@Carle Wille and Les Will
“As Africans, we simply must raise the bar and put leaders in place with ability, vision and strength of character,” you said. And I agree with you there Carle. I believe we have not done well so far because we have tended to close the stable when the horse has bolted.
For years before and after independence Mugabe could do no wrong; it was simply unthinkable to question anything he did. He exploited this weakness to undermine and corrupt the Police, Media, Judiciary and all other the other institutions necessary for a functioning democracy and turned Zimbabwe into a de facto one party state. At the critical formative stage of Robert Mugabe and Zanu PF, we placed him on a pedestal fit for a God. We are doing exactly the same now with Morgan Tsvangirai, Tendai Biti and MDC.
MDC have been totally ineffective in facing up to Mugabe’s land debacle. Indeed Tsvangirai even had the chic to dismiss the whole thing as an “exaggeration” – there is strength of character for you.
When the Kimberley Process (KP) relented and allowed Mugabe to sale the Marange diamonds; they allowed the dictator to fill his war chests. Of course he will now use the money to pay his thugs and State Security Operatives to ensure the Zimbabwe electorate are once again denied a meaningful vote in the coming elections. Of course, without free and fair elections there will be not real change in Zimbabwe. One had expected even the placid MDC to see just how important this was and act accordingly.
All the MDC Minister of Finance, Tendai Biti, had to say about the KP sell-out was that parliament will pass a “Diamond Act” to stop Mugabe and his cronies misappropriating the diamond revenue. It was not the lack or weakness of existing parliamentary legislations that has allowed Mugabe to misappropriate the nation’s wealth and resources, including land, to intimidate and even murder his critics and political opponents all these year. Mugabe and his ruling elite have no regard for the rule of law; they are a law onto themselves.
In Zimbabwe parliament has no real power. The Joint Operations Command (JOC) composed of the heads of the State Security Organs, a selected few like Minister Mnangagwa and Gideon Gono and chaired by Mugabe himself has all the power.
Even if one was to give Minister Bit the benefit of the doubt and assume the Diamond Act will wrestle the diamond revenue from Mugabe’s clutch; the diamonds are being sold NOW. By the time the Act finally become law Mugabe’s war chests will be full to the brim!
Minister Biti’s Diamond Act is nothing more than the proverbial frog who claimed he could put out the forest fire with his fart!
If we are to give ourselves a fighting chance of ever getting competent leaders in Africa we must not be transfixed by the public enemy number one of the day that we forget to access the competency of those offering to lead us tomorrow. Before independence we were concerned about ending the racist regime of Ian Smith we allowed Robert Mugabe, a ruthless tyrant, to take over. Now its all eyes on Mugabe we voted on-mass for one of the most incompetent African leaders of all time – Morgan Richard Tsvangirai. If it was not for Tsvangirai and MDC’s blundering; Mugabe would not be in State House, the madness of the farm invasions would have been stopped and the looters kicked off the farms, etc.!
I agree with Les Wil “I don't think there is anybody listening to you. Particularly the African leaders. They all benefit from disorder. So why would they want to change?” I think it is a waste of time to think that Mugabe will ever change; he is not only drunk from absolute power but is completed addicted to it. As for people like Tsvangirai and Tendai Biti if we failed – not that we even tried – to hold them accountable to us before 2008 when they were just opposition MPs what chance now they are ministers?
Real change will only come if we the people have finally learnt that it takes more than empty rhetoric against the public enemy number one of the day to make a visionary leader with strength of character.
3 comments:
Well I agree with you, Tano, that MDC is no longer serving the people's interests but their own. But as long as there is no alternative to MDC, there is no pressure for them to change, they still see themselves as infinitely better Zanu PF.
Of course MDC's poor performance is itself working in Mugabe's own favour. Zanu PF has better electoral prospects today than it has had at any point in the last ten years.
The need to have a real alternative voice other than MDC muchless Zanu PF is probably the most pressing thing in Zimbabwe today.
@ Fungayi
You are paid to say nonsense and so you write nonsense day after day after day. You are back to your favourite theme; lying about the Mugabe regime’s achievement and intentions.
“We will not have our future determined by those who oppressed us and only saw us as a source of cheap labour” you write.
Mugabe and many others in Zanu PF are the liberation heroes and the fought to end white oppression and exploitation. But since the country attained its independence in 1980 it is not the whites but blacks who have being doing the oppression. It was thirty of gross mismanagement and rampant corruption ending up in such acts as seizing productive farms only to have them lying idle that has resulted in 80% of our people out of work, the highest in the world.
Yes Zimbabwe has the highest latency rates in Africa but with students attending 23 days a year and the whole education system barely functioning for lack of funds. Indeed many schools will have closed a long time ago were it not for foreign aid. How long will Zimbabwe hold on to this piece of good news?
Life expectancy has fallen from 65 years in 1980 to 34 years now; there is an acid test of how well the Mugabe dictatorship has performed.
“We will not have our future determined by those who oppressed us and only saw us as a source of cheap labour. We choose leaders to make policies that will benefit us in real terms in the long run”, you continue.
We all know Mugabe is going to use the money he gets from selling diamonds to pay the youth militia, buy more twin-cab trucks with no registration plates that will be used to kidnap Zanu PF opponents and critics, etc. All this for one purposed and one purpose only – to ensure the Zimbabwe electorate are once again denied a meaningful free and fair vote in next year’s election. So please spare us this nonsense of “we choose leaders” when that is the one thing Mugabe has denied the nation.
You, just like you master Mugabe, keep going back to the whites. You deny the whole nation their basic human rights, the right to vote, freedom expression and even the right to life under this excuse of fighting off the whites. I am pleased to see that there are now many blacks, some of them in the rural areas, who can see through this smoke and mirrors game you love to play. The one thing they want now is a Zimbabwe where no Zimbabwean will ever be treated as if their hopes and dreams count for nothing just the way the white treated them before independence and the same way or worse Mugabe is treating them now.
We want a life with human dignity and are treated with respect – we know the man denying us that life is Mugabe.
Yes Mugabe will have his war-chest full to the brim with diamonds money but the people’s resolve for meaningful change is hardening by the day. Mugabe has won a minor skirmish but the battle for the people’s heart is yet to be fought.
This is one war that the people have lost so much to Mugabe’s brutality already and know worse things are in store for them, they also know the more they given him the more he has demanded from them. And so they now know they the only sure way to end this madness is by winning. You are fighting to loot one more farm and for even more luxuries of life; we, the people, are fighting for life – never underestimate our resolve!
If President Zuma thought that by doing nothing to stop Mugabe's madness will make the Zimbabwe problem disappear like morning mist in the African sun; he was wrong. Like it or not the problem has got worse and worse making him look more and more pathetic for his lack of foresight.
Mugabe is not the type of person one should ever try to appease because he will respond by kicking you in the teeth. To him those who seek to appease him do so because they fear him and so he kicking them in the teeth Mugabe will underline his dominance. President Zuma should look at the contemptuous way Mugabe has treated Morgan Tsvangirai. Here is the man who got the dictator off the hook after the sham 2008 elections and by agreeing to share power with him. And yet Mugabe has humiliated Tsvangirai at every turn and in the GNU Tsvangirai’s role is that of an Office Boy!
Wilmot James is absolutely right in saying Mugabe has "shown SADC the finger, again". But since SA is the big brother in SADC, Mugabe was giving the two finger salute to President Zuma, indirectly of course! President Zuma has allowed Mugabe a lot of rope and now the Zimbabwe dictator is out to hang President Zuma with it!
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