It is often said the distinction between madness and genius is a fine line, the same cannot be said about the yawning chasm that separate piety humility and blasphemy. Emmerson Mnangagwa has crossed that chasm!
“Dear God, Jehovah and the only true God, Father of our saviour Jesus Christ. I humble myself before you, together with the people of Zimbabwe over whom You made me a servant leader!” proclaimed Mnangagwa in his prayer yesterday.
Everyone with any democratic credentials worth a spit condemned Zimbabwe’s July 2018 elections as a farce.
“The electoral commission lacked full independence and appeared to not always act in an impartial manner. The final results as announced by the Electoral Commission contained numerous errors and lacked adequate traceability, transparency and verifiability,” stated the EU Zimbabwe 2018 Election Mission final report.
“As such, many aspects of the 2018 elections in Zimbabwe failed to meet international standards!”
There are many things we can argue about and agree to differ, if we cannot agree. But there are others which are establish historic facts that must be respected and accept as such, that the July 2018 elections were not free, fair and credible is one of these historic facts.
ZEC failed to produce something as basic for elections as a verified voters’ roll, for Pete’s sake!
Zimbabwe is in this political and economic mess because Zimbabweans, from all walks of life, notably academics and church leaders, have all shied away from holding Zanu PF and other political leaders to democratic account. Zanu PF leaders have been allowed to ride roughshod over the people, denying them their freedoms and rights including the right to free, fair and credible elections and even the right to life. This must stop!
The people of Zimbabwe must learn the importance of speaking the truth to power – a recurring theme in the Christian Bible. A theme our church leaders have seemingly forgotten!
To therefore evoke the name of God and proclaim that God Himself made him (Mnangagwa) “a servant leader” over the nation is blasphemy because it implies God was involved in the rigged July 2018 elections.
Last week, Mnangagwa proclaim 15 June 2020 a National Day of Prayer and Fasting. He invited several church leaders to join him in the praying and fasting at State House.
Several high profile leaders attended the State House gathering including Zimbabwe Catholic Bishops’ Conference (ZCBC), the Evangelical Fellowship of Zimbabwe (EFZ), the Zimbabwe Council of Churches (ZCC), the Indigenous Zimbabwe Inter-denominational Council of Churches, as well as the Zimbabwe Elders Forum.
By participating in July 2018 elections Nelson Chamisa and his MDC friends and the coterie of other opposition politicians gave some modicum of credibility to the flawed and illegal election process. And, by extension gave some modicum of legitimacy to this Zanu PF regime.
The country’s church leaders have in turn given the regime their modicum of legitimacy by attending activities hosted by Mnangagwa as the State President. In his public prayer yesterday, Mnangagwa has gone one step further and proclaimed himself chosen by God to leader. The many church leaders gathered at State House were first-hand eye-witnesses to the profanity. Those church leaders who were not at State House have, nonetheless, since seen the video recording of the prayer with their own eyes and heard with their own ears.
So, what are our church leaders now going to do about this illegitimate and blasphemous Zanu PF regime?
Silence, it must be said, is consent – a maxim of common law!
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The University of Oxford has reported that the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland scientists have made a breakthrough in the fight against the deadly Coronavirus by discovering that an existing drug called dexamethasone can help to cure infected patients.
This is a piece of great news indeed!
At the heart of Zimbabwe’s economic and political crisis is the country’s failure to hold free, fair and credible elections. Nothing of any substance can ever be accomplished until we implement the democratic reforms and take away Zanu PF’s carte blanche powers to rig elections.
Of course, there is no one with half a working brain out there who does not know that Zanu PF rigged the July 2018 elections. However, many Zimbabweans will never admit it that the elections were rigged because they know that if they admit it then they will have to answer the more difficult question of: What have you done about it?
The easier answer is to accept the result of a Zanu PF victory as fait accompli; you are not going to reverse the Zanu PF victory and remove the party from office.
“Legitimate or not Zanu PF is in power and the only thing to do now is work with the regime,” many people have argued. What these morons have refused to accept is that has allowed Zanu PF to do as it jolly well pleased with disastrous economic and political consequences we see today. Even after 40 years of hopelessness and despair they still refuse to admit the dictatorship is a total failure.
The tragedy of Zimbabwe is not only has one to fight the Zanu PF thugs to end the dictatorship but has to fight the corrupt, incompetent opposition politicians who have profited from sell-out the common cause to Zanu PF and then fight the morons who will never get out of the comfort zone of appeasing Zanu PF.
It is one thing for Mnangagwa to claim the July 2018 elections were free, fair and credible when he blatantly rigged the election. By boldly proclaiming, in an act of solemn prayer to God, that God Himself had chosen him to lead Zimbabwe; Mnangagwa has indeed implicated God is the rigged elections. The big question is will any of the country’s church leaders have the guts to speak truth to power and put the record right.
