In life, one must always make a honest assessment of what one can and cannot do. And proceed accordingly. There is logic in doing otherwise especial when that means repeating the same foolish mistake over and over again!
President Cyril Ramaphosa and his team should have sat down and asked themselves what is it exactly is the problem in Zimbabwe and the honest answer is the country’s failure to hold free, fair and credible elections. And the solution is to get the country to implement democratic reforms to stop this curse of rigged elections.
This is old ground, SADC leaders made the same assessment following the 2008 elections and came to the same conclusion. The 2008 to 2013 GNU was tasked to implement the reforms. Sadly, not even one reform saw the light of day; the GNU failed to implement even one token reform in five years! Not one!
It is clearly naive to expect the same Zanu PF and MDC players involved in the 2008 GNU to implement the reforms even if they were given another chance to go so. The more rational course of action is to appoint body, in which both Zanu PF and MDC play no role, to implement the reforms.
The challenge is not can we find competent individuals to implement the democratic reforms; of course, we can. The real challenge is whether we can get Zanu PF to step down to allow the reforms to be implemented - knowing fully well this will mark the end of the regime’s strangle hold on power for not just the duration of the interim period but forever.
Since SADC and President Ramaphosa endorsed Mnangagwa and Zanu PF as legitimate following the July 2018 elections, the regional body has no political leverage to force Zanu PF to step down and relinquish power. With no meaningful political leverage, SADC and President Ramaphosa will never get Mnangagwa to step down and so there is really no point in him sending his envoys. None!
Zimbabwe is in exactly the same situation that Lebanon is in:
- both countries are in a serious economic and political mess after decades of gross mismanagement, rampant corruption and rank lawlessness
- both are stuck with a rotten political system designed to keep the ruling elite in power whilst denying the impoverish majority a meaningful say in the governance of the country.
- both need a complete overhaul of the political system a task that cannot be entrusted to the ruling elite as much as they would insist they are the only ones who can do it. The ruling elite will never ever reform themselves out of power.
- However, in Lebanon there is international consensus agreeing with the ordinary Lebanese on the need for an independent body to overhaul the country’s political system. In Zimbabwe our problem is being compounded by regional leaders who do not have the common sense to see and acknowledge their own serious limitations.
8 comments:
@ Fungai Chiganangana
“I get your statement and I entirely agree with you. However, the unfortunate thing is that the country is in a perpetual state of liberation war. Each generation will always have a preceding generation as liberators. The very people being incarcerated and beaten now, my sympathies to them, will be so called liberators and will have a sense of entitlement. Will they allow someone who is not currently in the trenches to lead them? My suggestion is to have people in leadership with no current or past scars or with no history of trench warfare to lead the country. So the liberation generation is not only the pre-1980 one but also the one currently fighting now!”
Those in the trenches can rightly argue that the voters must elect someone with a track record of putting the common people’s interests above the individual interest. But when all is said and done, it must be the people of Zimbabwe who must have the final say, in a free, fair and credible election, on who rules the country.
The trouble has arisen when the liberator usurped the people’s freedoms and rights on the pretext that they alone know best. That we must not allow ever again!
FIREBRAND Economic Freedom Fighters leader Julius Malema has berated Zimbabwean youths for sticking to social media to express their frustrations over poor leadership by government instead of thronging the streets to free themselves.
“Why is the youth of Zimbabwe are not rising in Zimbabwe and face death because they are already dead,” said Malema.
Trust Malema to shoot from the hip and, no surprise there, often end up shoot everyone else except the target. Street protests are all very well but without a clear plan of where we are going are we not just going round and round in circles?
Those calling for street protest in Zimbabwe have not said what the plan is. Call to end corruption is foolish, to say the least. The people have been calling for an end to corruption for the last 40 years and corruption has got progressively worse. And as long as Zanu PF remains in power, calling for an end to corruption is like a dog howling at the moon. Surely we must be smart enough to stop howling at the moon and focus on making sure we have free and fair elections.
Yeah, Idi Amin went to see the doctor convinced he had been poisoned, a Zimbabwean speciality for getting rid of one's political opponents, only to discover all he needed to do was fart! What a clown!
@ Tafa Mhaka
To be sure, the dubious Global Political Agreement brokered by former President Thabo Mbeki in September 2008 smothered an electoral win by Morgan Tsvangirai and forced Zimbabwe to endure nine long and wasteful years of former President Robert Mugabe's jaded, despotic and corrupt administration.
Far from helping an immensely popular MDC to power, Mbeki, with support from the ANC, helped a highly unpopular Zanu-PF enjoy a new lease of life.
This unwelcome and extremely uncritical support for Zanu-PF has not been restricted to South Africa.
It has filtered through to the AU and SADC, whose equally depressing and unflinching positions on Zimbabwe's right to independence from external reproach have been exceedingly regressive.
South Africa is not interested in the discriminating policies behind Zanu-PF's resounding election win in 2018, such as ZEC's problematic, disputed and bungling performance, the ZBC's partisan broadcasts, the police's biased position on MDC Alliance protests and the vote buying agricultural schemes implemented by the government.
The ANC government truly prefers to pay lip service to helping solve Zimbabwe's problems.
