The trouble with people with little or nothing
to offer is that they easily get carried away; MDC – T is getting carried away
with the Khampepe report just as Zanu PF got carried away with the sanction.
What we must not allow these narrow minded people to think they are carrying us
away with them!
The Zimbabwe economy was already in serious
trouble after the two five-year Economic Structural Adjustment Programmes of
1990 to 1995 and 1995 to 2000 failed to produce any meaningful economic
recovery. The violent seizure of white owned farms by Mugabe and his cronies
that started in 2000 was more like the avalanche that buried the camel. The
farm seizures destroyed the agricultural sector, the engine of the Zimbabwe
economy, sending the economy into a spiral free fall from which it has never
recovered.
The Western countries imposed target sanctions
on Mugabe and a few in his inner circle in protest at his regime’s failure to
hold free, fair and credible elections in 2002 when the economy was already in
free fall. Mugabe took the sanctions as God-sent, the regime and its propaganda
machine swung into action and for the last 12 have blamed all, and I mean ALL,
Zimbabwe’s economic problems on “the illegal sanctions imposed by the British
imperialists and the western allies”.
Ever since last year’s rigged election MDC-T
led by Tsvangirai, MDC led by Ncube and the break-away MDC-Renewal have all
been at sixes and sevens as to what to say about the elections. Tendai Biti is
on record denouncing the elections as fraudulent only to revise his statement
to say Zanu PF won because they had a better campaign. Everyone knows that
Mugabe rigged the elections, what has made it so difficult for MDC leaders to
come out and admit it is that they will also have to admit that they failed to
implement the reforms necessary to stop Mugabe rigging the vote!
The last release of Khampepe report has been as
God-sent scapegoat as sanctions were for Zanu PF.
The Khampepe report concluded that the 2002
Zimbabwe elections were not free and fair. Successive SA governments have
refused to make the report public until know. MDC – T led by none other than
Tsvangirai himself – no doubt with one eye for another Usan Bolt dash to the
Netherland Embassy at the first sign of trouble – have seized on this delay and
now blame it for the rigged 2013 elections as if to say if MDC had known Mugabe
rigged elections they would have implemented all the reforms. Nonsense!
All the Election Observers to Zimbabwe’s 2008
elections released their reports within days after the presidential run-off
elections and their findings were unanimous – the election were not free, fair
and credible. Mugabe and Zanu PF accepted that and it was the basis for the GPA
to which Tsvangirai as leader of one MDC faction and Arthur Mutambara as the
leader of the other faction are the other two parties in the agreement. The GNU
was tasked, above all else, to implement a raft of democratic reforms to ensure
the next elections would be free, fair and credible.
So the GPA shows MDC leaders knew, if they did
not know already, that Mugabe and Zanu PF will rig the elections again just as
they had done in 2008. After 2008, the Khampepe report, would not have added
anything new that the world did not know already.
Mugabe was able to blatantly rig the 2013
elections because MDC leaders failed to get even one democratic reform
implemented in all their five years in the GNU. Mugabe granted MDC leaders a
seat on the gravy train and they promptly forgot about the reforms.
“MDC vadzidza kudya vanyerere!” as one Mugabe
crony cynically remarked at the time. (MDC have learnt to enjoy the gravy train
good life and not rock the boat!) Ever since Tsvangirai got his $ 4 million Highlands
mansion to which he has now superglued himself like a binnacle to a rock he
never said or did anything to upset Mugabe for the rest of the GNU. Talking
about implementing the reforms would have send Mugabe into volcanic rage!
Tsvangirai and his fellow MDC friends believed
that even without one reform implemented they would still win the elections and
so they confident went ahead disregarding SADC’s advice not to. Within hours of
voting starting, MDC leaders and supporters were running around like headless
chickens; the vote rigging was massive and blatant. In failing to implement the
reforms MDC leaders showed that they are breathtakingly incompetent!
MDC leaders owe the people Zimbabwe and our
SADC friends an apology for failing to implement the democratic reforms which
allowed Mugabe to rig the 2013 elections landing the nation into this mess.
