Fight Mugabe yourself, Namibian President tell Zimbabweans - he is being cruel to be kind!

“Kune anonzisisa, chokwadi hachipudzi chinowaka!” so goes the Shona adage. (To him who hears and understand, the truth does not destroy but builds!) It is in this enlightened context that one must view Namibian President Hage Geingob’s candid words of advice to both Zimbabwe’s leaders and people.

"We must get rid of the days where we believed in strong presidents, personality cults, and that some are (demi)-gods," he advised the leaders.

"We must know that killing our people is not the way to go.

"If you do that, you can't expect the world to respect you. They will intervene and tell you that you are doing a wrong thing".

In the case of President Mugabe the advice is coming too late; he has rigged elections and even murdered over 30 000 of his people to establish and retain his one-party cum one-man dictatorship.

President Mugabe and his Zanu PF cronies have enjoyed absolute power for the last 36 years and their greed for wealth has grown in leaps and bounds; they have more than the lion’s share of the nation’s wealth, they are taking everything. President Mugabe admitted in February that the country lost $15 billion of diamond revenue to “swindlers”. It is no secret that Zanu PF leaders, including Mugabe himself, together with the Chinese and other foreigner who are doing the mining are the swindlers.

So far, no one has been arrested for this grand theft; confirming that the swindlers are the ruling elite and they are above the law.

Last week, Harare Central Hospital announced that it was stopping all operations because it did not have essential drugs like painkillers; needless to say the smaller hospitals and clinics are even worse off. So hundreds of ordinary Zimbabweans are dying every day because the health service has all but collapsed for lack of funds whilst a select few are pocketing billions of dollars.

The Zimbabwe government has to pay for the health and other public needs of the 12 million population from a misery $3.8 billion in collected revenue and billions of dollars of potential diamond revenue is shared out amongst just a handful of the ruling elite, the demi-gods!

President Hage Geingob’s advice is clearly too late Mugabe and his Zanu PF cronies; their hands are bright red with all the innocent blood their have shed. And, now that their primeval appetites have been fully aroused, their insatiable greed has gone into overdrive, they cannot stop the looting.

Zanu PF’s 36 years of gross mismanagement and rampant corruption have dragged the Zimbabwe economy into total economic meltdown; the regime is nothing more than that a bacteria culture that grows exponentially only to collapse suddenly after eating all the available food.

Mugabe’s decades of misrule have dragged Zimbabwe and the whole SADC region deeper and deeper into the abyss and the import of President Geingob’s advice to the tyrant is that he must expect the people of Zimbabwe, SADC and all those concerned about the tragic consequences of his selfish greed to criticize him for it!

The Namibian President had words of wisdom for the ordinary Zimbabweans too; “Zimbabweans, who are unhappy with strongman President Robert Mugabe should fight for themselves,” he advised, according to Namibian newspaper report.

SADC leaders’ frustration with the people of Zimbabwe, specially the MDC party is understandable for all those who have cared to follow the Zimbabwe crisis. The MDC had the golden opportunity to implement the democratic reforms during the GNU and SADC leaders did their best to remind Tsvangirai and company of this but were ignored. MDC failed to get even one reform implemented in five years of the GNU.

Since the rigged 2013 elections MDC-T has failed to take advantage of its MPs and Senators to push for the implementation of meaningful democratic reforms. The party has failed to articulate reforms are required much less how they should be implemented!

“We don't go out in public and shout, so that you can be happy and dance in the streets of New York,” came the Namibian President jab! Of course he has a point!

MDC leaders have wasted one opportunity after another to dismantle the corrupt and tyrannical Zanu PF dictatorship and replace it with a healthy and functional democratic system of government. The dismantling is done by proposing and implementing democratic reforms and parliament is the only forum in which this can be done. MDC has never taken advantage of it parliamentary majority to implement the reforms during the GNU and now it is abandoning the parliamentary route altogether in favour of street protests, nagging SADC leaders to pressure Mugabe to change.

In all these years MDC leaders have failed to come up with any details of democratic changes the country needs showing that they have not being paying attention. The ordinary Zimbabweans themselves too have not been any wiser; if they were then they would have seen to it that Tsvangirai and company implemented the reforms during the GNU, for example.

By telling Zimbabweans to fight our own battles President Geingob is being cruel to be kind because like it or not it for us Zimbabweans, not SADC or anyone else, to implement the democratic reforms. It is for each nation to determine its own destiny; we are stuck with a corrupt and tyrannical dictatorship but who can ever deny that it is what we rightly deserve!

