"I don't know what
the West will say or do, that is not my business. My business is to ensure that
the decisions that we have arrived at here are implemented and they are all
decisions which have to do with the development of Africa; that is my concern,
concentrating on bettering the lives of the people, giving them something that
will raise their standard of living,” said Mugabe at the first press conference
after he is crowned AU chairman.
Mugabe “concentrating on
bettering the lives of the people”; what a sick joke! Sure and we in Zimbabwe
can testify to how much he has BETTERED our lives in his 35 years of corrupt
and tyrannical rule of the country.
The Zimbabwe economy is
in total meltdown after decades of gross mismanagement and rampant corruption.
The country’s once booming economy is now in ruins, 90% plus are out of work,
16% of the population now live in abject poverty, life expectancy has plummeted
from 68 years when he got into office in 1980 to 34 years in 2004, etc.
In his 35 years in
power, Mugabe has murdered over 30 000 innocent Zimbabweans to establish and
retain his de facto one-party, Zanu PF, dictatorship.
It is all very well for
Mugabe to be foul-mouthing the West from every platform he can get; he does not
care. He does not need the West but the ordinary Zimbabweans do. Since 2008 98%
of Zimbabwe’s medicine is imported and paid for by Western donors, for example.
He and his family can afford to fly to Singapore each time his eye has a twitch
(he went to Singapore 8 times in 2012 alone for that) or the wife needs an appendectomy surgery.
The trips cost $ 3 million
each and in 2012 alone Mugabe made a staggering 8 trips all paid for by the
taxpayer; yes the same taxpayer the regime says it has no money to import
malaria tablets for!
Africa has shown again and again that it does not
have what it takes to deal with any serious problems and needs help. Take the
Ebola crisis; it is outsiders, especially the West, who have help contain the
outbreak otherwise the virus would have spread from West Africa to Cape Town in
the South and to Cairo in the North by now!
Yes it was in the West and the rest of the world’s
interest to contain Ebola as quickly as possible because the virus threatened
the whole world. But there are other problems like cholera, starvation, civil
war, etc. that cause untold suffering and deaths in Africa if the West does not
step in to help.
“Mugoti anopiwa anyerere!” so goes the Shona adage.
(It is the quiet one who will be rewarded!) It is in fact one of those adage
every mother will repeat to try to influence behaviour; they know only too well
that they always reward the howling child. We can be sure of one thing the AU leaders
did gave Mugabe the chairmanship because he was the quiet one but because he
threatened to bring the house down with his howling.
For the last five years each time a Zimbabwean
diplomats opened his/her mouth with a fellow African diplomat it was to ask if
their country would support Mugabe’s bid to be AU Chairman. There was a whole
department in the ministry of Foreign Affairs tasked to coordinate the campaign
and nothing else.
Mugabe campaigned long and hard to be AU chairman.
African leaders had no choice by to let Mugabe become chairman just to stop the
nagging and pestering from Harare!
There is no doubt that Mugabe did not beg but cried
to be appointed AU chairman. We know because if he was back in Zimbabwe he
would have rigged the vote, raped and murdered – anything to secure election victory!
At the AU his options were limited to begging or crying and he did both! “Mugabe
akakumbira akachemera ushe!”
All the African leaders who saw Mugabe’s press
interview with the Zimbabwe tyrant once again blasting the West for the same egotistic
reasons must have cursed themselves why they allowed themselves into rewarding this
foul-mouth tyrant. Now the whole continent will regret it because Mugabe will not
make everyone’s life better but worse, guaranteed!
18 comments:
“Bishop Bakare should be applauded for boldly calling upon all concerned citizens of Zimbabwe to put their heads together in an endeavour to rescue our beloved country from the socio - eco-nomic and political hell-hole it finds itself in, thanks to decades of Zanu-PF corruption, misrule and misgovernance,” said Gutu.
Any serious discussion of Zimbabwe’s political and economic situation and solution there to will be a rehash of the solution proposed in the 2008 Global Political Agreement (GPA) – Zimbabwe must implement a raft of democratic reforms and then hold free and fair elections. After five years of the GNU not even one reform was implemented, Not one! So any proposed indaba must not waste time talking about the reforms – there is no need to reinvent the wheel – it must address the problem of why not even one reform was implemented head on.
