The road to hell is paved by
good intentions and nowhere is this more true than when the well-meaning have
no clue what they are doing. In their blundering they make the bad situation
worse and even harder to disentangle!
“CHURCHES
under the banner of the Zimbabwe Council of Churches are leading efforts to
bring President Emmerson Mnangagwa and opposition MDC Alliance leader Nelson
Chamisa to the negotiating table to break the post-election conundrum
characterised by a worsening cash crisis and escalating shortages of some basic
products,” reported News Day.
“The process of envisioning is
not an easy one. It must be painful and it is supposed to give nightmares to us
because we are trying to grapple with our past trying to make sense of the
present. But we are also trying to envision where we are going as a nation,”
ZCC vice-president Bishop Solomon Zwana told the gathering.
“Let us try to find ways to
move our nation forward. Yes, there is a period of problems and there must be
another period of strategising and yet another phase of moving forward and not
continue to mourn without trying to look for practical ways of moving forward.”
There are two basic questions
these church leaders must ask of themselves (should have done so but it is not
too late to do so now) before going any further:
Were the 30 July 2018 elections
free, fair and credible?
What is it exactly they are
hoping to accomplish?
Soon after last November’s
military coup that resulted in the booting out of office of Robert Mugabe after
37 years as the nation’s leader; President Mnangagwa promised to hold free,
fair and credible elections. Sadly he did not keep his promise.
Zanu PF denied 2 to 3 million
Zimbabweans in the diaspora the vote for no other reason than that the party
feared many of them would not vote for the party. Last week President Mnangagwa
told the world the party will vote next time – proof the denial was a
deliberated and calculated act. The regime has failed to release something as
basic as a verified voters’ roll although this is a legal requirement.
Nelson Chamisa and his MDC
Alliance were warned not to participate in the elections without first
implementing the democratic reforms designed to stop Zanu PF rigging the
elections. They would not listen. They did not even have the common sense to
insist that ZEC must release a verified voters’ roll.
There no debating it; Zanu PF
rigged the recent elections. The British, the only western nation who had
withheld their condemnation of the flawed and illegal elections finally told
the Zanu PF regime “the election playing field was not level”.
“This has made the prospects of
the multi-billion-dollar financial package needed to stave off economic
collapse unlikely, which has in turn discouraged private investors,” reported
The Guardian.
The British were the ones who
had, until the announcement, been pushing hard to help Zimbabwe settle its debt
with IMF, WB, Paris Club, etc.
So by rigging the elections,
Zanu PF has confirmed Zimbabwe’s status as a pariah state; back to the economic
isolation and meltdown of the Mugabe years. The Zanu PF regime is illegitimate
because it rigged the elections and brought on the whole nation the curse of
the economic meltdown.
Asking Zanu PF to go into some
form of coalition arrangement with MDC will not change the fact on the ground
i.e. Zanu PF is illegitimate, Zimbabwe is a pariah state facing economic
meltdown.
What Zimbabwe needs is the
courage and resolve to implement the democratic reforms and end this curse of
rigged elections and pariah state status. The country is in this economic and
political mess because Zanu PF has rigged the elections for the last 38 years
and has got away with it politically because it has not been castigated as
illegitimate. It has not got away with it economically because investors have
shied away.
The Zanu PF - MDC Alliance
marriage of convenience the Church leaders are calling for will do nothing to
end the curse of rigged elections because we can be absolutely certain that
Zanu PF will not implement any meaningful democratic reforms in the next five
years. So come the 2023 elections we will be back where we are today,
complaining of another Zanu PF rigged elections.
Zimbabwe is not moving
forward by letting Zanu PF get away with yet another rigged elections and
setting ourselves up for the party to rig the 2023 elections too! We will only
be moving forward by curing ourselves of the curse of rigged elections by
punishing Zanu PF for rigging the elections and not appeasing the regime yet
again!
8 comments:
Jonathan Moyo on Twitter:
When a finance minister announces a policy on Monday and come Friday he announces changes to that policy, you know there's no science behind the policy. It's muddling through!
Could not agree with Moyo more on that one!
The real tragedy here is whilst President Mnangagwa and his ministers "muddle through" the country's economy continues to sink like a stone and is the poorest of the poor who pay dearly for it!
People must not forget that Mnangagwa rigged the elections and the regime is illegitimate. We must step up our demand for this regime to step down because there will never be any meaning economic recovery without first ending this national curse of rigged elections and pariah state!
