Zanu PF blatantly cheated in the March 2008 vote to overturn Morgan Tsvangirai’s &3% electoral victory to a 47%, just below the 50% plus 1 thrash hold to force a run-off. And then the party use wanton violence during the run-off. “Zanu PF has declared war on the people”, said Tsvangirai as he announced his withdrawal from the race. The international community condemned the election as a farce; including the see-nothing, hear-notringand say-nothing SADC and AU who had always rubber stamped Zanu PF’s rigged elections in the past.
As the way back to legitimacy, Mugabe, on behalf of his party, Zanu PF, signed the 2008 Global Political Agreement (GPA) stipulating the need to implement a raft of democratic reforms designed to stop a repeat of the blatant rigging of 2008 and ensure future elections are free, fair and credible. A GNU comprising Zanu PF and the two MDC factions was tasked to implement the reforms and SADC was the guarantor of the GPA.
Mugabe bribed Morgan Tsvangirai and his MDC, the banded mongoose, friends with the trappings of high office; the tinted glass and air conditioned ministerial limos, very generous salaries and allowances, a US$4 million mansion for Tsvangirai, the opportunity to travel the world at taxpayer’s expense, etc., etc.
The gravy train good-life was meant to overwhelm the banded mongooses and it did. Tsvangirai and company throw the reforms out of the window. Not even the incessant reminders from SADC leaders to implement the reforms managed to get MDC leaders to do anything. MDC failed to implement even one token reform in five years. Not even one!
The single most important lesson Mugabe and his Zanu PF cronies learned from the whole 2008 election debacle and the humiliating GNU that followed was to make sure the party rigs elections but in a very subtle way. As long as Zanu PF can get the opposition to participate in the elections, the more the merrier, regardless how flawed and illegal process happened to be; Zanu PF can point to the number of contestants as proof the election was hotly contested, free, fair and credible. And to guarantee the opposition’s participation, Zanu PF has been giving away a few of the gravy train seats; the banded mongooses found the bait simply irresistible!
SADC leaders warned Tsvangirai and company not to take part in the 2013 elections, not until the reforms are implemented. Again the warning fell on deaf ears.
It is not that MDC leaders did not comprehend the folly of participating in the elections without reforms; they did, at least some of them like David Coltart did.
“The worst aspect for me about the failure to agree a coalition was that both MDCs couldn’t now do the obvious – withdraw from the (2013) elections,” wrote Senator Coltart in his Book, The Struggle Continues 50 years of Tyranny in Zimbabwe.
“The electoral process was so flawed, so illegal, that the only logical step was to withdraw, which would compel SADC to hold Zanu PF to account. But such was the distrust between the MDC-T and MDC-N that neither could withdraw for fear that the other would remain in the elections, winning seats and giving the process credibility.”
So participating in the flawed gave electoral process “credibility” and, by extension, the vote rigging Zanu PF regime, legitimacy. Exactly what Zanu PF wanted!
A number of MDC factions including the one led by Welshman Ncube and that led by Tendai Biti rejoined the MDC-T led by the late Morgan Tsvangirai and then by Nelson Chamisa plus a handful of other opposition parties to form the MDC Alliance BEFORE the 2018 elections. As we know MDC A went on to contest the 2018 elections with no one ever suggesting boycotting the elections.
So, MDC A could NOT give the excuse of “failure to agree a coalition” for once again failing “to do the obvious - withdraw from the 2018 elections”.
Right now the MDC A and all the usual opposition party suspect, all 130 of them at the last count, are all gearing to participate in the 2023 elections with no reforms in place for the same reason they participate in the rigged 2013 and 2018 elections - greed.
My fellow Zimbabweans, ladies and gentlemen, the 90% unemployed and millions now living in abject poverty; ever since the 2008 GNU the country has made no progress in its quest for democratic change, an end to the curse of rigged elections and the holding of our first ever free, fair and credible elections. None!
Zanu PF has not only blatantly rigged the 2013 and then 2018 elections but got away with it thanks to the MDC leaders and the rest of the opportunists opposition who, by participating in the flawed elections gave Zanu PF legitimacy. And unless we, the people do something to end this madness, Zanu PF will blatantly rig the 2023 and the conniving opposition sell-outs, for the sake of a few gravy train seats, will provide the legitimacy bolt-hole!
Zimbabwe is in serious economic trouble, the country’s economy is in total meltdown, unemployment has soared to 90%, basic services such as education and health care have completely collapsed. Millions of our people now live in abject poverty denied all human dignity and hope. We own it to ourselves, our children and posterity to put an end to the madness of rigged elections and bad governance which is the root cause of all our economic and political crisis.
We all know what constitutes free and fair elections. All Zimbabweans eligible to vote must be afforded very opportunity to do so; ZEC must produce a verified voters’ roll and conduct the election in a transparent manner; Zanu PF operatives and traditional leaders must not be allowed to intimidate voters especial rural voters; etc.; etc. Zanu PF must not be allowed to get away with another rigged elections in 2023!