Mugabe continues to demand UN veto in keeping with his maxim "What is yours must be mine!"

When it comes to how Robert Gabriel Mugabe relate to others, be it at an individual, group or national level, everything he has ever said or done have all been guided by the following three cardinal rules:

1)      “What is yours must be ours in true socialist tradition and spirit of sharing.” Mugabe can be a socialist to the bone marrow and will use all manner of tricks to force everyone else to become a socialist and an egalitarian. He has haunted the petty bourgeois, capitalists and colonialists and blamed them for all the ills in this world.

Mugabe has turned Zimbabwe into a Chinese colony; right now he has started giving the farms he seized from the European white farms to the Chinese. He gave the farms initially to his Zanu PF cronies but has taken them back after they failed to put them into productive use.

Corruption is Zimbabwe is rife which suits the Chinese given the Chinese government’s secretive culture. The Chinese are also at the heart of the wholesale looting and plunder of Marange diamonds and other resources. So the Chinese are actually worse than the British as a colonial power but they are Mugabe’s friends and we, ordinary mortals have no say.

2)      “What is ours must be mine.” All wealth and power in Mugabe’s Zimbabwe is ostensibly owned by the people with government managing and controlling it much as a guardian of a minor would. The Zimbabwe government owns and runs the usual state institutions like civil service and judiciary, state controlled institutions like NRZ and ZESA which Mugabe has increased since independence by the forced acquisition of such companies as the country’s biggest bus company ZUPCO and government has since extended its reach and influence to every sector of society include the private sector giving rise to such self-contradictory anomalies as GONGO – (Government Organized) None Governmental Organizations.  

From the word go Mugabe has deliberately made the distinction between government and his party Zanu PF blurred but his end and purpose has been very clear – government is there to above all else serve the party’s interest to become the new owner of everything and to secure absolute power.

Whilst on paper Zimbabwe is and has always been a multi-party democracy; in practice Mugabe has ruthlessly pushed his selfish agenda to turn it into a de facto one-party dictatorship in line with his desire to secure and enjoy absolute power. He has bribed, cheated, harangued and even murdered his political critics and opponents to ensure he secured and retain absolute power at all times.

So in Zimbabwe ownership of wealth and power has moved from the white colonial regime and the mainly white capitalists to black government to Zanu PF and ultimately to Robert Gabriel Mugabe.  

3)      “What is mine is mine and mine alone, you touch it and you die!” Mugabe has often said “Zimbabwe is mine!” and nothing has encapsulated that he meant this literally and in deadly earnest that his cavalier attitude when he admitted that corruption was costing the country billions of dollar!

Zimbabwe is facing a serious economic meltdown with unemployment now a nauseating 90% and government is so short of cash it is failing to pay civil servants their wages let alone pay for other necessities as medicine. And yet when Mugabe announced that $15 billion of diamond revenue had been “swindled” he could not have been more casual about it. He has since underlined that point by doing absolutely nothing to hunter down the swindlers and thus recover the loot and, more significantly, to stop the looting.

$15 billion is a fortune even to a wealthy nation like USA with a GPD of $18 trillion; it is humongous amount money to a country like Zimbabwe with a GDP of $14 billion!

On the political front, Mugabe has ruthlessly robbed the ordinary people their freedoms and basic human rights including the right to free and fair elections and even the right to life itself with the arrogance and heartless indifference of the slave master!

Robert Mugabe’s speech to the UN General Assembly captured the essence of his arrogance and his me! – me! mentality perfectly.

“For over 20 years, many of us have come to this rostrum, pleading and demanding for reforms of the Security Council. Today we are no closer to achieving that goal than we were 20 years ago. This is so in spite of the universal acknowledgement of the injustice, unfairness and inappropriateness of the current composition of the Security Council,” said Mugabe.

There five permanent members on the Security Council and they have a veto; make no mistake about it Mugabe demand a permanent seat and veto too, initially for Africa but ultimately for himself of course.

The UN has often failed to protect the weak and voiceless people all over the world, especially those from failed states of which Africa has plenty of, because existing five permanent members have abused their UN Security Council veto to serve their selfish interests. Now imagine adding to that mix a corrupt, vote rigging and murderous tyrant like Mugabe wielding a UN veto too; that will rather the UN completely useless!

