economic melt down throwing millions of Zimbabweans out of work and poverty and thirty years of brutal repression; one had hope Tsvangirai’s sympathy would be with the people who had suffered so much. Instead Tsvangirai was concerned about the tyrant.
After thirty years of absolute power, Mugabe was finding the very thought of being kicked out so unpalatable he step up a gear the terror, rape and murder that had kept him in power in the past. When not even SADC would accept his dirty tricks to retain power; Tsvangirai signed on to the GPA just so Mugabe can stay into power.
The very fact that allowing Mugabe back into office meant extending the suffering that his rule stood for the life time of this GNU was of no consequence to Tsvangirai. He was concerned about giving Mugabe a soft landing and did not care about ending the suffering his thirty years of misrule had caused to the nation. These are the same people who had risked their very lives to vote for him whose crying he now dismisses without a second thought!
If Tsvangirai had hoped that allowing Mugabe to stay in power a few more years was going to make the tyrant more amenable to democratic change, free elections and then ultimately to regime change. Then his “soft-landing” plans could not have been more wrong. Mugabe crossed the point of no-return a long time ago when he had the thousands murdered to establish his de facto one-party dictatorship.
It was really naïve of Tsvangirai to grant Mugabe all his dictatorial powers in the GPA and still hope the tyrant would NOT use these powers to stop the very democratic changes that would spell his own political demise! Mugabe a ruthless tyrant was to preside over the dismantling of his own dictatorship – what a stupid proposition!
Mugabe has used time since the signing of the GPA to reorganise his party and secure funding for his thugs. Mugabe has no intention of accepting any democratic reforms and free elections. He intends to use violence to resist regime change. Tsvangirai can see the writing on the wall for himself and he clearly is at a loss as what to do. He has sheepishly turned to SADC to stop Mugabe.
Of course, SADC too is at a loss as what to do. SADC will never authorise boots on the ground to stop the political violence particularly in a situation where the Police, Army and CIO – Zimbabwe’s own security services – and themselves involved in the violence. Even SADC itself should have remembered what a stubborn and arrogant tyrant they were dealing with in Mugabe and, more significantly, that unlike other dictators Mugabe had too many hidden skeletons to ever allow anyone else to rule in his life time.
“It is not the survival of the King that is at issue here,” Cromwell reminded some of his confused fellow country men at one point. “It is the survival of England. And the King is not England!”
For decades Zimbabweans have been fighting to end the corruption and repression of tyrannical regime. And in 2008 the country had its best chance ever to do so and has had many more others chances besides only for these chances to be wasted. It is not giving Mugabe a soft-landing that is at issue here but giving this nation hope and its human dignity; what will it take to make idiots like Tsvangirai understand that!
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