@ Sarah Mahoka
Ncube would not have reversed his decision if he had thought it through carefully! Zimbabweans have been asked to make economic sacrifices again and again on the promise of economic recovery which never materialise. Ncube's muddling will bring a lot of hardship but no gains!
We already know that many investors and lenders are not coming to Zimbabwe because the country is still viewed as a pariah state ruled by thugs. Ncube and the regime must accept that there will be no meaningful economic recovery without first dealing with this curse of failed leaders who remain in power just because they rig elections!
At the very heart of Zimbabwe's teething economic and political problems is the failed leadership. Instead of having leaders who are helping the nation become a free, just and prosperous nation we have leaders who dragging us deeper and deeper into this hell-on-earth.
It is an established fact that Zanu PF rigged the recent elections and after 38 years of rigged elections one would think that our church leaders would be leading from the front in demanding an end to this cursed culture of rigging elections. The challenge is end the dictatorship and not to keep coming up with more and more feeble excuses for granting it legitimacy and keeping it alive.
MDC leaders had the golden opportunity to dismantle the Zanu PF dictatorship during the GNU they wasted it because, like these church leaders, they too believed Zanu PF could remain in power if it could be reformed.
The rigged elections are giving us another bite of the cherry; we can get the illegitimate Zanu PF junta to step down so we can finally have the democratic reforms implemented and finally get out of this mess. Or we can give Zanu PF an excuse for staying on in power si they can rig the 2023 elections too!
@ Munya Shumba
November 2017 will go down in history as the greatest month and the critical turning point for Zimbabwe. We all know what happened then but to sum it up the good eggs realized that the root cause of our suffering wasn't curse at all, wasn't the imposed sanctions, wasn't the western countries but the rotten eggs amongst ourselves and the only salvation was their removal, never mind the means!
We all know the lavish and glamorous lifestyles of these rotten eggs, characterized by extravagance shopping sprees, buying offshore mansions, building hotel like houses, driving expensive cars, drinking expensive exotic wines, buying expensive shoes and jewellery, drinking super purified bottled water and I'm sure moving around with air fresheners! These rotten eggs were and are still in our midst, be it the ordinary crook in the street, the highly corrupt government officer or highly ranked politician.
Think of the corrupt ZIMRA officials, the corrupt police officers add the super corrupt politician! Surely that's a recipe for total disaster. So dire was the situation that plenty people currently in high offices got fake qualifications. Yes people who cannot even read or write are proud owners of the sacred cap of knowledge. Shame on us, God forbid.
Love him or hate him but I strongly believe ED is what Zimbabwe needed most at this crucial time and save the sinking Titanic! Yes tough decisions come with a price. I can see light at the end of the tunnel. Rotten eggs are being taken out.
I think it is people like you who are naïve who are as much a curse to the nation as the rotten eggs you are talking about! ED has been in government for nearly a year now, how many corrupt rotten eggs has taken out? The few corrupt individuals he has removed are those he consider a threat to his hold on power.
Mnangagwa has just splashed hundreds of millions of dollars on new cars for Chiefs and chefs and $1.4 million chartering a plane for Grace Mugabe at a time the nation is grappling with cholera.
Mnangagwa and many of those around him are corrupt and incompetent and rigging the elections they have just impose themselves of the nation just as they have done for the last 37 years.
@ Professor Chan
“For so far, no major foreign power has undertaken to relieve in any significant way the country’s economic distress. Although election observer reports have been guardedly and conditionally – almost grudgingly – accepting of the election results, the question marks raised and, particularly, the totally unnecessary violence unleashed against protesters in the wake of the election have made all governments shy of offering full endorsement of the regime.”
There are some western nations, notably the British, who would have wanted to sweep the vote rigging under the carpet just to give President Mnangagwa and his regime the leg up. In the end no self-respecting has dared to endorse the elections as having been free, fair and credible because the vote rigging was too blatant! The regime failed to produce something as basic as a verified voters’ roll.
President Mnangagwa rigged the elections; this is now an accepted fact. What should happen next is for the people of Zimbabwe, not the western nations or anyone else, to say.
Resident Mnangagwa and his junta rigged the elections and, per se, they do not have the people’s mandate to govern the country. This is not the first time Zanu PF has rigged elections, they have done so for the last 38 years, and the party has been allowed to stay in power and thus get away with it. Zimbabwe is in this economic and political mess precisely because Zanu PF was allowed to rig elections and get away with it. It is self-evident that the nation will be very foolish to allow Zanu PF to get away with yet another rigged election.