“This session of the General Assembly will elect the next Secretary-General of our organisation. We have witnessed commendable efforts aimed at making the selection process of the next Secretary-General inclusive and transparent. The greater involvement of the General Assembly, and therefore of the majority of our membership, does not, however, mask the opaqueness of the process at Security Council level.” Every Zimbabwean was surprised to hear Mugabe say this.

Here is the man who has never, in his 36 years in power, ever held free, fair and credible elections talking of an “inclusive and transparent” election process. He has failed to release the voters roll at least a month before the July 2013 elections as is required by law and has failed to do so to this day.

Nearly one million voters were denied the vote that year because their details were not in the constituency voters roll where they expected. If the voters roll had been made public as judiciously as is required by law; most of these people would have had the mistake put right – proof this was in fact a deliberate and calculated vote rigging move. Mugabe’s victory margin was just over a million!

But without doubt the crass of Mugabe’s duplicity and hypocrisy was in him lying about why Zimbabwe has repeatedly failed deliver any meaningful economic development.

“On our part, I am happy to inform you that we have established national multi-stakeholders and multi-sector structures to domesticate and implement the 2030 (UN development) Agenda in a co-ordinated and integrated manner with our national development programme, the Zimbabwe Agenda for Sustainable Socio-Economic Transformation (Zim-Asset),” explained Mugabe.

“Our biggest impediment to the achievement of the 2030 Agenda is the burden of the punitive and heinous sanctions imposed against us by some among us here.”

Anyone remotely familiar with Zimbabwe’s economic story knows that ZimAsset died soon after the rigged July 2013 elections. Mugabe thought he would rig economic recovery just as he had rigged the elections; that did not happen. He failed to get anyone, not even his “all weather” Chinese friends to bankroll the $27 billion ZimAsset budget; without the funding the plan was died in the water.

Mugabe continues to live in his own cloud-cuckoo-land not subject to the same laws of thermodynamic and of basic economics that apply in the real world. In the real world there is no way an a country with a GDP of $14 billion would sustain much less thrive and prosper when corruption in the said country has reached the nauseating heights of $15 billion is “swindled” in a few years and those in positions of power and authority are not even alarmed!

Mugabe’s epitaph should simply read:

Here lays a tyrant who believed and ruthlessly imposed his maxim; “What is yours is ours. What is ours is mine. And what is mine is mine, touch it and you die!” 

As Zim crisis worsens President Khama say Mugabe must go - hang diplomatic taboos! By P Guramatunhu

Botswana’s President, Ian Khama, did not mince his words when he told reporters that Mugabe must go.

"Without doubt,” he said. “He should have done it years ago."

"It is obvious that at his age and the state Zimbabwe is in, he's not really able to provide the leadership that could get it out of its predicament," he explained, in what some would consider to be comments that breach an African diplomatic taboo banning criticism of fellow leaders.

Humbug to African diplomatic taboo! Or to use Charles Dickens’s more flowery turn of phrase:

“If the law supposes that," said Mr. Bumble, squeezing his hat emphatically in both hands, "the law is aass — a idiot. If that's the eye of the law, the law is a bachelor; and the worst I wish the law is, that his eye may be opened by experience — by experience.”

Of all the SADC leaders President Khama is the only who has had his eye on the ball as regards Zimbabwe’s endless tragic tale that sunk from bad to worse and has yet to hit rock bottom. Zimbabwe’s economic collapse has its origin in the country’s repeated failure to hold free, fair and credible elections. For 36 years, Zimbabwe has been stuck with a corrupt, incompetent and tyrannical regime.

President Mugabe rigged the 2013 elections - that was blatantly obvious -; he claimed the elections were free and fair and most of the SADC leaders obligingly endorse the result as free and fair except President Khama. He refused to be bullied and demanded the results be audited.

The audited elections results would have exposed the blatant rigging such as the deliberate posting of opposition supporters’ details into constituent voters roll other than the one individual expected, for example. Nearly one million voters were denied the vote in 2013 because their details were not in the constituent voters roll. President Mugabe’s winning margin was just over a million. Knowing that Zanu PF had rigged the vote was one thing doing something about it was another.

SADC leaders, across the board, had very little appetite to continue playing any role in Zimbabwe’s political crisis and economic mess after the July 2013 rigged elections. The blamed MDC leaders for  to get even one democratic reforms, designed to stop the vote rigging, implemented in the five years of the GNU. They had tried their best to get MDC to implement the reforms but Tsvangirai et al completely ignored them. Mugabe had bribed the MDC leaders with the gravy train lifestyles, $4 million Highlands mansion for Tsvangirai, former white owned farm for Ncube, etc. in return for them to do nothing about implementing the reforms.