If Bishop Bakare’s proposed indaba is on the basis of “decades of Zanu PF corruption, misrule and misgovernance”, as Gutu said then it will be a waste of time and resources because that was the problem back in 2008.
Not even one democratic reform was ever implemented because the people tasked to carry out this important task, Morgan Tsvangirai, Tendai Biti, Obert Gutu and all the other MDC leaders have proven to be corrupt and breathtakingly incompetent. The proposed indaba must address the important question of how are we going to ensure ALL the reforms are implemented this time. Or to put it more concisely, how are we going to ensure we do not have the same corrupt and breathtakingly incompetent MDC leaders talking about reforms they clearly never believed in just to waste everyone’s time and money?
From Gutu’s comments it is clear Bishop Bakare will have a real challenge keeping these corrupt and incompetent village idiots out! What does the Bishop done to keep MDC village idiots from swamping the indaba? If I want to attend a crab mud-dance I take a walk along the Kariba Dam’s muddy banks rather than attend Bishop Bakare’s political mud-dance.
@ Moyo
Mugabe is a corrupt and murderous tyrant given to foul-mouthing the West to hide his own failures.
Africa has shown again and again that it does not have the competent leaders to deal with the continent's challenges like Ebola, civil wars, cholera, etc. and needs the West to help. The last thing the continent therefore need is a foul-mouth tyrant insulting those who are helping us!
@ Eddie Cross
It goes without saying that no one would want to be a vendor if they could have a regular well-paying job in the formal sector. Kiya kiya, informal sector, is hard work for very little return but when it is other kiya kiya or starve, what else can one do but sweat all day for the few pennies! So for Minister Chombo to call for the vendors to be kicked off the streets is tantamount to forcing these people to starve!
“If he (Mugabe) thinks that I am a fool then he must have been working with a fool very closely for the past 35 years, because I started working with him in prison right up to now,” Mutasa said in an interview for the South Africa-based Mail & Guardian Newspaper.
Is this the case of the pot calling the kettle black and the kettle answering back by calling the pot black.
Yes comrade Mutasa, Mugabe is a fool for working with a fool. Zimbabwe was a rich and prosperous nation back in 1980, look what Mugabe has done to the nation in 35 years of corrupt and tyrannical rule? Only a first class fool would have done this; there is no need for more evidence that Mugabe is a fool!
As for you comrade Mutasa you have worked with the tyrant all these 35 years and you never realised what a fcuk up he was making. Well that speaks volumes of you, comrade and what a fool you too are!
@Patrick
People like Mutasa only believe in a one-man-one-vote when it is their vote only at stake and not those of others especially the ordinary people.
Some freedom fighters like General (or whatever) Douglas Nyikayaramba never believed in a multi-party democracy, he said he would not salute Tsvangirai because he did not fight in the war of independence.
Could not agree with Takura Zhangazha more; it is pointless Tsvangirai meeting people without "a clear message and plan". But if we insist on that one then he will never hold a rally given that here is one politician who has yet to produce his first "clear message and/or plan"!
The fact that people are attending MDC rallies regardless of the obvious lack of message or plan shows just how desperate the people are. What they have yet to learn is that desperate people do desperate things like follow a village idiot with no plan where they are going. Tsvangirai has already proven beyond all doubt that he is a corrupt and breathtakingly incompetent leader following him blindly got the nation nowhere last time and it will produce no better result this time round.
If Zimbabwe is ever going to get out of this political and economic hell then the people have to show that there are capable of thinking for themselves because only a thinking electorate not be so easily coned, in this case, by a village idiot with no message or plan twice in a roll!
@ Member Tshuma
The World Bank and IMF stopped giving Mugabe any monetary help in 2000, two years before the sanctions were imposed, because Zimbabwe was not saving its loans. When Mugabe went to China last August he wanted the Chinese to give him the $4 billion in budgetary support but they refused and allocated all of it to projects because Mugabe is a “bad debtor” and told him so to his face!
