Tendai Biti against Mugabe carpet, my vote will go to the carpet!

“You (citizens) spend most of your time this week looking for pictures of Mugabe falling at the airport. We have become so hopeless that a piece of carpet is our salvation,” said MDC-Renewal Leader, Tendai Biti. He was speaking at the Southern Africa Political and Economic Series.

There was more than a hind of jealous in Mr Biti’s statement. How can the whole nation be showering praise on that piece of carpet when all he and his MDC friends have ever got from the nation since the rigged 2013 election is ridicule and contempt! Well to put it in the simplest of languages Mr Biti; that lumpy carpet has done more to humiliate and humble Mugabe in those few seconds than MDC has done in five years in the GNU.

MDC was in the GNU for the primary purpose of implemented the democratic reforms agreed in the Global Political Agreement (GPA) and signed to by Robert Mugabe on behalf of Zanu PF, Morgan Tsvangirai and Arthur Mutambara on behalf of the two MDC factions. South Africa’s President Thambo Mbeki signed on behalf of the regional body, SADC, the guarantor of the GPA.

The democratic reforms were designed to dismantle the Zanu PF dictatorship brick by brick and use the same bricks to build a democratic Zimbabwe. The litmus test that the democratic reforms had been implemented fully and properly was that the next Zimbabwe elections must be free, fair and credible.

After five years of the NGU not even one reform was implemented, not one brick of the dictatorship was dismantled. Not a sausage!

SADC leaders did their best to reminded MDC to implement the reforms and then not to take part in the elections without the reforms, as MDC MP Samuel Sipepa Nkomo has since admitted.

“It is common knowledge that Lindiwe Zulu (President Jacob Zuma’s international relations adviser) advised us,”MP Nkomo admitted. “(President) Zuma also advised us and even the Sadc Heads of State meeting in Maputo (Mozambique) also advised not to participate in the elections without electoral, media and security sector reforms, among others.”

SADC heads issued a statement after the rigged 2013 elections in which their criticism of the MDC for the party’s failure to implement the reforms was clear. The statement accused MDC leaders “of enjoying being in the GNU but forgetting why they were there!”

Of all people, Mr Tendai Biti, knew what the democratic reforms were about and understood their critically importance in delivering free, fair and credible elections. There was no way he could ever say he did not know or understand because he was MDC-T’s chief negotiator in the GPA.

So of all people Mr Biti should have been the first to apologise to the nation for “enjoying being in the GNU but forgetting why they were there!”

“If Zimbabwe was a normal country, Mutasa, Mugabe and several other Cabinet ministers and heads of security departments must have resigned in shame,” wrote the Japanese commentator on Zimbabwe, Ken Yamamoto. “In Japan, we would expect them to bow deeply, apologise and pack their personal effects and leave office immediately!”

Ken was right, Zimbabwe is NOT a normal country; for not only is arrogance indifference to failure and betrayal confined to Mugabe and his ruling party cronies, it is everywhere even the country’s opposition upstarts like Tendai Biti are arrogant.

“You (citizens) accuse us of being weak, the opposition of being weak but we are just a mirror reflection of the country,” said Tendai Biti. “We are just a mirror reflection of the citizens’ fatalism and cowardice.”

The sheer arrogance of our politicians is really insufferable. Biti betrays the whole nation by failing to implement the critical reforms for selfish financial and political gain but instead of admitting this and apologize he call us, the electorate the real victims of this cruel betrayal since we are the ones stiff suffering under this Zanu PF dictatorship cowards.

He is the one who, as one of the senior MDC ministers and the party’s chief negotiator in the GPA, was supposed to ensure all the reforms were implemented. He did not do so and spent his five years in the GNU singing praises to Mugabe. It was Tendai Biti who called Mugabe “unflappable and father to the nation!”

Mugabe a corrupt and murderous tyrant giving to rigging elections to stay in power, “unflappable and father to the nation”; what is Biti talking about? But obviously Tendai Biti and his fellow MDC leaders must have believed Mugabe unflappable and held the tyrant is such high regard they all decided to the man and woman to do nothing about implementing the reforms. The reforms were designed to dismantle the Zanu PF dictatorship brick by brick but how could they do that when the dictatorship was Mugabe’s, the man they considered “father of the nation”, life-time work!

No Mr Biti, the people of Zimbabwe are not political cowards; they risked life and limb to get MDC elected in 2008 and seats in the GNU, for example. Zimbabweans voted for Morgan Tsvangirai and MDC in the March 2008 elections in droves knowing fully well that they would be punished by Zanu PF for that and they were punished. In the July 2008 presidential run-off millions of Zimbabweans were subjected to all manner of politically motivated harassment and terror and as many as 500 were murdered. What else did you want the people to do to convince you, Mr Biti, that they are not cowards?

 If the people of Zimbabwe are guilty of anything then it must be political inaptitude and naivety; because only an inapt and naïve electorate would fail to hold failed leaders like you, Mr Biti, to account.

For failing to get even one democratic reform implemented all the MDC leaders should have been forced to apologize and resign on mass on 31 st July 2013 and, those like Morgan Tsvangirai will no other career other than politics forced to return to his Buhera rural home to herd goats!

Like it or not it is Tendai Biti and his MDC friends breath-taking incompetence that has allowed Mugabe to stay in power for the last 15 years. Yes, until last year the carpet has done nothing which is still better than propping up a tyrant. By tripping Mugabe, the carpet flattened the “unflappable” and that made the carpet a national hero compared to sell-outs like Biti.

What Biti has failed to understand is that by failing to implement the reforms he has made himself unelectable so much so that if he stood against the carpet, the later will have my vote and those of the millions who have enjoyed seeing a corrupt and murderous tyrant used to being pampered by the country’s minion opposition cut to size for a change – since there is no competent opposition to do this the public gladly accept the carpet going this!