If MDC had failed to implement even one reform in five years there was no reason they would do so even if the GNU was extended by another year or two!

After President Mugabe blatantly rigged the 2013 national elections he thought he would rig economic recovery too. He failed hence the current worsening economic meltdown dragging Zimbabwe and the whole region deeper and deeper into the abyss.

"It is a big concern," said President Khama. "It is a problem for all of us in the region - and it is a burden. There's no doubt about that."

Last month the Group of Elders comprising Archbishop emeritus Desmond Tutu, Former US President Jimmy Carter, Nelson Mandela’s widow Graca Mandela and others urged SADC leaders to reconsider their involved in Zimbabwe precisely because of the serious economic and political consequences of Zimbabwe’s pending economic meltdown to the country and the region.

History will judge President Ian Khama kindly as the only SADC leader who had the courage and foresight to tell Zimbabwe’s President Mugabe in no uncertain terms that he must go. The consequences of a total economic collapse in Zimbabwe are too ghastly to contemplate and yet the collapse is becoming increasingly certain the longer Mugabe remains in power. There is just too much at stake to delay telling Mugabe that he MUST GO NOW – hang diplomatic taboos and niceties!

Zim flag stripped off Mawarire by D12 American blacks - not surprised, we have even more lunatics Zanu PF.

Mugabe is in America to attend the annual UN General Assembly denounced. Pastor Evan Mawarire whose #ThisFlag campaign calling for Mugabe to fire corrupt ministers, for the return of the looted $15 billion, etc. had hundreds of thousands of followers on the social media inside Zimbabwe and beyond. #ThisFlag staged a number of well supported public protests in Zimbabwe and was hoping to stage one such protest in New York City to surprise Mugabe. It was the Pastor who was in for a big surprise.

A group of, mostly black Americans, calling themselves December 12 Movement’s street protest out staged that of Mawarire and his group. The D12 Movement activists, as they called themselves, who were interviewed, were as generous in the praise of Mugabe as they were ruthlessly critical of Mawarire.

“He is a preacher without a church, with a following of less than 50 members in Zimbabwe, but who has apparently unlimited funding,” reads a D12 report.

“He denounces the conditions of life in Zimbabwe but NEVER mentions what the devastating effects of hundreds of years of Western underdevelopment, terrorism and 16 years of direct US and European SANCTIONS have had on the Zimbabwean economy and quality of life.”

The D12 article was headed Pastor Evan Mawarire’s True Flags: America & Great Britain and had the photograph of Mawarire draped in the two flags.

The shallowness of the D12 movement’s arguments is what screams at you. At the heart of the people of Zimbabwe’s tragic economic suffering as a result of the country’s economic meltdown and political helplessness is a cry for freedom and human dignity including the right to free, fair and credible elections and the right to life itself.

Given that most of the D12 activists are descendants of black slaves and that over 150 years after the abolition of slavery blacks still continued to suffer to this day all manner of racist abuse, exploitation and  oppression should have made D12 activists even more sympathetic to anyone else out there crying for freedom and human dignity.

Indeed one of founding members of D12 even has the chutzpah call himself human rights activist!  

“One of the founders of the December 12th Movement was Sonny Abubadika Carson, who, according to Workers World Org, was a staunch activist against racism and #Police Brutality," according to a report in BlastingNews, a USA based publication.    

Zimbabwe has been independent for the last 36 years now and is yet to hold free, fair and credible elections. What has that got to do with “devastating effects of hundreds of years of Western underdevelopment”?

If the December 12 members have heard of the “16 years of direct US and European SANCTIONS” they must too have of Zimbabwe’s rampant corruption.  In February this year Mugabe, himself, admitted that $15 billion of diamond revenue were “swindled”.

"Lots of smuggling and swindling has taken place and the companies that have been mining, I want to say, robbed us of our wealth," Mugabe said.

Surely not even one D12 activists would deny that the looting of $15 billion from USA’s US$18 trillion GDP will have adverse effect on country’s economy and its people; if it causes a hip up on the American economic it will cause a fatal heart-attack on the Zimbabwe economy whose GDP is a mere $14 billion! So are these D12 busy-bodies are telling us, Zimbabweans, we cannot raise the serious problem of corruption, even when it has become “fatal” to the national economy, because we have “never” mentioned sanctions? How stupid is that!

