After nearly a year of dithering and blowing hot and cold the Zanu PF
bigwigs led by former VP Joice Mujuru, Didymus Mutasa, Rugare Gumbo and other
purged out of Zanu PF by Mugabe in December 2014 have finally got their act
together and launched their new political party. The People First’s vision is
“to attain peace, freedom, democracy and prosperity for all” according to its
manifesto.
These are very noble objectives but before we cheer and applaud; please
tell us how many of these objectives have you successfully delivered in your 34
years at the very heart of government as Zanu PF members? If the truth be told,
and it must be told no matter what, the nation has regressed in all these
areas.
Instead of peace, freedom and democracy, Zanu PF has denied the people
their basic freedom and human rights including the right to a meaningful vote
and even the right to life itself in pursuit of its selfish goal of
establishing a de facto one-party dictatorship. The country is yet to hold
free, fair and credible elections. Over 30 000 innocent Zimbabweans have lost
their lives in the 35 years of Zanu PF rule.
The people have been promised economic prosperity thousands of times
and yet all they have ever seen delivered is mass poverty. Life expectancy, the
qualitative and quantitative barometer of a nation’s the standard of living,
has nose-dived from 68 years in 1980 when Zanu PF took over the reins of power
to 34 years in 2006.
“Since my last statement issued in early June 2015,” stated Mai Mujuru
in the manifesto, speaking as the PF leader, “we have been hard at work and I
wish to share with you, in brief, how we propose to translate our vision for a
better Zimbabwe into reality - through the proposed Blueprint to Unlock
Investment and Leverage for Development (BUILD).”
So we can safely say Mai Mujuru and her PF friends only started paying
attention to peace, freedom, etc. after they were unceremoniously booted out of
Zanu PF. Realists like me would go further and say they started paying
attention to the needs and aspirations of the long suffering people of
Zimbabwe’s because they need the people’s political support to get back into
power.
On the other hand the eternal optimists are already talking of Mai
Mujuru and her friends’ Saul on the road to Damascus transformative moment and
paradigm shift in their vales and behaviour although there is absolutely
nothing the lot’s demeanour or in this manifesto to back this. There is nothing
to show Mai Mujuru has repented let alone been transformed.
Corruption remains one of the nation’s greatest challenges and until
her purge Mai Mujuru was one of the most corrupt officials in the country. Just
the political purge, Grace Mugabe accused Mai Mujuru of being corrupt and
mantling in the billion dollar diamond looting industry, she was not saying
anything new.
Everyone knows that Mai Mujuru is not just corrupt but worse still she
has been at the front of those denying there is corruption. In November 2012
she dismissed the story like Cuthbert Dube, the Premier Medical Aid Society
CEO, who was earning a staggering $500 000 a month when the members were not
getting even the most basic service because the Society had no money to pay its
bills. She said the story was lies manufactured by those pushing “for regime
change”.
“But Zacchaeus stood up and said to the
Lord, “Look, Lord! Here and now I give half of my possessions to the poor, and
if I have cheated anybody out of anything, I will pay back four times the
amount.” Luke 19;8.
There has been no such public show of repentance by Mai Mujuru and any
of her friends. All the manifesto has to
say on corruption is “We shall resource, restore and fully implement the
intended roles of the Anti-Corruption Commission,” without even admit there has
been serious looting and plunder of the nation’s resources especially in
Chiadzwa and Marange. This is just a platitude that would change nothing in the
end it will all be “Pilhagem continua!” (Looting continues!)
There is one positive in PF re-entering Zimbabwe’s political stage;
since no democratic reforms have been implemented the nation’s political waters
will remain muddy and dangerous, PF are the only opposition capable of giving
Mugabe and Zanu PF a run for their money. Mugabe will be counting on rigging
the next elections to stay in power and PF, being ex-Zanu PF themselves, would
know enough to make it difficult at least to rig the elections.
In the 1995 elections Zanu PF was rambled when the party rigged the
Harare South parliamentary elections because Margaret Dongo, a former Zanu PF
member and CIO agent herself, was able to get inside information on how Zanu PF
had rigged. When she presented the evidence in court Zanu PF quickly admitted
to the irregularities and agreed to a rerun. PF have many supporters still in
Zanu PF and there is a distinct possibility of PF repeating Dongo’s challenge
of the next result but at a much bigger scale.
What must be said clearly however is that Mai Mujuru and her PF friends
are corrupt and murderous thugs, they are not democrats. Their manifesto is
phony in portraying the members as champions of peace, freedom and all the
other liberation war values they had claimed to stand for in 1980 but only to
discard them as soon as they got into power. The reality is that for 34 years
Mai Mujuru et al were an integral part of the Mugabe regimes that failed to
deliver on any of the liberation war promises and the PF manifesto will never
air brush this important historic fact out!
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