Harare Tribune: 29th January 2009
It was American Civil War General William Tecmuseh Sherman who said, and I quote; “To the winner belongs the spoils.” He was wrong. Sherman’s aphorism is not always an absolute certainty particularly when it comes to African politics. Mugabe’s behaviour following the historic March 2008 election in which he and his ZANU-PF were booted out of office is a prime example of the flaw in Sherman’s observation. The winner does not always hog all the spoils.
That Mugabe lost the election is beyond a shadow of doubt. The humiliating rejection by the Zimbabwean electorate notwithstanding, Mugabe wants all the spoils. After losing the election, a stark fact that he has acknowledged, Gushungo wants to hold onto key ministries to ensure the perpetuation of his grip on power as well as the immortalization of his beloved ZANU-PF. It is futile. Reports of Mugabe’s lack of decorum during the series of SADC meetings point not to arrogance. It was primal fear on display. The shadow of political death is slowly and ominously creeping upon Mugabe and his party. Vultures are circling above Mugabe, waiting and watching as they plan to pick off power, take Gideon Gono’s reported presidential ambitions as an example. These are people who want power just for the heck of it. The Zimbabwean people know it and do not want any part of it.
After winning the election under very tough conditions, the MDC is within its right to demand all the ministries it wants. That demand is in compliance with the decree and mandate of the Zimbabwean people. One man, Robert Mugabe, cannot and ought not be allowed to wilfully negate that mandate accorded by the people of Zimbabwe. He does not have the authority to nullify the will of the nation. The president of the Republic of Zimbabwe serves at the pleasure and consent of the Zimbabwean people. I have said this before and I will say it again; Zimbabwe is a REPUBLIC NOT A MONARCHY! In a republican government, the president is the servant of the governed not their master. Since Zimbabwe is a republic, Mugabe cannot be its potentate even by proxy. He may have come back from Mozambique with some misconception that he was a chief but he is most definitely mistaken if he is of that view.
As a servant of the people of Zimbabwe, Robert Mugabe’s custodianship of the nation on behalf of the people had to be appraised at regular intervals. The Zimbabwean people did just that. They reviewed Mugabe’s performance during his custodianship of the nation. The report card was not pretty. It read like a dispatch from a trench-warfare front. Mugabe and ZANU-PF have 29 years of shocking, mind-numbing and abject failure. It was as if they were on vacation for 29 years, as Sibangani Sibanda aptly put it. They are so incompetent they can never be trusted to run even a village grinding mill much less a ministry. On second thought I have to admit that I am mistaken, they will run the grinding mill alright, straight into the ground!
That is what Mugabe’s record during his tenure in office tells anyone who cares to make a casual inspection. He is very good at running things into the ground, especially those inherited from better performers than him. Tanonoka Joseph Whande of The Zimbabwe Times rightly described the manner in which Mugabe frittered away the economic legacy inherited from Ian Smith as an unparalleled act of betrayal.
On assuming power, ZANU-PF was hell bent on changing name plates on roads and building, and renaming towns, cities, mountains and rivers. It seemed as if independence was reduced into a mundane exercise of changing names and nothing else that required more physical and mental exertion beyond that. As prototypes of the ineptitude that is characteristic of ZANU-PF I will cite two examples. After renaming Andrew Flaming Hospital to Parirenyatwa Hospital, a once highly respectable institution was left to decay into a shell that it is now. The city of Harare had an efficient public transport in the form of Harare United Omnibus Company operating out of Belvedere. ZANU-PF took over the company and, overnight, the company was run into the ground through corruption and sheer incompetence. Similar disasters have been visited on everything that Mugabe has touched. The man has the reverse Midas touch. Everything he touchs instantly turns into a pile of worthless ash.
By reducing independence to an effortless exercise of renaming national landmarks and mismanaging thriving economic institutions thereafter, Mugabe and ZANU-PF are responsible for reducing his beloved revolution into a mockery. As Reason Wafawarova intimated, Mugabe’s inability to deal decisively with corruption is the genesis of the mockery. Sanctions have very little to do with it. They can wail all they want about sanctions until Hell freezes over but the fact remains unchanged, Mugabe and ZANU-PF are responsible for the Zimbabwean mess.
Ian Smith had sanctions but he found a way around them and kept the country running despite simultaneously dealing with a debilitating war, ditto the Afrikaner regime in Apartheid South Africa that used sanctions to become self reliant. Smith and Botha faced sanctions like men because they cared for the countries they were running whereas Mugabe chooses the path of least resistance, denouncing the imposition of targeted sanctions ad nauseum, because he does not really care.