Mugabe has used his liberation war credentials to hide his corrupt and tyrannical post-independence record. He has kept up his anti-colonial rhetoric especially to the naïve and gullible captive audience outside Zimbabwe who had no first-hand experience of economic hardship of 90% unemployment or 500 billion percent inflation rates or the mental anguish of being beating and some killed to vote for a tyrant.

The D12 members are supporting Mugabe because he has always been very quick off the mark to condemn white oppression and has often taken over the top position on such matters as homosexuality just to bolster his radical reputation and draw attention away from his corrupt and tyrannical rule. D12 members love Mugabe because he has supported them against white abuse although Mugabe has committed even worse acts of abuse on his own people then the D12 member have ever suffered but, of course, that is irrelevant to them. How selfish it that!

Like it or not the D12 activists who attended the UN demonstration in support of Robert Mugabe have tarnished the image of the movement for all time. Anyone with an self-respect will never ever want to be associated with the group.

Thank God the D12 activists who took part or supported those who did in whatever form constitute the lunatic fringe of black Americans and it would be wrong for any Zimbabwean to paint all black Americans with the same brush. After all Mugabe has a hell lot more Zimbabwean lunatic supporters then Americans! He has used some of the looted wealth to buy the lunatics’ continued blind loyalty; the war veterans only finally came up to their sense and acknowledge Mugabe’s “dictatorial tendencies” when Mugabe stopped paying them and poverty started to bit! 

Implementing the reforms is the Holy Grail - street protests are crows sassing at the sun!

I spoke to my favourite Aunt, Vatete (Shona for Auntie) Ndakaziva, over the weekend. She is one of the most amusing and insightful people I have ever met and I love and admire her to bits for it!

We ended up talking about the recent street protests how the public euphoria was a repeat of the euphoria associated with our independence in the 1980s and more recently the new constitution during the GNU. The people were ecstatic with excitement convinced event marked the dawn of the free, just and prosperous Zimbabwe they had all been awaiting for. Their hopes and dreams were crashed on both occasions, as we all know.

I told her the people got what they deserved in 2013 because they were warned the new constitution would not deliver free and fair elections and should focus instead on implementing the democratic reforms agreed in the 2008 GPA. The people were making the same mistake again by being carried away with the street protests and taking their attention away from implementing the reforms.

“Sometimes people behave like crows!” she commented. I laughed as I remembered the first time she told me about the tale of crows screaming at the sun.

Where I grew up in the back waters of rural Zimbabwe, it was common to see a flock of crows swooping and crowing and making a racket just before sun set. In my Vatete’s fable crows often called a “humwe” (gathering to carry out a communal task) to scream at the setting sun. They would be unhappy at the short day because they did not find enough to eat and now faced the prospect of a long cold night. This would be especial true during the dry and cold months of May to August when, for the crows, food would be hard to come by.

“They can sass all they want,” Vatete would continue. “The sun will not hear them and, even if it heard them, it has far more important matters to deal with then than listen to pompous crows!

“Even if the crows would understand you,” she advised in a conspiratorial whisper, “you are must never tell them that the sun is not listening to them. They know it is not listening but will nonetheless be very angry to be reminded of their foolishness.”

Like it or not the street protests are foolish in that they are drawing attention away from understanding what democratic reforms are about and making sure that this time they are all implemented just as the new constitution was a unwelcome distraction during the GNU. Those spear heading the street protests have no idea what the reforms are and therefore will never get even one reform implemented just as MDC leaders who spear headed the new constitution during the GNU failed to get even one reform implemented.

The people refused to listen to the warning that the new constitution was weak and feeble and that it will never deliver free and fair elections. They voted to approve it with an impressive 95% Yes in the March 2013 referendum.

Mugabe went on to blatantly rig the July 2013 elections and the rest is history!

Mugabe rigged the 2013 elections and thought he would rig economic recovery too; that has proven to be a bridge too far. The country’s worsening economic meltdown is the invisible but irresistible force that has forced this Zanu PF regime to accept that the present economic situation cannot continue, there must be political change. It is for us, the people, to make sure that we finally get the meaningful political change we have waited for all these last 36 years by making sure everyone understands what the democratic reforms are about.

Unless a significant number of the people understand what the democratic reforms are about, it is unlikely that they will ever be implemented properly!  

