Implementing democratic reforms is key to ending Mugabe dictatorship but none will implemented until people understand this!

By the late 1990s “democracy” and “democratic change” these were the buzz words everybody was talking about in Zimbabwe. After nearly two decades of a corrupt and oppressive de facto one-party dictatorship the nation had finally realized that the only way to end the chronic cancers of gross mismanagement and the corruption was by replacing the tyrannical autocracy with a healthy democratic rule.

The Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), the political party led by Morgan Tsvangirai was launched in 1999 on the crest of the democratic change wave. Even in the face of the usual beating, rape and even murders by Mugabe and his thugs, the people braved all that and voted for Tsvangirai and MDC in drove of the promise MDC would deliver democratic change.

To be perfectly honest, ever since Morgan Tsvangirai took centre stage in the Zimbabwe politics his blundering incompetence was impossible to miss. But it was the failure to get even one democratic reform implemented throughout the five years in the GNU that has come to define just how breathtakingly incompetent he and his MDC co-leaders really are. They really did not have a clue what the raft of democratic reforms agreed in the GPA were about, how they were supposed to be implemented and, much less, the consequences of going ahead with the 2013 elections with no reforms implemented.

And only did Tsvangirai and his MDC friend have no clue about the reforms but so too did the Zimbabwe electorate. MDC had stood on a ticket of bringing democratic change and yet even the leaders did not know what these changes were. The people had risked life and limb for democratic change without knowing what changes they wanted.

It is not as if the concepts of democratic changes complex and therefore hard to understand; they are not, they are in fact common sense.

Take the need to reform the Police, for example; even the rural people were aware of how Zanu PF thugs had beaten raped and even murdered innocent people and yet none of the culprits ever arrested and punished. Even my Aunt in the rural backwaters who does not understand the niceties of democracy understands that a none-partisan Police Force is important for a justice society.  

One expected that political leaders like Tsvangirai, Biti and Mangoma, especially the last two since they are lawyers and were MDC’s negotiators in the GPA, would understand that to have a none-partisan Police Force it was necessary to end the State President powers to appoint and dismiss the Police Commissioner without reference to parliament. Parliament or a parliamentary committee should have the powers to call the Police Commissioner and hold him/her to account and have the individual replaced if founding wanting.  

SADC got Mugabe to sign the GPA and accept that a whole raft of democratic reforms, including Police reform, would be implemented if the next elections were to be free and fair. It is not rocket science to see why without Police reforms, for example, it would be impossible to stop Zanu Pf operative hell-bend on rigging the elections.

As it happened MDC failed to get even one democratic reform implemented although the party had the majority in the GNU parliament, the majority in the cabinet, had the full backing of SADC who was the guarantor of the GPA and had five years to do it. Not even one reform was implemented, not one!

There are two reasons why Tsvangirai and his MDC friends to get even one reform implemented; one, they were all side tracked by the trappings of power. Mugabe welcomed them on the gravy train and denied them nothing; Tsvangirai got his $3 million mansion, was glob-trotting, etc. SADC leaders disappointed that none of the reforms had been implemented accused MDC leaders of “enjoying themselves and forgetting why they were in the GNU”.

The second reason MDC leaders failed to get even one reform implemented and still agreed to take part in the 2013 elections against advice not to that they are breathtakingly incompetent and naïve. It was not until the afternoon of the election-day that the penny finally dropped that people like Tsvangirai realised how naïve he had been.

With not even one reform implemented Mugabe was able to use the Police, ZEC, the Judiciary, etc. to blatantly rig the elections.

The consequences of the rigged elections is that the Mugabe and Zanu PF dictatorship got back into power and the cancers of mismanagement and corruption which had crippled the national economy took off after the GNU pause with vengeance. The political repression too was emboldened by the electoral victory!

What has been really disheartening is that the electorate still at a loss as to what went wrong, even with the benefit of hindsight and all the evidence of Tsvangirai and MDC blunders, they still fail to see why the failure to implement the democratic reforms was central to this nightmare. All that talk of democracy and democratic change was empty slogans repeated without ever understanding what they meant.

Whilst the nation still recognizes the need to end the Mugabe and Zanu PF dictatorship as a necessary step in bring about change in Zimbabwe few people realise that nothing can ever be accomplished with implementing the democratic reforms. Hence the majority still put their trust in leaders like Tsvangirai and Tendai Biti because they never comprehended that it was their breath-taking incompetence and failure to implement the reforms that landed the nation in this mess.

Implementing the democratic reforms is the key to ending the corrupt and oppressive Zanu PF dictatorship but none of these reforms will ever be implemented properly until both the politicians and the people, especially the people, really take the trouble to understand that these reforms are. How can the people hold the leaders to account when their understanding of the subject matter is superficial, at best!