“SADC turned a blind eye when innocent
civilians were being butchered in broad daylight and is therefore to blame for
the current economic meltdown in Zimbabwe - the result of an illegitimate
regime derived from yet another stolen election in 2013, with the full
complicity of SADC, and with South Africa as the chief sponsor of the
"free and fair" verdict,” said MDC-T UK and Ireland press statement.
They are just following Tsvangirai and MDC-T SA in this.
No amount of propaganda by Mugabe has changed
the fact that the Zimbabwe’s economy is in a mess because of mismanagement and
corruption and not sanctions. Indeed by burying its head in the sand the regime
has allowed these cancerous problems to grow and spread and today they are as
big as tennis balls and are killing the economy.
2 comments:
@ Eddie Cross
The GNU "then collapsed in a flurry of legal and political measures which forced elections in July 2013 despite the failure to implement the reforms necessary to hold a credible election process," you said. This is the meat of the issue: why did MDC fail to get even one reform implemented.
You should answer the question and stop treating everyone the way you treat your MDC followers who never asked what happened and will follow like sheep.
MDC owe the nation an apology for their breath-taking incompetence in failing to get even one reform implemented knowing that “reforms necessary to hold a credible election process” as you rightly admit.
Mugabe and Zanu PF has always treated the Zimbabwe people in a patronising and con-descending way, just as the white racist regime of Ian Smith before had done. The only two occasions MDC and Zanu PF agreed and cooperated 100% during the GNU was in getting more allowances and perks for politicians and when it came to keeping the populous deliberately in the dark as to what was happening.
Instead of calling for a free press and freedom of expression all Tsvangirai demanded was that the Zanu PF controlled media should stop calling him a puppet – which they dutifully did for a few weeks.
MDC betrayed the nation in failing to implement the reforms and now you lot pretend as if you did nothing wrong to add insult to injury! When are you going to apologise and stop treating us as if we are all stupid?
@ Yamamoto
Zimbabwe’s long standing leaders, led by Mr Robert Mugabe, have developed incompetence into an art, perfected it and meshed it with great skill in giving excuses for this in-competence and leadership poverty to the point of creating an ironically effective propaganda machinery to mask it. Every economic question seems to have ZIMASSET as an answer to it.
Just looking at the $7 million allocation to Mr Bimha’s ministry compared with the ATI premium does not tell us much. Again the devil is in the detail. If you drill further into Mr Chinamasa’s 2014 budget, you will notice a strange anomaly. Mr Mugabe’s own “office of the President and cabinet” was allocated a whopping $200 million. Yes, a cool $206 054 000. That is twenty-nine times the size of the ministry in charge of industry and commerce. Put differently, Mr. Mugabe’s office alone got a huge five percent (5%) of the total national budget. Clearly, a country does not need enemies, when it can do this to itself. No wonder companies are collapsing one after another, as if suffering from an epidemic!
The thinking into the warped allocation of resources is not too difficult see. The funds are used for non-essential schemes to keep power – such as the spy games which have been revealed by Mrs Grace Mugabe - recording political enemies in mini-skirts and so forth. More importantly, this budget covers Mr Mugabe’s endless international travels. This year alone, Mr Mugabe has travelled to no less than ten countries (Singapore, Dubai, USA, Italy, China, Bolivia, Equatorial Guinea, Ethiopia, and Austria).
As the IMF noted, the economy of Zimbabwe is at a crossroads. Crossroads means to be at a stage when you have to make a very important decision. The Zimbabwean economy is in free fall, and like a manual car, you can drive to your destination all the way in the first gear. You have to engage to higher gears to gather speed. This free fall is not going to stop till there is a fundamental change in the economy’s managers. The government of Zimbabwe operates yakuza-style; very much like a blood-sucking vampire squid. The people of Zimbabwe have tough choices to make.
After rigging the 2013 elections to stay in power Mugabe and Zanu PF had to rig the economic recovery to stay in power – rig because the regime was not capable of implementing any sound policy and reforms such as ending the corruption to achieve normal recovery. After a year of desperate begging the regime has only managed to get $7 billion out of the $27 billion it was asking for it its ZimAsset recovery plan – a plan design to rig economic recovery by throwing lots and lots of money at the problem.
The regime has finally come to the end of the long economic rope, it has nowhere else to go now but wait for the fall. The regime will be forced to step down or else forced out of office the Gaddafi style!
Post a Comment