If ANC had not booted out Zuma the party would have lost the elections - testimonial to Mandela W Mukori's legacy

“If ANC had failed to remove Jacob Zuma from office last year, the party would have lost the recent elections!” said Dumisani, a South African and ANC supporter.

I was speechless! What a profound statement!

People have often question the late Nelson Mandela’s legacy especially since many South Africans have continued to live in abject poverty now 25 years since the end of apartheid. Few people can deny that widespread incompetence and corruption of the successive ANC regime since Mandela have held back South Africa’s development. It has!

Still, not even the worst pessimists out there cannot deny that SA has consistently held free, fair and credible elections since 1994. And it is this certainty of democratic accountability that has applied the brakes on what, by now, would have been a run-away train of corrupt, incompetent, vote rigging and tyrannical ANC government.

As we know, after 20 years of corrupt, incompetent and tyrannical Zanu PF rule Zimbabwe was in total economic ruins and the regime had already murdered over 20 000 innocent Zimbabweans to establish and retain its de facto one-party dictatorship, the nation has groaned under to this day.

By the time Zimbabwe marked her 25 years of independence, the country was in the middle of Zanu PF’s seizure of white owned farms to give to party loyalists, mostly, destroying the country’s agricultural sector and knocking the nation off its perch as the breadbasket of the region. In the day and age when human ingenuity has turned deserts into blooming orchards we are starving in a land which is for all intend and purposes the Garden of Eden. A damning testimonial to Zanu PF failed leadership and, most important of all, to Zimbabwe’s failed political system.

Nelson Mandela could not have dragged all South Africa’s millions of blacks who had languished in poverty during the nightmare years of apartheid in the five years he was in power. Even if he had done so, there would have been nothing to stop the incompetent and corrupt Thabo Mbeki and Jacob Zuma tearing it all down! Mandela bequeathed all South Africans a healthy and functioning democracy which has survived the trials and tribulations of his corrupt and incompetent successors and is still able to guarantee the freedoms and rights of all South Africans including the right to hold those in power to democratic account! A legacy which many of us in Africa have read about but have yet to behold!

Indeed, in Zimbabwe the dream of free, fair and credible elections has been a mirage many have long given up chasing. Zanu PF has corrupted all the state institutions, from the high and powerful Court judges with farms, cars and other trappings of high office to lowly rural peasants the regime has turned into nothing more than medieval serfs beholden to the all-powerful landlords.

In a recent article in ASPI The Strategist, Stuart Doran, described Zanu PF as demonic subculture drunk with power. “It’s like watching a drunken sailor go down in increments. A stumble, a forehead to the counter, a wild grasping, followed by a crash of bottles. That’s the trajectory of Zimbabwe’s post-Mugabe ‘new dispensation’—all in not-so-glorious, super-slow-mo Technicolor.”

What has made Zimbabwe’s search for freedom, liberty, justice, human rights and a life with human dignity and hope such a pipedream is that the opposition leaders, whom the people had risked life and limb to elect into power in the hope they will bring about the democratic changes the nation was dying for have sold out. During the 2008 to 2013 GNU, when the opposition had the golden opportunity to implement the reforms and end the Zanu PF dictatorship; Mugabe bribed Tsvangirai and company. The rest is history!

It takes vision and courage to resist the temptation to seize absolute power for oneself Nelson Mandela had is all. Tyrants like Mugabe and Mnangagwa do not even have common sense and hence the reason they have landed the nation in this mess.

Zanu PF rigged last year’s elections, it is illegitimate and must be forced to step down. It is naïve to expect the regime to reform itself out of office, especially when it has already been given that chance and failed. Nelson Chamisa and his MDC A friends too cannot be trusted to implement the democratic reforms, they were given many chances to do so and wasted them all.