Another "Mujuru Bhora Mushango will defeat Zanu PF" - another kiya kiya hare-brain scheme. N Garikai

The elephant in Zimbabwe’s political room is Zanu PF’s now limitless power to rig elections. When a number of Zimbabwe’s opposition parties came together to form NERA, they promised to pressure the Zanu PF regime to implement electoral reforms to take away the party’s omnipotent vote rigging powers. What they were proposing is the equivalent of the mice proposing to tie the bell on the cat with the new twist, get the bloody cat to tie the blood bell round its own neck!  

“Zanu PF is not going to reform itself out of office,” Zanu PF bigwigs like High Education Minister, Professor Jonathan Moyo have said. He was only stating the obvious, just to underline the foolishness of the proposal.

The opposition have failed to get even one democratic reform implemented in the last four years since the last rigged July 2013 elections and it is certain they will not get any implemented in the remaining year before the elections. There is panic and confusion in the opposition camp; they all want to contest next year’s elections but since they have done nothing to curtail Zanu PF’s vote rigging powers they are now coming up with all manner of hare-brain scheme to convince themselves and the electorate how they can still win the election regardless of all Zanu PF’s vote rigging!

“In the instances that they (opposition) partially won an election, it was because of the bhora musango (kick ball into the bush),” said Jealousy Mawarire, Mujuru’s NPP spokesman, explaining his party’s hare-brain scheme.

“If you read and understand the bhora musango phenomenon, you would see that there was a Mujuru element in that aspect; supporters of Dr Mujuru within Zanu PF chose not to vote for the Zanu PF president in 2008. And that resulted in the MDCT and its leader Morgan Tsvangirai winning the first round of that election.”

“So that alone is an indication that if we work together we have chances of defeating Zanu PF and also effect the transfer of power.”

If Mai Mujuru was truly committed to see power transfer then and smart enough to see this through then why did she fail to stop President Mugabe rigging the result. Tsvangirai had 73% of the vote, according to President Mugabe’s own admission, he ordered ZEC to recount the votes. After six weeks of recounting ZEC announced that Tsvangirai had 47% of the vote.

In the presidential run-off that followed, President Mugabe launched his own military style operation “Mavhotera papi!” (Whom did you vote for!) which completely overwhelmed Bhora Musango (assuming it was still active) and turned Tsvangirai’s 73% victory in March into an 85% Mugabe victory in July!

The people expected Mai Mujuru and her ZimPF to do well in the recent Bikita West by-elections, after all she could now openly and aggressively deploy her Bhora Musango phenomenon and not have to hide as in 2008 when she was still a Zanu PF bigwig! The ZimPF only got 14% of the vote! Mawarire should explain what happen. Did she lose her ball?

If Mai Mujuru has any brain at all and truly cared about a free and democratic Zimbabwe then she should have used her position at the heart of the party and government to stop President Mugabe creating the de facto one-party dictatorship in the first place. Her hare-brain Bhora Musango plan was too little too late, as we have seen.

After 37 years of corrupt and tyrannical Mugabe and Zanu PF rule that has forced millions to leave the country as economic and/or political refugees or else live in abject poverty; the need for a competent government is now a matter of life and death. We cannot afford yet another rigged election; that should be obvious even to our corrupt and incompetent opposition politicians.

We need a working solution to fix our broken political system. NPP’s Bhora Musango, the grand opposition coalition, etc. as all kiya kiya solutions because they all do nothing to address the big problem of Zanu PF’s power to rig elections. We have ignored Zanu PF’s ability to rig elections for 37 years and it has only grown in extend and sophistication over the years to the all-powerful colossus it is today. Grace Mugabe is so confident of a Zanu PF victory next year that she boasted that even the corpse of her husband as the Zanu PF candidate would win the election.  

We must now stop Zanu PF’s vote rigging juggernaut once and once for all by making sure there will be no elections until the democratic reforms designed to dismantle the dictatorship are fully implemented. We must discard all the opposition’s kiya kiya scheme to contest the elections with no reforms in place because they have not worked in the past and never will!