The street protests are being led by elements who have never understood what the reforms are about and they are concentrating all their energy on “Mugabe must go!” The street protests are popular because many people want to vent their anger and frustration. What must be understood however is that, at best, the street protesters will get their wish and remove Mugabe but only for him to be replace by another dictator, as has happened in Egypt.

If we want to stop other dictator taking over then we must dismantle the edifice of the dictatorship by implementing the reforms, something the protesters will never accomplish because they have never understood what the reforms are much less how they are to be implemented.

In many people’s minds, street protests are now more important than implementing the reforms. In fact street protests without reforms are as futile was the new constitution without reforms, as futile as crows sassing at the sun!

Until we finally end the scourge of rigged elections nothing else we say or do matters! And the only sure way of delivering the country’s first and long awaited free, fair and credible elections is by implementing the democratic reforms. Implement the democratic reforms - that is this nation’s Holy Grail! 

Ncube advises frustrated Chinamasa to commit "harakiri" - show him how, Professor!

Last week Zimbabwe’s Minister of finance Patrick Chinamasa confirmed that Zimbabwe’s economic meltdown is getting completely out of hand. The regime is now spending 97% of the collected revenue on civil servant wages alone, for example, up from 80% last year when the aim was to reduce it to a manageable 40%.

The Minister proposed laying off thousands of civil servants, stopping bonus payments, etc.; a desperate effort to contain public expenditure in the face of shrinking revenue. This was not the first time the Minister has tried to reduce public expenditure; he proposed similar measures last year but was publicly slammed down by senior Zanu PF leaders including the President’s nephew Patrick Zhuwao and President Mugabe himself. Minister Chinamasa was slammed down again this time by the usual suspects.

What I have found shocking is the out pouring of heartfelt sympathy for Chinamasa, with some even praising him; reminiscent of the Russians mourning Joseph Stalin! When the Russian dictator Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin died in 1953 it is said millions of Russians mourned him with the grief few had ever shown before or since.

Joseph Stalin caused the untold suffering of hundreds of millions of his own people and the deaths of millions more. He reportedly sent hundreds of thousands of soldiers into battle with no weapons with instructions to find the weapon of any who gets killed. Millions of Russians were arrested send to labour camps or summarily killed during his reign of terror. And yet when the tyrant died millions of Russians who were themselves or had relatives and friends victims of his tyrannical rule shed more tears for the tyrant than those shed for his victims.

“This year has been pretty hectic for my learned friend and former Cabinet colleague Zimbabwe Finance Minister Patrick Chinamasa,” wrote Professor Welshman Ncube. “Patrick is a consummate politician, who in spite of the negative public image he has in many circles, mostly justly earned for having been at the forefront of the legal and media justification for ZANU PF's land grab policies and the attendant attacks on the judiciary, is honest, possesses a beautiful work ethic, loves his country and one of very few ZANU PF Ministers I know for a fact as being uncorrupted. To this day he remains largely very poor by ZANU PF standards because he has tried to practice honest politics.”

What a truck load of baloney!

Patrick Chinamasa is one of the Zanu PF officials who have benefited greatly from the de facto one-party state in that he has returned his ministerial job and all the financial and other fringe benefits that goes with Mugabe’s gravy train political system. He has received at least one former white owned commercial farm worth hundreds of thousands of dollars and never paid a single penny for it. No doubt he has helped a few of his relatives secure jobs, contracts, farms, etc.

So someone who has had a well-paid Ministerial job for 36 years (earned by rigging elections), a large commercial farm (to gratify one’s insatiable greed - never mind that the chaotic acquisition triggered the disastrous economic meltdown), etc.; is still considered “very poor by Zanu PF standards”. Well by the standards of the millions of ordinary Zimbabweans who have paid dearly for having this corrupt and tyrannical dictatorship and are on the coal-face of the 90% unemployment, etc.; Minister Chinamasa is filthy rich!

By the way, Professor Welshman Ncube is one of the opposition political leaders who was allocated a former white owned farms. Mugabe has dished out the farms to bribe or reward those who have helped him establish and retain this corrupt and tyrannical one-party state cum one-man dictatorship. Professor Ncube was a senior MDC member in the GNU and, as we know, MDC did the tyrant a great favour by kicking the democratic reforms into the tall grass. No doubt Professor Ncube considers himself “very poor by Zanu PF standards”.

A few weeks ago Minister Patrick Chinamasa shocked the listeners when he denied on BBC programme HardTalk that the $15 billion of diamond revenue, which President Mugabe had admitted was “swindled”, had indeed been looted. Chinamasa insisted the money was not looted but was instead an accounting error due to “mispricing”!