Evidence on the ground condemns Mugabe for his incompetence and lack of care for his compatriots. Based on the evidence alone, he does not deserve to run anything beyond his family. If reports are to be believed, Mugabe’s own family does not really respect his abilities to preside over even a traditional burial ceremony in his own village. It is quite damning evidence pointing to the lack of respect he commands from those who know him best. Shouting down an uncle during the burial of a family member is incontrovertible proof that the man has little honour left and does not take that kindly. A person whose power is disjoined from respect lacks authority no matter the size and number of troops and death squads at his or her beck and call.
Mugabe, a man now bereft of honour even in his own village, has presided over an incompetent but eager-to-murder entity called ZANU-PF, does not deserve to run anything in Zimbabwe. The Zimbabwean people know this. Tsvangirai and the MDC are to be commended for trying to extending the olive branch to ZANU-PF and offering Mugabe some semblance of respectability to his hollow presidency. Tsvangirai and the MDC are too generous. Mugabe, true to form, has mistaken that magnanimity for weakness and spurned the offer. That is the problem.
Mugabe can ill afford to pick and choose what he wants and what crumbs to toss at the MDC. Beyond the ever-shrinking cover of military personnel, he has nothing else. Mugabe and ZANU-PF cannot bank on ordinary army grunts to protect them. If he believes that soldiers will slavishly obey his command then he is gravely mistaken. When ZANU-PF gave starving soldiers elephant meat, it pacified them for a while. A soon as they discovered that elephant meat did not taste anything like chicken, they went to Gono’s farm to borrow some in an act of blatant rebellion.
That is a very an ominous sign and if there are thinking people in ZANU-PF, they should be worried stiff. Soldiers preoccupied with looting shops, engaging in The Great Chicken Robbery and stealing maize and fertilizer are not going to fight anyone’s silly war meant to protect a few corrupt fools. I am afraid these acts of indiscipline are just a taste of what is to come. It is getting worse, with voodoo economist Gideon Gono right in the crosshairs.
It is Gono today but the next target of the fury of the soldiers is anyone’s guess. Clearly, Mugabe is in a pickle and he knows it. It is the very source of his intransigence. Constantine Chiwenga can puff out his chest and challenge the Yankee military machine to a fight but it is all wind. It is one thing to beat starving peasants and a totally different prospect facing a war machine that is the American military.
Mugabe is banking on Tsvangirai and the MDC to bail him out of the troubles he is facing from his own soldiers through what Eddie Cross rightly pointed out as the GNU Ponzi scheme. Tsvangirai and the MDC do not walk on water and their presence in Mugabe’s government is not going to solve the myriad of problems created by Mugabe. Mugabe and ZANU-PF are the source of the problems and it is inconceivable that they would be part of the solution. The problems facing Zimbabwe will only be solved by Zimbabweans.
The paramount point that should be impressed upon the arbiters of the Zimbabwean crisis is that the Zimbabwean people are not prepared to toil for a nation run by people who hoard donated fertilizer and seeds for personal gain. Tsvangirai and the MDC have the good will of the Zimbabwean people but Mugabe does not. When he had it, Mugabe abused it through his penchant for use of brute force and the unbridled corruption of his cartel. Without that good will, nothing will solve the problems, not even the gold bars in Fort Knox. The bad state of the world economy militates against Mugabe. No country is going to give him money, or let Gono use non-Zimbabwean currency, so that his corrupt underlings can salt it away and his wife can go on shopping junkets; the more the surprising aspect of ZANU-PF’s hard headedness. They are up against it. Mugabe and ZANU-PF are up to their ears in the hot soup they brewed. If they will not budge, the MDC should leave them to stew in it.
An incompetent, improvident and dishonourable man that looks a gift horse in the mouth should have that horse taken away from him on the spot. He is an ingrate and does not deserve the horse! Instead of offering him posts that he does not deserve and ministries that his party is incapable of running, Mugabe and his supine supporters in SADC have to be told that the MDC runs the whole shebang or the MDC will not run anything. That is the kind of clarity that is needed. Motlanthe can gnash his teeth all he wants but, as the hapless Thabo Mbeki put it, Zimbabwe is not a province of South Africa. Neither SADC nor Zuma has the right to impose Mugabe and ZANU-PF on the people of Zimbabwe. For presiding over a corrupt regime, Mugabe and ZANU-PF are the enemy of the people as wisely pointed out by Reason Wafawarova. Satan cannot man the Gates of Heaven.
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