Since when has God ever sided with a vote rigging and murderous tyrant?
Zimbabwe's attempts to raise money to fight Covid-19 are looking up as the African Development Bank (AfDB) is planning to give it US$13.7 million (about R235 million) in financial assistance.
The Southern African country is in need of aid estimated at around US$2.2 billion. But it has not been very successful in getting the help it needs as its finance ministry reported earlier this month that Zimbabwe had only amassed less than US$200 million in cash donations.
The World Bank, European Union and the United Kingdom are among those who have previously extended helping hands. The African Development Bank plans to provide up to US$10 billion to African governments and the private sector to help the continent provide better health responses to Covid-19 and mitigate the impact of the economic downturn that the pandemic has brought with it.
AfDB forecasts that Covid-19 will cause Africa's GDP to drop by between $22.1 billion and $88.3 billion this year. It said five geographical regions in the continent had received its Covid-19 emergency packages by 12 June. Other countries that will benefit from these support package include a few in West Africa, North Africa, Kenya in the East, Mauritius and DRC.
Zimbabwe have again and again failed to stamp corrupt notably the billions of dollars lost in the country’s lucrative diamond industry. Donor funds have not been spared the sticky hands of the corrupt Zanu PF ruling elite as the most recent case of the Drax scandal in which the company was awarded a US$60 million contract to supply corona virus stuff without following proper tender procedure.
The WB, IMF, AfDB and other financial institutions and donors have all but walked out on Zimbabwe in protest against Zimbabwe’s failure to end the rampant corruption. The level of financial assistance and aid Zimbabwe has received is a fraction of what it might have got if the country did not have this reputation of being wasteful.
Ordinary Zimbabweans are paying dearly, with their very lives, for Zimbabwe’s reputation as one of the most corrupt nation on earth!
The United States Government, through the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), has committed an additional $10 million in response to COVID-19. The funds will go to the World Food Programme (WFP) for humanitarian assistance for nearly 100,000 vulnerable people in eight urban areas.
With this additional funding, U.S. assistance to the COVID-19 response in Zimbabwe exceeds $18 million. USAID has provided nearly $15 million, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has provided $3 million, and PEPFAR has reprogrammed $150,000 to address COVID-19.
Through this $10 million in new funding, USAID will collaborate with WFP to address increasing food insecurity in urban areas. In September 2019, the Zimbabwe Vulnerability Assessment Committee (ZimVAC) determined that more than 2.2 million Zimbabweans in urban areas face food insecurity as a result of rising food prices. In May 2020, WFP estimated that this number had increased by as much as one million people as a result of the COVID-19 lockdown, which further constrained the economy and severely affected Zimbabweans whose livelihoods depend on the informal sector. This funding will ensure that nearly 100,000 people in eight urban districts have access to cash transfers that will ensure adequate food supplies between July and December 2020.
Ever since Zanu P’s chaotic and often violent land redistribution in which most of the former white owned farms were given to Zanu PF leaders and their cronies Zimbabwe has lost its cherished accolade of being the breadbasket of the region. The country’s agricultural sector has all but collapsed and the country has more often than not depended on food aid or millions of Zimbabweans would die of hunger.
The country has spent billions of dollars everyone to kick-start the agricultural sector but only the ruling elite have benefited without any notable increase in production.
Zimbabwe’s economic recovery is totally dependent on reviving the country’s agricultural sector and that will never happen as long as Zanu PF remains in power and the ruling elite continue to profit from holding the nation to ransom by holding on to the land.
Did you notice that Mnangagwa played the leading role in asking God’s forgiveness of himself and the nation. This is the role assigned to the most senior clergy, the Chief Priest or Bishop in a gathering of priests, the Pope in gathering of Bishops. Is Mnangagwa now the head of all the Christian Churches in Zimbabwe?
We know he is already the Commander In Chief of the Armed Forces, he is the Head of State and Government, he is the Chancellor of all the Universities in Zimbabwe, he is the First Secretary of Zanu PF, etc., etc. And now he is the Head of all Christian Churches in Zimbabwe and its Principle Bishop too.
No doubt next time all the church leader buffoons who attended his Day of Prayer and Fasting will be kneeing before Mnangagwa to get his blessing! This time they all got a dvd recording of the Principle Bishop of Zimbabwe eulogizing (they are expected to know his prayer by heart and emulate his beaming voice) plus the multi-coloured scarf as a memento of their privilege pilgrimage visit!
There is the new dispensation, the new Zimbabwe, for you and me!