If Zanu PF is still in office to organise the next elections in 2023, then we can be certain of one thing – Zanu PF will rig the next elections. The party will not implement even one democratic reform to ensure free, fair and credible elections. After 38 years of rigged elections with tragic, tragic economic, political and social consequences.
There is only one sure way of ending this sorry culture of vote rigging – Zanu PF must step down and allow for the appointment of an interim administration that will implement the democratic reforms and thus guarantee free, fair and credible elections in 2023 and in future!
“We look forward to receiving private sector business delegations from France in the coming months, as well as high level political meetings in the next year,” said President Mnangagwa on facebook.
“As Mr. Rioux noted, “Zimbabwe is going in the right direction”, and we look forward to rebuilding our nation with the help and cooperation of international friends and partners such as France.”
Throughout the decades of economic meltdown under Mugabe rule, Zanu PF has never ever freely admitted that the country was in serious trouble. The odd occasion the regime was forced to admit the economy was not doing well it was always followed by “but we have a solution to end the problem!”
President Mnangagwa is doing the same today.
Zimbabwe is not going in the right directions, not when the country has just rigged the elections to confirm we are still a pariah state. In a few more weeks President Mnangagwa would have been in office for a full year and still there will be no investors, he was so sure would flood into the country.
Zimbabwe’s economic recovery is totally dependent on the country shedding off its pariah state status for real and not just say so. The world was not fooled by Zanu PF promising to hold free and fair elections but only to blatant rig the elections.
Chamisa cannot have his cake and eat it too. He has refused to accept that Mnangagwa won the elections because process was rigged. Many people believe the process was indeed flawed and illegal. One of the blatant vote rigging acts was the denying of 2 to 3 million Zimbabweans in the diaspora the vote. Is Chamisa then saying elections in which 2 to 3 million were denied the vote is legal just because he won these elections?
We cannot accept this kind of nonsense where millions are denied the vote but the result is allowed to stand just because one is considered the winner.
Chamisa should have never gone into these elections without making sure the reforms necessary for free, fair and credible elections were in place. He did go into these elections knowing Zanu PF will rig the process but clearly did not care as long as he won the rigged elections. We want leaders who care about the rights of all Zimbabweans and not leaders who do not care as long as they get a seat on the gravy train.
The elections were rigged and if Chamisa thinks he can claim to have had 2.6 million votes and expect us to believe that figure and consider him legitimate then he has something else coming!
Our ZCC clergy have accepted the basic reality that Zanu PF has failed to bring about any meaningful economic recovery. They, like millions of other Zimbabweans out there, were bowled over by President Mnangagwa's "Zimbabwe is open for business!" drive. They were convinced he had opened the flood gate of new investors and lenders ready to take full advantage of the many golden business opportunities the country had to offer. But after near a year of the "new dispensation" and still not even one investor to show for all that effort, the penny has dropped that President Mnangagwa and his Zanu PF junta will never bring about the economic recovery.
Our Church leaders may be stupid but not that stupid not to have realised that Zanu PF leaders are corrupt and incompetent and they are the root cause of Zimbabwe's economic meltdown.
Our Church leaders are stupid but not that stupid to have failed to realise that Zanu PF has managed to stay in power all these last 38 years regardless of the party's pathetic economic performance because they rigged the elections. The Clergy know that Zanu PF has cheated and even committed wanton violence including beatings, rape and even murder just to retain the party's iron grip on power.
38 years of appeasing Zanu PF by letting the party remain in power whilst the nation makes all the sacrifice to revive the economy have not worked; the nation has sunk deeper and deeper into the abyss.
Zanu PF does not have the divine right to rule Zimbabwe. Zanu PF does not have the divine right to continue to loot to feed the insatiable appetites of the few ruling elite whilst millions live in grinding abject poverty. These are the fundament truths and realities this nation has avoided for decades with the tragic consequences we see all around us. We must now deal with these realities.
Zanu PF rigged the 30 July 2018 elections, they cannot rule the country without the mandate of the people. Mnangagwa and the junta must step down - that is not negotiable!
The ZCC clergy are seeking a way to keep Zanu PF in power at all cost, is both a cowardly and stupid act, we must reject the time wasting foolishness with the contempt it rightly deserves!
Post a Comment