The MDC A and all those opposition opportunists who participate in the 2023 elections when it is clear with no reforms Zanu PF will rig the elections must be held to democratic account. The country will never have free, fair and credible elections if the opposition continue to disregard the rules to ensure free and fair elections for selfish gain. The opposition cannot sell-out and get away with it!
5 comments:
@ DUMISANI MULEYA
"AS Zimbabweans go through the third year after President Emmerson Mnangagwa shot his way to power via a military coup, what has now became evident is the army-engineered transition has not led to democratisation. Mnangagwa and his allies removed the late former president Robert Mugabe for their self-preservation and self-interest, not national interest as they claimed during the time.
The military said it wanted to remove some criminals around the president and those who were now exercising executive power without being elected—referring to the now subdued Zanu PF G40 faction members, mainly Grace Mugabe.
Mnangagwa and his faction also spoke about restoring the legacy of the liberation struggle as part of their narrative to justify the coup.
In the process, they crafted the narrative that they were bringing a new dispensation under “The Second Republic”.
Mnangagwa also came up with the mantra that “Zimbabwe is open for business”.
An impression was given to Zimbabweans and the world that Mnangagwa would steward the transition from dictatorship to democracy in a country traumatised by decades of Mugabe’s repressive, violent and disastrous rule. A huge wave of support and expectation for Mnangagwa accompanied his rise to power.
From 1950 to 1989, 14% of successful coups against dictatorships led to democracy within two years, while 40% did so from 1990 to 2015. Yet several scholars have recently challenged the standard interpretation of military coups as anti-democratic.
Instead, they argue, a coup can help usher in democracy. But new research gives pause to such optimism.
To assess whether coups are associated with democratisation, the American scholars investigated what follows coups against dictators, excluding coups against democracies.
They show that coups are not systematically correlated with democratisation. On the contrary, the perpetrators of coups tend to oust dictators only to impose new ones. Further, they also show that many coups in dictatorships lead to escalations in human rights abuses.
Those who thought the November 2017 military coup in Zimbabwe was going to deliver democratic change were just being plain naive, gullible and stupid. The individuals who were staging the coup were the same individuals who rigged elections to kept Mugabe and themselves in power including carrying out the soft coup in 2008.
It was clear that Mugabe had grown tired of this particular group of thugs and they were fighting back “for their self-preservation and self-interest, not national interest as they claimed during the time” as you rightly pointed out.
As Zimbabwe’s economic meltdown started to bite fuelled by the hyperinflation starting in the late 1990s and peaking at 500 billion percent in 2008 ; Zanu Pf imploded as the members started fighting over the ever shrinking national cake. The November 2017 military coup was about the internal Zanu Pf factional fighting and nothing to do with the desire to restore democracy. The writing was on the wall but, of course, some people out of a desperate desire for some good news and foolishness ignored the warnings.
When Mnangagwa blatantly rigged the July 2018 elections, the penny finally dropped. The Second Republic was all hot air!
In a move that Finance Minister Tito Mboweni described as 'painful', rating agencies Fitch and Moody's pushed South Africa's credit rating deeper into the scrap heap of junk with downgrades announced late on Friday. Borrowing costs will rise, leaving less money for schools and clinics, and other services.
The moves were also unexpected: most economists certainly did not anticipate that Moody's would pull the trigger again. But it did and so did Fitch, delivering a double-barrel shotgun blast into South Africa's widening fiscal hole.
The cut by Moody's takes South Africa two notches below investment grade status, while Fitch's brings it three levels below. Both also maintained negative outlooks, which means the next move would also likely be down. S&P also rendered judgement on Friday, maintaining its "junk" rating with a stable outlook.
South Africa lost its last investment-grade credit rating in March this year when Moody's finally dispensed with the fiction that it was worthy of that status. Junk status effectively means that a country's debt is regarded as a risky investment because it is on a potentially unsustainable path. This means lenders will demand a higher rate of return for the capital they invest in bonds issued by a junked borrower, raising the costs of debt.
This can become a vicious cycle, with more and more of a government's scarce revenue spent on servicing the debt while it faces demands to maintain social and other expenditure.
"Whereas the rating action earlier in 2020 reflected an erosion in the country's credit profile which predated the coronavirus crisis, today's action reflects Moody's assessment of the impact of the pandemic shock, both directly on the debt burden and indirectly by intensifying the country's economic challenges and the social obstacles to reforms," Moody's said in its statement.
There are risks galore for further downgrades. The political battle over curbing the public sector wage bill that soared under former president Jacob Zuma's cadre patronage machine is far from over, and decent rates of economic growth are simply not possible without reliable power supplies. Unemployment continues to climb, leaving fewer workers in a position to pay taxes or buy things. And wider structural reforms remain largely dead in their tracks.
Moody's said it now forecasts South Africa's "government debt to GDP to rise to 110% by the end of fiscal year 2024 – including SOEs guarantees – equivalent to a 40 percentage point increase from fiscal 2019". That is a massive rise in a relatively short period of time off a high base.
How will the markets react? We will know by Monday morning. A spike in bond yields is possible, and the rand could lose some of the ground it has recently clawed back. Some things are certain: South Africa's debt burden is set to become more onerous, and regaining investment grade status has just become even more difficult.
