Zanu PF, especial the state control public media, is fighting a desperate rear-guard action to promote last month’s coup as the silver-bullet to solve all our political paralysis and economic meltdown problems allowing the nation to finally climb out the hell-hole we have been stuck in all these last 37 years. The truth is Zimbabwe is still stuck in the hell-hole because Mugabe’s departure has changed nothing other than allow one lot of thugs to replace the last lot. Zimbabwe is a still as lawless today as it was before Mugabe resigned, for example.
“Members of the public are warned against seeking the services of the ZDF to settle old personal scores taking advantage of the ongoing Operation Restore Legacy. Such cases are clearly a violation of the law,” reported The Herald quoting a joint Police and Army statement.
“They said there are also some malicious individuals abusing the social media to generate and circulate inflammatory content that potentially causes unnecessary alarm and despondency within the defence and security services “with the ultimate objective of disturbing the prevailing peace and stability in the country.”
Nonsense! What “prevailing peace and stability” can there be in a country in the middle a military coup whose dust is yet to settle? No amount of political spin can change the fundamental fact that the coup was an internal Zanu PF matter that did not solve the Zimbabwe’s problem of bad governance at the heart of the country’s political paralysis and economic meltdown.
Operation Restore Legacy was about making sure absolute power within the Zanu PF dictatorship was wrestled from Grace Mugabe and her G40 members, which is what Robert Mugabe was planning to do, and handed back to the Joint Operation (JOC), the Junta that has ruled Zimbabwe with an iron fist all these last 37 years. The firing of the VP Mnangagwa early last month was to clear the way for Grace Mugabe to succeed her husband. JOC, the majority of whom supported, Mnangagwa to succeed Mugabe was left with no option but to stage the coup to restore the Junta’s political supremacy.
Of course, Mnangagwa, Chiwenga and all the other JOC members were aware that Zanu PF lost its popular support decades ago. The challenge for them was to stage the coup to not only achieve the more immediate objective of removing Mugabe and stop the G40 succession but to do in such a way that the populous showered the Junta with rose petals as the nation’s liberators. That is exactly what has happened!
To the naïve and gullible public, Mugabe was the head of Zanu PF dictatorship; and, to them, cut-off the head spelt the death of the monster. In reality, Mugabe was nothing more than the tail of the autotomy gecko which, when cornered, it sheds off. The shed-off tail assumes a life of its own as it wriggles with vigour as if determined to get away. It will take the predator minute or two to subdue the tail; enough time for the gecko to get away.
It going to take some Zimbabweans few months if not years to realise that the Zanu PF dictatorship survive the coup and all they ever got was the gecko’s tail. The dictatorship replace Mugabe with Mnangagwa within two weeks and has since resumed corruption, vote rigging, etc.
If we really want to address the country’s teething economic and political problems of gross mismanagement, rampant corruption, blatant vote rigging and tyrannical oppression then we must go back to implementing the democratic reforms. It is the Zanu PF dictatorship we are after; the gecko and not its tail.
6 comments:
@ Briggs Bomba
There is a world of difference between seeing what is there and seeing what you wish to see. You are seeing the latter and are desperately trying to convince yourself it is the reality.
“I argue that Zimbabweans have every reason to celebrate Mugabe’s fall but that the bigger task is to use this opportunity to organize with more vigour for a more democratic and just Zimbabwe,” you say.
“Further, I assert that Mugabe’s fall creates a new cultural climate of which Zimbabweans must take advantage to launch a new era of invigorated civic organizing and citizen agency in the country.”
You admit that the “bigger task” was making sure there is democratic reforms. In other words, getting Mugabe to go was the smaller task. I would argue that the 18 November 2017 march to demand Mugabe to go has been greeted by many as a monumental achievement and greeting of the Army as liberation heroes was heart felt. The coup plotters have lapped it all up and they have gone to town about how this being a “new era of democratic dispensation, etc.”
So, whether you care to admit it or not it is irrelevant, what has happened is many Zimbabweans saw the resigned of Mugabe not as small achievement with more to come but as the big achievement. President Mnangagwa and his Zanu PF cronies are burning the midnight oil to convince the masses it was the greatest achievement the nation ever wanted.
The truth is whatever head of steam the nation had built for demanding democratic change is was wasted on getting Mugabe to go. It is going to take nany Zimbabweans months if not years, some people are already arguing to give Mnangagwa a chance to prove himself, for people to realise they were short changed. They should have concentrated on getting democratic reforms implemented and thus dismantle the dictatorship. After all no dictator will survive without the dictatorship, he or she will be a fish out of water. We failed to drain the swamp because we were excited we got the big dictator and a few others around him but left many others to take their place.
