We are hardly into the New Year but, already, the unity government in Zimbabwe appears to have upped the tempo in their endless infighting and squabbling.
The leaders of the three political parties that formed the unity government spend so much energy doing each other down instead of running the country. To make matters worse, one, two or all of them are always out of the country. Worse still, Mugabe, whether present or absent, long became a liability with nothing to offer except the same old rhetoric, defiance, threats and the usual reference to the war of liberation.
By all indications, we are in for the same crap we have endured for the past several years.
This unity government, made up of, strictly speaking, no elected party, is causing more danger than good to our nation.
Although Tsvangirai beat Mugabe in the initial stage of voting, classic rigging forced him into a run-off against Mugabe. That run-off election was not seen to its end because of violence Mugabe unleashed on Tsvangirai’s supporters.
Then there is ZANU-PF, which lost the incomplete election but still managed to get its leader to remain president, while wielding so much power over the nation that the opposition ZANU-PF, in effect, remains the ruling party.
We practically have two parallel governments in Zimbabwe.
So much time is spent on attacking each other, both verbally and physically. The country is put on hold as each one of the leaders is fighting personal battles of survival both in government and within their political parties.
The bickering among these parties has put service delivery in great danger and the people cannot continue to be subjected to this nonsense, mostly by people rejected at the polls.
I have no confidence in any one of the principals, especially since the three of them are fighting internal party wars in their respective political parties.
Early this month, Mugabe’s ZANU-PF and Tsvangirai’s MDC were involved in a noisy tug of war over the burial of an MDC official.
The MDC said they would bury the dead woman, Queen Gondo, because she was one of their own while Gondo’s relatives, who happen to be ZANU-PF supporters, wanted ZANU-PF to handle the burial.
How these political parties can lower themselves so low as to play around with the corpse of a person, using party loyalties to defile a sacred moment at the end of one’s life is beyond me.
They both had to use the harmless dead to further their political parties. This is outright disgusting, regardless of who started it. Do things really have to degenerate to such a level?
And the reason for all this abuse of a corpse? Some people did not want MDC people in their village where the burial should have taken place fearing a backlash from other villagers!
This is madness.
But again, this is what we get from a unity government. They cannot agree on just about anything, except, of course, foreign trips.
This culture has also pervaded Africa when it deals with Zimbabwe. Africa has failed to speak with one voice when it comes to our nation.
Mugabe and Tsvangirai cannot agree on elections.
Zuma and Mugabe cannot agree on elections.
SADC and ZANU-PF cannot agree on elections.
President Sata of Zambia agrees with Mugabe on elections and calls Tsvangirai a stooge of the west, describing Tsvangirai’s calls for security, electoral and constitutional reforms in Zimbabwe as ‘unnecessary’.
Are they really unnecessary?
“We don’t know the policies of Morgan ÔÇô he has other people speaking for him rather than speaking for himself. There will be elections and Mugabe will go and someone else will take over but not someone imposed by the Western countries,” said Sata.
But wait a minute, Zambia is a member of SADC’s Troika of the Organ on Politics, Defence and Security, tasked with assisting Zimbabwe get out of its quagmire and now we have one of the mediators saying this!
It is only a few months since Sata won the Zambian presidency and he has already forgotten that security, electoral and constitutional reforms are the ingredients that brought him into office.
Tsvangirai’s demand for “security, electoral and constitutional reforms” before elections can be held in Zimbabwe is a demand laid down by SADC and one that South African President Jacob Zuma has been trying to arm twist Mugabe into accepting. It is not Tsvangirai’s demand per se’.
African leaders never cease to amaze me.
A few weeks ago, Equatorial Guinea President Nguema told a press conference in Harare that Zimbabwe would not be on the agenda of this week’s forthcoming African Union Summit; the same cowardly behaviour displayed by SADC over the same issue.
And we hear our African presidents talking about being sovereign nations, being republics and independent nations who apply African solutions to African problems.
As an African, I can vouch for the fact that shying away from a problem or fearing to tackle a problem is definitely not an African solution to an African problem.
Yea, Mugabe was right, African presidents are cowards!
While African leaders who should mediate call the people they are supposed to assist idiots, other African leaders refuse to discuss problems in the middle of the continent.
African leaders are unable to speak with one voice on such issues mainly because a majority of them came into power through dubious and undemocratic means.
This disarray, obviously, has given Mugabe ammunition to canvass other African leaders to be allowed to hold elections this year, “with or without a new constitution”.
African leaders undermine the mandate of their own organizations and this gives me a sinking feeling of hopelessness as I realize that there will never ever be an African solution to an African problem.
We in Zimbabwe have lived with so much violence for so long now. We have been baited and trapped with elections and, last time around, we lost over 200 of our compatriots at the hands of Robert Mugabe.
Now Mugabe wants another election this year without the safeguards suggested and demanded by other interested parties being put in place.
Already, some African leaders, like Zambia’s Michael Sata and Ethiopia’s Meles Zenawi, have already urged Mugabe to go ahead with elections this year.
And they have not even consulted SADC, the regional body, or the AU, the continental body.
We Zimbabweans are compelled to pause and remember those who were killed by Mugabe just because they were MDC.
The blood of our citizens has hardly dried in the polling booths of 2008 and yet there are some of Africa’s leaders who, like thokoloshis, always want fresh blood, our blood.
Maybe one day we will find the answer to why African leaders are such masochists, always bent on inflicting pain on themselves; why they hate the people they rule.
Surely, one day we will find out why Africa creates so many disasters for itself and yet shy away from solving their own problems.
But African leaders never failed to solve an African problem; African leaders just refuse to solve the problems afflicting us.
As Mugabe sets the electoral trap in Zimbabwe, the countries of Botswana, South Africa and SADC should brace themselves for a fresh wave of refugees…money that could have gone to development or feeding the people.