The sum total of Mugabe’s look East policy was to think that the East would bankroll his insatia-ble appetite to spend and spend. So it was not long before he was up to his eyes in debt with the East but, once again, would not service the loans. The Chinese have stayed in Zimbabwe only because they are looting the country’s diamonds and other resources otherwise they too would have broken all links with our pathological “bad debtor”.
It is all very well for Mai Mujuru to put on a brave face and claim she is not afraid of the net clos-ing in on the allegations of corruption and other offences make against her. She is just being very naïve because she knows that she is corrupt. She was naïve to think that she could be as corrupt as she pleased and will get away with it because she in a senior Zanu PF official.
The question she should have asked herself was could she have cast iron guarantee than she will never fall out with any of her Zanu PF friends and that the party will rule for generations to come. Only someone who is really politically very naïve would answer yes to both parts of the question.
Now that she has been kicked out of the Zanu PF leadership she is compounding her political situations by moving from being naïve to being downright stupid. For it is stupid for her to think that the party, having carried out the Herculean task of getting her removing from the party, will not dare go through with the more straightforward task of proving that she is corrupt.
Mai Mujuru is not the only corrupt Zanu PF leader, that is true but the case and the evidence being produced to support it are not to prove that she is not the only corrupt leader but rather that she is corrupt period. Her only defence here is to attack, she must produce some of the evidence of who else is corrupt to force those after her now to make a tactical withdrawal for fear of mutual annihilation if they proceed. If she is hoping to mount her counter attack in Court then it will probably be too late!
If the indaba is not going to be a talk-shop then Bishop Bakare must know that the end product of the indaba is to come up with a roadmap to implement ALL the democratic reforms agreed in the 2008 GPA followed by the holding of free, fair and credible elections.
There should be no wasting of time and resources talking about the reforms, we know these already.
If the Bishop and his team understand these basics then they will not me or anyone to remind them that Zanu PF and MDC are the two parties who failed to implement even one reform in the five years of the NGU. It would be self-defeating to allow any of them to play any dominant role in the indaba!
MDC have become masters of Zimbabwe politics at wasting time on shadow boxing. After wasting US $100 million and five years of NGU time, they presented the Copac constitution to the nation as an MDC child and guaranteed to delivery free, fair and credible elections. Paul Mangwana, the Zanu PF Copac co-chairman later boosted that Mugabe dictated the constitution and, of course, it failed to delivery free and fair elections because it is a weak and feeble constitution.
Even if ZEC had given MDC a copy of the voters roll it would have saved no useful purpose because it is too late for them to enter the by-elections contest. The nomination process is closed.
Zimbabwe will do better and total ignore MDC and their hare-brain, shadow-boxing and time wasting schemes and stories of MDC knock-out victories in shadow-boxing match fought in pitch-black dark-ness.
"If somebody calls the President a weevil or gamatox, are you going to prosecute that person? It is part of the trade of politics. Why are you bringing such matters to the Constitutional Court? The President is not a goblin and we all know that Why should the law bother itself about it? You have to be an imbecile to believe that the President is a goblin," Chief Justice Chidyausiku said.
In a country used to hearing nonsense spoken from the bench in the name of justice and common sense, it is really refreshing to hear a chief justice with some common sense!
The EU has announced that travel ban on Mugabe will be lifted for a year whilst he is AU chair-man.
So no one is still under EU sanctions; are we therefore to expect noticeable economic recover within days!
As long as nothing is done to end the gross mismanagement and rampant corruption, the two milestones round the nation's neck and dragging it down into the abyss, things are going to continue to get worse. Whether Mugabe likes it or not he will have to step down or he will be forced to, Gaddafi style because the economic meltdown will never be allowed to continue for much longer!
@guest
Zimbabwe is broke; the growing poverty caused by the economic meltdown has reached the Blue Roof mansion too. Gone are the days of shop and until you drop; Grace will find that hard to swallow but swallow it she will.
For the first time since she started dating Bob, Grace will start looking at the price tag and think "too expensive" until now she only looked at the price to confirm it was not too cheap. She measured he self-esteem in terms of the total value of what she was wearing and hence the reason everything had to have a designer price tag and would never wear the same knickers twice! There was no stay-soft powerful enough to restore the knickers to their original softness for her delicate softness.