“While this new cultural climate may be imperceptible to an observer removed from the scene, the change in the atmosphere for civic organizing in the country is palpable,” you continued
What are you talking about? It was none other than grouping of the country’s Church and civic society organisation who wrote to President Mnangagwa asking him to form a government of national unity. Of course, that was a foolish call because if the last GNU supervised by SADC failed to get even one democratic reform implemented in five years what hope is there that a Zanu PF one would do any better!
We have had many golden opportunities to end the Zanu PF dictatorship but wasted them because we failed to keep our eyes on the ball. We have made the same mistake again and again because some people did not see the folly of being distracted. Taking our eyes off the dictatorship to concentrate on Mugabe was a foolish thing to do and the very least we can do is admit and learn from that.
The African Export-Import Bank (Afreximbank) is set to inject $1,5 billion to stabilise the country’s economy, as well to provide investment guarantee to investors that the bank will pick up country risk which may befall their investments.
The bank has worked very closely with Mugabe’s regime regardless the latter’s reputation of being corrupt and incompetent regimes. Considering that the Mnangagwa administration is in fact all but the same crap with a new head there is little reason to expect change in terms of being corrupt and incompetent.
In fact one is forced to question the competence of these Afreximbank managers who have granted loans to corrupt regimes! Better still, future regimes should seriously consider refusing to repay these loans. Why should a nation should be dragged down by a debt from which it never benefited from and the creditor knew the money would be wasted!
There is no way next year's election can ever be free, fair and credible when not even one meaningful democratic reform has been implement. SADC leaders advised MDC not to contest the 2013 elections without first implementing the reforms and that advice is even more relevant today than back then.
SADC leaders should know that the political and economic chaos in Zimbabwe is not going away until there is meaningful democratic change. The coup last month was a warning of how easily things can get out of hand in Zimbabwe. SADC leaders will be very foolish to judge next year's elections anything other than a sham! Zimbabwe needs to revisit the democratic reforms the last GNU failed to implement as the only way out of the mess the country is in.
@ Tapson Muchena
“In short, ZANU PF would use democratic methods not to grant democratic freedoms but to create a pseudo-democracy in which it would manage public grievances, respond to public concerns and pre-empt mass dissent in order to maintain its grip on power,” you argue.
“Responsiveness would be the key to ZANU PF’s strategy and Zimbabwe would become a “respondocracy”.”
An interesting idea but one that will never be applied in Zimbabwe. President Mnangagwa and his Zanu PF cronies are riding high on the feel-good factor generated by the departure of Robert Mugabe. But now, hardly one month after the tyrant’s resignation many people are already waking up to the political reality that Mugabe’s departure did not equate to the end of the Zanu PF dictatorship, as they had thought. By the time of next year’s elections, people will know the coup changed nothing.
If next year’s elections were free, fair and credible then they would be the first such elections in the country’s history. The elections will then be a vote for making all future elections are free, fair and credible and for that people know they must vote for anyone, anyone at all as long as he/she is not Zanu PF!
President Mnangagwa is smart enough to know he will lose free, fair and credible elections and so he will have no choice but rig the vote. He must also know that SADC and other international organisation are under increasing pressure to dismiss the whole election process as a sham but he has no choice and hope they will rubber stamp another Zanu PF rigged election.
Zimbabwe’s former president Robert Mugabe has left the country for medical checks in Singapore, his first foreign travel since the army forced him from office last month, a state security official said on Tuesday.
Zimbabwe is still waiting for a real democratic change and when that happens the nation will launch a thorough investigation into election fraud. Once it has been established beyond all reasonable doubt the Mugabe and his cronies had been rigging elections to stay in power then one of the consequences have to be stripping Mugabe and his cronies all their ill-gotten wealth and give it to the rightful owners, the impoverished masses who are the ones who have paid dearly for all the misrule by this regime.
“The truth is Zimbabwe is still stuck in the hell-hole because Mugabe's departure has changed nothing other than allow one lot of thugs to replace the last lot. Zimbabwe is a still as lawless today as it was before Mugabe resigned, for example,” you said.
Sadly, this is true; nothing has change in Zimbabwe. The same Zanu PF thugs who had kept Mugabe in power all these years decided to throw him out in operation restore legacy to save the dictatorship itself. We, the public, were naïve enough to believe we had the dictator and the dictatorship when all we got was the dictator, the gecko’s tail, which once discarded was doomed. The dictatorship has survived and has a new tail.
President Mnangagwa will never end corruption by going after the few G40 members like Kasukuwere but doing nothing about everyone else. Of course, people like General Chiwenga are corrupt, he did not build his C&M mansion from the general salary alone. Mnangagwa himself is corrupt, he was named in the UN report as one of the Zimbabweans involved in the looted of diamonds in Zaire.
Zanu PF, even the new Zanu PF with its new tail, is a party of thugs and it is naïve to think the country will ever get out of the hell-hole the party dragged us into as long as the thugs rule the roost.
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