The wholesale looting of Marange and Chiadzwa diamonds is certainly one of the worst cases of institutionalized theft of public resources. The grand theft is taking place at the time when hundreds of Zimbabweans are dying every week of simple illnesses like appendicitis because the country’s health delivery service has all but collapse after decades of chronic underfunding. $15 billion is a fortune for even the rich nations what more a country like Zimbabwe whose collected annual revenue is $3 billion! What is worse, the grand theft is still going on as we speak!

After President Mugabe’s confessed that the regime could not account for the $15 billion of diamond revenue in February this year, Minister Chinamasa and his counterpart in the ministry of Mines, Minister Chidhakwa, announced that the whole diamond mining industry in Marange was being reorganized to end the “mispricing”! In his budget statement last week Minister Chinamasa admitted that industry produced less than one million carats of diamonds in the last six months against an expectation of six million carats – proof that the regime is failing to stop the looting!

Of course Minister Patrick Chinamasa, like so many of his fellow Zanu PF colleagues, is a dishonest, incompetent, greedy, corrupt and despicable scum of the earth; a curse to the nation. How anyone would describe him as “honest, possesses a beautiful work ethic, loves his country and uncorrupted” beggars belief and speaks volumes of the speaker!

Professor Ncube shed buckets of tears for Chinamasa’s frustrating position of knowing what he must lay-off the thousands of civil servant to reduce the public expenditure, for example, but being stopped by Mugabe. Ncube did not shed a single tear for the unlucky civil servants and the hundreds of thousands who dependent of them who are, for no fault of their own, are the real victims here. To end his clearly frustrating situation, Professor Ncube suggested that Chinamasa should resign or, better still, fall on his own sword and commit hara-kiri!

For the first time, I found myself agreeing with the Professor! Whilst still on the subject, it would be even better if the Professor himself too committed hara-kiri; after all we are in this political and economic mess because he and his MDC friends sold-out during the GNU and failed to get even one democratic reform implemented!  

It is the people, by being naive and gullible, who keep dictators in power

In his article on “How dictators stay in power” see The Zimbabwean newspaper, UZ Student Zivai Mhetu attributed the dictators’ staying-power to how they create fictitious enemies to divert attention away from their own misrule.  

“Their most common tactic is that of conjuring up ‘enemies of the people’ or fictitious threats in a bid to rally their people against an imaginary foe while distracting them from the real enemy – the dictator himself. For Hitler it was the Jews, for Idi Amin, the Asians; for other African dictators, the west,” wrote Zivai.

 Zivai went on to give many examples of how dictators have played this dirty trick to achieve their objective; I encourage you to read the article for yourself, it is well worth reading; I will just quote the last example he gave.

“In the social sciences, legitimation refers to the process whereby an act, process, ideology, or in this case, the dictator becomes legitimate by his/her attachment to norms and values widely shared within the country,” wrote Zivai. “A strong anti-gay stance in a nation that is predominantly Christian and frowns upon that sort of thing can move mountains for a dictator in as far as the legitimation process is concerned. The same applies for inclination towards socialist policies in a country where the majority are workers and not owners of capital.”

Mugabe’s anti-gay stance did indeed move political opinion mountains for him in 1995; I remember it as clearly as if it was yesterday. That year The Zimbabwe Book Fair organizers had assembled such luminaries as playwright and poet Wole Soyinka and author Nadine Gordimer both winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature is 1986 and 1991 respective to speak about freedom of expression. Given Zanu PF’s total domination of the public media and draconian laws to muzzle the little private media there was left in the country; freedom of expression was therefore a burning issue to every freedom loving Zimbabweans, at least one would have thought.

The Book Fair organizers had allowed Zimbabwe’s Gay and Lesbian group, who were campaigning for the scraping of the law homosexual a criminal offence, to have a stand at the book fair. The Zanu PF control public media pick on that and went to town and so did Mugabe.

Mugabe and his propagandists distorted the facts turning the homosexual debate into such an emotive issue, the important debate on freedom of expression was elbowed off the national agenda and the golden opportunity to address this key national issue was lost! Indeed Mugabe has often evoked this theme again and again precisely because it is an emotive issue and has milked it for all its worth!