This is a double barrel shotgun blast into the breadbasket of every Zimbabwean for two reasons. One, most Zimbabwe want to see SA doing well because it given them the belief than an African country can do well, Zimbabwe earned her junk rating decades ago, and the impetus to do well. Two, many Zimbabweans are in SA because it is doing well and so will now have nowhere to go.
Progressive Teachers Union of Zimbabwe (PTUZ) secretary-general Raymond Majongwe says the 41% salary offer by government, which will see teachers now earn $19 000, is not a negotiated offer, but is a salary imposed by government on teachers.
He said teachers could not be blamed for the bad behaviour of pupils during the teachers' strike. The following are excerpts of an interview between NewsDay senior reporter Miriam Mangwaya (ND) and Majongwe (RM) on different issues pertaining to the education sector in the country.
Zimbabwe’s education service is all but dead after decades of under funding! The only reason why there are still people who call themselves teachers is because there are no other job opportunities and they have nowhere to go!
What kind of future is there for Zimbabwe?
In 1734, Alexander Pope published his much celebrated poem entitled, “An Essay on Man”.
It is in the said poem that he wrote one of his most famous lines ever:
“Hope springs eternal in the human breast”
This particular line quickly went viral and soon achieved proverbial status.
But more importantly, it is still as resonant today, as much as when it was initially written; now almost 300 years later.
But what exactly did Alexander Pope mean to say with this particular line that immediately attained iconic status?
It is now a widely held view that what he meant to say was so simple.
There was no rational reason to believe Mnangagwa would end the decades of Zanu PF dictatorship since he and his fellow coup plotters were the driving force behind the dictatorship. The coup was staged not because Mnangagwa and company were sick and tired of corruption, vote rigging and all the thuggery the regime was known for. Mugabe was booting them out of the dictatorship and deny them of their share of the looting and absolute power and they stage the coup to boot out Mugabe and his G40 friends out of the dictatorship instead.
Zanu PF keeps wittering about the country attaining upper middle income status by 2030, a mirage the nation has been chasing for the last 40 years.
MDC A has promised to implement the democratic reforms and end the curse of rigged elections. It has yet to implement even one reform in 20 years.
Zimbabwe has had many false dawn of freedom the November 2017 coup was one of them. It is little wonder many of our have lost hope. What the nation is now craving for is to do something right! Something to give meaning to Pope’s words of eternal hope!
A leaked audio recording by the MDC Alliance Bulawayo provincial women's assembly chairlady Tendai Masotsha has sent the party into panic mode, with senior party officials saying there were fears that she was working in cahoots with people that were my believed to have abducted Midlands State University (MSU) student Tawanda Muchehiwa in July this year.
In the audio, Masotsha made sensational claims that Muchehiwa and 20 others were plotting to bomb government buildings ahead of the July 31 protests.
Her allegations angered MDC Alliance activists and those linked to Muchehiwa who blasted the opposition party for allegedly protecting Masotsha despite "overwhelming evidence" that she was working with State agents and participated in the abduction of the MSU media student.
The MDC Alliance last week exonerated Masotsha for her alleged role in the abduction of Muchehiwa.
In the leaked audio, Masotsha alleged that she told the MDC Alliance presidential affairs secretary Jameson Timba that if she felt cornered, she would end up revealing the "plans" to bomb government buildings.
"Ndakamutaurira Timba kuti vakaramba vachindiisa mukona ndinotaura zvese kuti vaidakuita bomb government buildings uye kuti ane vanhu 20 vaida kumubetsera (I told Timba that if they continue pushing me I will reveal everything including their plans to bomb government buildings. Tawanda told me he had 20 other people who were to help him do that)," Masotsha claimed in the audio.
The exoneration of Masotsha raised a lot of dust with Muchehiwa's family and several other people accusing the opposition party of protecting her.
In a related matter, Masotsha tendered her resignation last night.
If MDC leaders’ pathetic track record is to be attributed only to the party having Zanu PF double agents then it will be no exaggeration to say all MDC leaders and the majority of the members are Zanu PF double agents. How else can one explain why not even one MDC leader proposed even one democratic reform in the 5 years of the 2008 to 2013 GNU and yet this was the primary reason the MDC were in the GNU!
“MDC leaders were busy enjoying themselves in the GNU they forgot why they were there!” remarked one SADC diplomat in sheer exasperation at how MDC had failed to implement even one reform in 5 years.
The truth MDC leaders are so corrupt and incompetent whether or not they are also Zanu PF double agents in a matter of indifference!
Why so many Zimbabweans still continue to follow these corrupt and incompetent MDC leaders speaks volumes of just how naive and gullible we are as a nation. It also explains why the nation has blundered from pillar to post and is slowly sinking in our own shit, literally!
If we are serious about ending the Zanu PF dictatorship then we must elect competent men and women with common sense. Continuing to put our faith in MDC leaders even after they have proven that they are sell-outs only goes to say we are not yet ready to end the dictatorship and with it our suffering. Until we are ready to end our suffering, the world will ignore us and rightly so too.
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