One has to agree with the nurses; they have taken orders from the scum for decades and now they are say enough is enough!
Look at those walls! When was the last time they got a lick of paint! One can only image the sorry state of what lies beyond these doors! It is common to hear that even big referral hospitals like Parerenyatwa and Mpilo have no running water! Donors are already supplying most of the country's medicine and equipment and now we want them to supply water too!
The country had the money to build Mugabe his Blue Roof mansion, Mnangagwa is building his own or be it all buried under ground, etc. but has no money for the up keep of the hospitals and other public infrastructure we inherited from the whites.
Health care workers are some of the lowly paid workers in Zimbabwe and to cut their salary at the time when they are facing the added risk to their own lives because of corona virus is simply madness!
There is no doubt that Zanu PF has no clue what it is doing and during tough times like this with the corona virus causing untold economic and health havoc the importance of having a competent government becomes paramount. 40 years of this corrupt and tyrannical Zanu PF dictatorship has left the country in economic ruins and political paralysis. The dysfunctional political system has spawned thugs and scum and no competent political leaders.
Still, the nation master all its material and intellectual resources and fight for regime change a.s.a.p. The corona virus crisis is set to inflict a lot of economic and humanitarian damage to the nation but the damage will be even worse if this corrupt and blundering Zanu PF regime remains in power! It was bad enough to have had these Zanu PF scum, "saskamu" as the demonstrating nurses called them, in power these last 40 years. It is mid-summer madness to have the scum in power during an existential crisis such as now!
One of the things the WHO has said repeatedly is "Test, track and trace!" as a way of helping control the spread of covid-19. Sadly Zimbabwe is one of the countries that has not been testing. With a population of 16 million and four months since the first case of covid-19 in the country, we have only done 60 000 tests and most of them on new arrivals. The virus is spreading far and wide among the populous and we do not know anything about it.
Zimbabwe has failed to ensure there is clean running water even in key institutions such as hospitals, clinics and quarantine centres!
It is sad government should be declaring a National Day of Prayer and Fasting and pray for corona virus "storm to cease" when it is doing nothing to stop the virus spreading. God helps those who help themselves - we have certainly done precious little to control covid-19.
However, following Monday's National Day of Prayer, which the country's top clerics attended in their numbers, there is fresh hope and renewed attempts to bring Mnangagwa and Chamisa to the negotiating table again.
Monday's event was attended by clerics from the Zimbabwe Catholic Bishops' Conference (ZCBC), the Evangelical Fellowship of Zimbabwe (EFZ), the Zimbabwe Council of Churches (ZCC) and the Indigenous Zimbabwe Inter-denominational Council of Churches, as well as the Zimbabwe National Elders Forum.
Yesterday, ZCBC secretary-general Father Frederick Chiromba said the church was working on making Zanu-PF and the MDC to find common ground, which would enable "meaningful dialogue" between their leaders.
"The church can assist in pushing for dialogue, and for a very long time we have been pushing for the country's main political actors to set their differences aside and dialogue.
"All actors have said they are willing, but up to now they still haven't met in one room to discuss how we can solve our challenges as a nation," Chiromba told the Daily News.
Zimbabwe is stuck in this economic and political mess for many, many reasons and one of those reasons is because a big chunk of its population are insane, as Albert Einstein would aptly put it.
“Insanity,” said Einstein “is repeating the same thing over and over and expect a different result!”
Zimbabwe is in this economic and political mess because for the last 40 years the nation has been stuck with a corrupt, incompetent, vote rigging and tyrannical Zanu PF regime. The country’s church leaders and academic have ignored the vote rigging and allowed the regime to remain in office in the hope it will transform itself and stop being so wasteful of the nation’s human and material resources, at the very least. They have awaited for the transformation for 40 years and meanwhile Zanu PF has dragged the nation deeper and deeper into the abyss!
The church leaders are hoping Mnangagwa and Chamisa will meet and have the long awaited dialogue ending with the two forming a GNU. The 2008 GNU failed to implement even one democratic reform and only the naïve expect this new GNU to do any better.
After 40 years of waiting for the vote rigging and tyrannical Zanu PF regime to transform itself into a competent and democratic government, of course, it is insane to still be expecting that to happen.
As for Nelson Chamisa, he and his MDC friends lost political credibility when they sold-out and failed to implement even one reform during the 2008 to 2013 GNU. The High Court judgement confirming Chamisa behaved just like a Zanu PF thug when he seized power after Tsvangirai’s death was the coup de grace!
Mnangagwa and his Zanu PF thugs have earned this country a pariah state status. The country’s pariah state status will not change just because Mnangagwa has added Chamisa and a few his MDC sell-outs to his Zanu PF regime.
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