The solution to Zimbabwe’s seemingly endless political and economic crisis is to implement the democratic reforms to ensure free, fair and credible elections. SADC leaders were right in tasking the 2008 to 2013 GNU to implement the reforms. It is tragic that MDC failed to get even one reform implemented in five years.
To have any realistic hope of getting the reforms implemented now then Zanu PF must step down because the party will never reform itself out of office. Zanu PF blatantly rigged the July 2018 elections and it beggars belief why SADC and SA endorsed the elections as acceptable. However by endorsing Zanu PF as legitimate President Ramaphosa and SADC have no leverage over Mnangagwa to force him to step down.
The MDC Alliance was formally requested to be available for a meeting today, the 10th of August 2020, with the special envoys that were deployed by President Cyril Ramaphosa to Zimbabwe. A delegation remained on standby from 10am this morning only to be advised at the end of the day that the special envoys would be returning to South Africa without meeting the MDC Alliance delegation, in order to brief President Ramaphosa on the outcomes of their meeting with Mr Mnangagwa.
The Government in Harare is incapable of resolving these challenges because it lacks legitimacy. We are of the firm view that any solution to the ongoing socio-economic challenges lies in resolving the political crisis and answering the outstanding legitimacy question. It is clear that Mr Mnangagwa is not ready to resolve the national crisis through genuine dialogue.
By participating in the July 2018, when it was clear that without reforms Zanu PF was going to rig the elections, MDC A gave the process credibility and result legitimacy.
“MDC has stringent measures to stop Zanu PF rigging the elections!” insisted Nelson Chamisa before the 2018 elections. This was just a feeble excuse for participating against all the advice to do otherwise.
MDC has accepted the parliamentary elections as free and fair but rejected the presidential result on a spurious claim that Chamisa had more votes than Mnangagwa although the MDC A leader failed to produce V11 and other documents so no one could verify the result. The whole election process was flawed and illegal and everyone has dismissed Chamisa’s claim with the contempt it rightly deserve.
Zimbabwe is in this political and economic mess because MDC sold-out by failing to implement reforms and then participating in flawed elections. Chamisa and his MDC sell-outs are irrelevant and should be ignored.
Sikhala, if you want people to take you seriously then you must respect historic facts. When you say "refusal to reform electoral practices, leading to rigged elections”, who exactly are you accusing of this?
The task of implementing the democratic reforms was left to Morgan Tsvangirai and the rest of the MDC leaders - many of whom, like Tendai Biti, David Coltart, Welshman Ncube, Nelson Chamisa, are with you now in the MDC Alliance. MDC leaders failed to get even one token reform implemented in five years because they took their eyes off the ball.
In the last weeks of the GNU, they wanted it extended. This was nonsense, the GNU was supposed to last 18 months and ended up lasting 60 months and still MDC did not implement even one reform.
If you are not going to admit that MDC leaders sold-out then you should shut up and not add insult to injury!
"Any attempt to seek an elite political settlement where the usual political suspects will get into an incestuous political relationship will be totally rejected. The current struggle of the masses has outgrown individual and political organisations' narrow interests. People want to be the main stakeholders to the state of affairs. They want a raft of institutional and governance reforms to entrench public interest. As long as the attendant issues of the masses are not attended to, democratic expression will be action without end. We have now resolved that the democratic struggle must now be without end until all issues are attended to. We are now not going to announce our next move. We will just act without announcement until people's victory. It's now action without ceasing," said Sikhala, who was recently forced into hiding by State security agents who stormed his Chitungwiza home ahead of protests planned for July 31.
The 2008 to 2013 GNU was indeed an “incestuous political relationship” that accomplished nothing. His colleagues in MDC Alliance were in this relationship. Why has he never taken them to task on the matter?
Sikhala participated in the July 2018 elections knowing fully well that the process was flawed and illegal. He clearly did not mind as he secured one of the gravy train seats Zanu PF was giving away as bait.
MDC leaders have lost political credibility and individuals like Sikhala want to pretend they care about implement the reforms to end the curse of rigged elections but when push comes to shove, they will join their MC friends in a incestuous relationship with Zanu PF!
We want the reforms implemented but we do not want the task entrusted to Zanu PF or MDC, they failed the nation before and will do so again.
“In the ANC’s view, yes, there is a political crisis in Zimbabwe, and we have to be frank and honest about it,” Zulu who is also South Africa’s Social Development Minister said.
“We have to be frank and honest about it because we are asking ourselves a question where the dignity of the Zimbabweans who are here is. Where is the dignity of the young women and others working here, some of whom are working in our industries and are being laughed at, sneered at.
“We are asking ourselves where is the dignity of turning away people who are crossing the border illegally and all that.”
Of all the of SA’s politicians, Lindiwe Zulu played a leading role in Zimbabwe throughout the 2008 to 2013 GNU. She pushed MDC leaders hard to implement the reforms, a thankless job as she was kicked in the teeth not only by Zanu PF leaders but by MDC leaders too!
Minister Zulu knows that Zanu PF will never implement the reforms even if President Ramaphosa was to arm twist Mnangagwa to agree to go into another power sharing arrangement with MDC and the rest of the 130 opposition parties.
So why President Ramaphosa is getting himself involved in this Zimbabwe economic and political crisis when there is hope of SADC getting Mnangagwa to step down and have the reforms implemented.
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