Today, 36 years after our independence, Zimbabwe is in a serious political and economic mess whose Genesis can be traced back to the country’s failure to create a free, just and democratic society in 1980. The only way out of the mess is for the country to implement democratic reforms designed to dismantle the Zanu PF dictatorship. One of these key reforms is media reform to ensure the country has freedom of expression and free media – the very things Wole Soyinka and Nadine Gordimer told about in the Oasis Hotel back in 1995, if only we had listened!

Zivai started his article by speculating on where dictators get their inspirations on what tricks to play to stay in power.

“Dictators who have emerged all over the world in modern times use such similar tactics to stay in power that one can be forgiven for thinking they have a secret ‘dictator’s book’ with instructions on how to establish and consolidate despotic rule,” he speculated. “Either such a book exists – the Prince by Machiavelli maybe – or the autocratic behaviour of dictators constitutes a case of isomorphic mimicry of the earliest people in the ‘trade.’”

There is a more simple and obvious explanation here for which the dictator does not need a book or master art of mimicry – child psychology.  If you want to take away the toy from a child you play with the empty box with such attention that the child quickly loses interest in the toy and want to play with the box. It works every time because the child has no sense of the true value of the toy compared to the empty box!

Mugabe has systematically and routinely denied us our freedoms and basic human rights and dignities as easily as one taking away toys from a child. Dictators’ machinations and shenanigans work on a very naïve and gullible public – people who, instead of seeing all the colours of the rainbow, see everything only in monochrome, black or white, right or wrong and, with the application of more ruthless brainwashing technics, will even believe poor is the new rich and to bleat “four legs good, two legs better!”

Of course the Zimbabweans are not helpless children and therefore should know better but clearly the do not as Mugabe has blatantly conned them again and again for the last 36 years; the facts on the ground speak for themselves.  

So Zivai Mhetu, it is not so much how the dictator is staying in power but rather how the people themselves, by being so naïve and gullible, are the ones keeping the tyrant in power. The argument to see the people themselves not just as powerless and helpless victims of the dictatorship but rather as the authors of their own tragic tale gains more credence when one considers the number of opportunities the people had to end the dictatorship and yet wasted them all.

The best chance Zimbabwe had in the last 36 years to end the Mugabe dictatorship was, without doubt, during the 2008 to 2013 GNU. All the nation needed to do then was to implement the democratic reforms spelt out in the 2008 GPA. Not even one was implemented!

Yes Mugabe played his usual devil’s role in that he is the one who bribed Morgan Tsvangirai and his MDC friends to kick the reforms into the tall grass. Still it cannot be denied that it was us, the people, who once made it so damn easy for Mugabe carryout his evil plans; we are the ones who elected the corrupt and incompetent MDC leaders into power in the first place and, to make matters worse, failed to supervise the village idiots to ensure all the reforms were implemented.

Zimbabwe’s worsening economic situation has brought a lot of human misery and even deaths many people are now living in abject poverty and where poverty dwells, sickness and death are there also. The only positive thing to emerge out of the economic meltdown is that it has forced Mugabe and Zanu PF to accept that there will have to be political change or the economic situation will get worse and worse until there is change. The most important question now is what kind of political change are we going to see?

If the people continue to be naïve and gullible and elect corrupt and incompetent opposition leaders then it is certain that no meaningful reforms will be implemented. Tsvangirai, Tendai Biti, Mai Mujuru and many of the current crop of opposition leaders have already proven beyond all reasonable doubt that they are corrupt and incompetent it is sheer folly to believe that anyone of them will deliver the democratic changes the nation is dying for.

As things stand, the best solution for Zimbabwe right now is to have an interim government whose principal duty is to implement all the democratic reforms and thus completely dismantle the Zanu PF dictatorship and replace the system with a democratic complete with free media and freedom of expression and democratic competition. Quality leaders will emerge out of this system.

It is most disconcerting to hear people who have only recently started denouncing Mugabe as a murderous tyrant and even join in the street protest boasting of “Tajamuka” (We are enlightened!). And yet the same people continue to follow the same recycled corrupt and incompetent leaders like Tsvangirai or Mujuru. They are clearly refusing to see Tsvangirai or Mai Mujuru for the corrupt and incompetent leaders they are because of the binary mentality, having finally decided Mugabe was bad anyone challenging Mugabe must therefore be good! Being enlightened meanings one is no longer naïve and gullible and cured of the simplicity binary mentality.

Conclusion: it is the naïve and gullible electorate with their childlike binary mentality who are keeping dictators in power. It therefore follows that in the fight to end dictatorial rule and/or to guard against it rearing its ugly head make sure the people are not naïve and gullible.