ZANU-PF thrives on chaos. When things are orderly, ZANU-PF loses its script.
Demonising opponents, hero worshipping, corruption, beating up and murdering people, refusing to obey court judgements, tempering with the judiciary, stripping people of human and property rights, violence and spouting old discarded Marxist rhetoric that no one practices anymore, including ZANU-PF itself, are just a few things that ZANU-PF has been all about.
This is a matter of public record.
Given ZANU-PF’s record, it came as a surprise to hear Dumiso Dabengwa, onetime PF-ZAPU intelligence supremo, ZANU-PF Politburo member and former Home Affairs minister and current leader of an almost dead ZAPU, making a public statement at a rally that he had blocked the election of both Morgan Tsvangirai and Robert Mugabe in the 2008 elections.
“I think we achieved what we had set ourselves to achieve and that is to make sure Morgan did not win that election and that Mugabe did not win that election,” Dabengwa is quoted as saying last weekend.
The idea, it seems, was to leave Zimbabwe stranded without a clearly elected leader so as to include those who had been rejected by the people at the polls. And that is exactly what happened.
This is coming from a so-called ‘intelligence supremo’, who was maliciously arrested for treason in 1982 and released in 1983 due to lack of evidence. But Mugabe had Dabengwa detained immediately after release, spending the following four years in prison.
As an ‘intelligence supremo’, I would have believed Dabengwa could make an assessment as to the right direction to take, not for personal gain but for the sake of the country for which he had paid such a big personal sacrifice.
But short-sightedness and personal gain, as usual, always cloud up the eyes of our politicians.
In 2008, instead of coming together to heave the monster that Mugabe is out of power and give the nation a fresh start, Dabengwa now says he achieved what “we had set ourselves to achieve”. I wonder what he means by “we”.
Be that as it may, Dabengwa joined small political parties which, according to figures released, were just enough to deny Morgan Tsvangirai victory over Mugabe, sending the election into a run-off and triggering one of the worst violence against unarmed civilians in Zimbabwe.
200 people died in that m├¬l├®e, causing Tsvangirai to pull out of the run-off election, citing widespread violence against the citizens.
The result of that deadlock, thanks to the ‘intelligence supremo’, was the dysfunctional government of national unity which is still dominated by Mugabe.
I expected better from Mr Dabengwa. Intelligence supremo, my foot!
What Dabengwa, Welshman Ncube and Simba Makoni did at that time, strengthened Mugabe not weakened him although the numbers still belonged to Tsvangirai. Thanks to these three who achieved what they had set out to achieve, Mugabe still does as he pleases with the nation and the three are still in the political doldrums, desperately huddling together to try and somehow conjure up numbers that might give them relevance.
Now, they are at it again.
Makoni, along with ZANU-Ndonga, have announced that they will stand by Tsvangirai this time around.
Dabengwa and Ncube made their own pact. Although it is quite predictable, it makes my heart bleed when our leaders do such things. Just how did it happen again that political parties in Matabeleland, small and meaningless as they are, ended up together against political parties from Mashonaland region?
Here we go again; why did this happen and why did Tsvangirai’s MDC allow it to happen?
This is faulty in both design and intent and all the parties should have worked harder to prevent something that is even primitively suggestive of political divisions along tribal lines.
Am I forgiven to think that tribalism is again being used to gain more political sympathy? Whatever the reason behind this arrangement, I am not amused by all this because I am very sure that Zimbabwean people are now so politically mature as to shun this kind of division. And here I am talking and blaming all political leaders for allowing something like this to emerge amongst them.
This is downright disgraceful.
It is a shame that the people of Zimbabwe are now more politically mature than the political leaders they are following. When so much as a whisper of tribalism is injected into politics, Zimbabweans are the more poorer. The people of Zimbabwe want to be bombarded with different ideas and examine different scenarios offered by different political leaders, regardless of the origin of those leaders. We cannot continue using tribal lines as demarcations of our political thought and existence. Tribalism, never mind how scantly suggestive, must not be given a platform.
Why are all these political leaders behaving like Robert Mugabe, the man they all say they want to replace?
I am sick and tired of politicians who don’t deal with this kind of political cancer but go on as if all is fine. As long as we buy and sell our ideas along tribal lines we are all going to perish together and that does not need intelligence supremos to uncover.
These political leaders should have worked harder to stay together for a purpose.
To be denied free political thought and choice of who to follow based on selling of tribal ideas to the electorate defeat our purpose. We cannot be made to buy ideas based on homeboy politics and regionalism. From Kariba to Beit Bridge and from Hwange to Mutare, we don’t need that, for goodness sake.
We are fighting a seven-headed monster whose tentacles can go in different directions at the same time and vanquish us. We cannot afford any divisions. We deserve a new, fresh start because there are things we must do. There are issues we must correct and there are voices amongst us that need to be listened to.
Zimbabwe needs a fresh start but unless we work together for meaningful change, not for personal appeasements, we will be doomed to another five years of whimpers, tears, bloodshed and sorrow of the innocence.
We must know what we want to achieve before we set out to try it. Fighting Mugabe might be much easier than ruling the country, as Mugabe himself found out after independence.
We, as individuals and as individual political parties, must set our priorities and make them known to those whose votes we are courting.
We cannot sustain another five years of such disharmony where politicians spend most of their time arguing about trivial issues at the expense of the nation. Where they spend most of their time abusing us and taking us for granted instead of taking orders from us.
We cannot have another five years of a multi-party government. Zimbabwe is in distress and needs to correct itself because we have been made to waste time on politicians instead of on developing our nation.
Whoever wins these coming elections better understand that they are there for the people and the nation first, not for themselves and their hangers-on.
Whoever wins these coming elections must be reminded now that their mandate and only endeavour is nothing more or less than giving Zimbabwe back to the people of Zimbabwe.