Well she will readjust because the economic meltdown is real and it is getting worse. She is lucky because the economic situation has already forced many Zimbabwean women out there are using leaves as sanitary towels.
Lodging a court challenge of unconstitutional conduct of the Zanu PF elections will be the most honourable thing Mutasa have ever done in his worthless political life since independence. The challenge will go a long way to restore faith in two very important basic tenets of democratic rule that have been repeatedly flouted in the past one would be forgiven to think they had been writ-ten off;
a) That no one, including Mugabe, is above the law and
b) That it does not matter how often in the past one has disregarded the law, justice will catch up with us all. The wheels of justice turn very slowly but what matters is they turn and they will catch up with the wrong doers.
@ Alex Magaisa
Mugabe is a corrupt and murderous tyrant no Zimbabwean worth his salt will have any divided opinion on that. Zimbabweans wanted to get rid of the tyrant and would have done so too if MDC have implemented the bloody reforms.
So you, Dr Nonsense adviser did not want any reforms implemented because Mugabe is not a tyrant but he is "a big political figure, indeed a colossal" who could not be replaced. You are a man but with an intellect of an ant!
@ Gagare
“There are certain elements within the military who are benefiting while the majority [of Zimbabweans] are suffering,” said Douglas Mwonzora, secretary-general of the Movement for Democratic Change-Tsvangirai (MDC-T), Zimbabwe’s largest opposition party. “Those who benefit unduly then interfere with the politics of Zimbabwe in order to protect their wealth,” he said.
Yes Zimbabwe's security sector has in the past made it very difficult to have meaningful democratic change, Mr Mwonzora is right there. What he has failed to accept is that Zimbabwe was given its get-out-of-jail scot-free card during the NGU and it was Mr Mwonzora and his MDC friends who failed to use it!
MDC were tasked to implement a raft of democratic and write a new democratic constitution to ensure the next elections will be free, fair and credible. The reforms included reforms designed to cut the unhealthy umbilical ties between the party Zanu PF and the security sector. MDC had the majority in parliament, the support of SADC and five years to implement the reforms. In the end not even one reform was implemented. Not one!
The security sector has no role to play in implementing the reforms and they did not interfere in any way.
The GNU produce a new constitution but it was weak and feeble, it failed to deliver free and fair elections con-trary to MDC leaders, including Mr Mwonzora, insistence that it would.
When you have a get-out-of-jail card you do not care about height of the jail walls, the razor fence, etc.; we had the card and failed to use it do it.
Zimbabwe is facing a serious economic meltdown even those in the military who have ripped huge rewards from the system must realise that an economic system that throws 90% plus on the unemployed, has 16% of the population already living in abject poverty, etc. is socially and politically unsustainable. The only way to end this situation is for Zanu PF to step down so there can finally be free and fair elections.
Zimbabwe will get another get-out-of-jail card; this time we must make sure we use it and implement ALL the democratic reforms. How to make sure that happens is the present national challenge to be careful worked out.
The more Zanu PF tries to paint the false imagine that Zimbabweans love Mugabe the more people have grown to hate him and all the misery, suffering and deaths he has caused. It is shocking that the first thought that jumped into many people's heads when the saw the photograph of Mugabe falling was "Good, let us hope he does not get up!"
I am just angry that someone should have forced so many people to hate anyone with such a consuming and heartfelt passion their natural instinct to empathize with a fellow human being is completely swamped by the hatred.
Moyo said: "Our position as Zanu-PF remains that all sanctions imposed on President Mugabe as head of state and citizen of Zimbabwe be removed unconditionally. Any effort to hoodwink the continent is futile," said Zanu PF spokesman, Simon Khaya Moyo.
Zanu PF has used the excuse of EU sanctions for Zimbabwe’s economic meltdown and now literally all the sanctions have been lifted and the regime knows the nation is asking the obvious question "So where is the economic recovery now?” Zanu PF is frantically looking for an new excuse and it really has no excuse now!
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