Saturday 16 July 2016

Ultimately, street protests are a demand for free vote - secured in 1980 but soon denied by Nomusa Garikai


Now that the winds of change are growing stronger and blowing with a sense of direction and purpose we should not be surprised that this corrupt and tyrannical regime has responded by turning up the violence – it’s most tried and trusted response. And to justify the violence the regime has its brainwashed goons parroting their usual feeble excuses.

 

"We are not going to disclose our strategy because they will do a counter to us. However, those local people (leaders of protests) who are on the forefront are not the enemies, the real enemies are the West and America," Zanu-PF deputy youth league secretary Kudzi Chipanga said.

"We will keep on defending our sovereignty and as the youth league we are watching these developments closely. We promise the nation that we will not stand akimbo when we are under threat. The red button hasn't been press as yet and they day they press it then they will learn their hard lesson."

We have all heard this nonsense before, this is regime that has systematically and ruthlessly denied the ordinary people their freedoms and basic human rights including their right to free and fair elections and even the right to life itself under the pretext that it was doing so to protect the country’s independence and sovereignty.

 

To spice up their theory of the country’s very survival being under serious threat they have had to throw in the shadowy third hand; after all how can unarmed and simple ordinary people be a threat. The regime then accuses shadowy third force in the form of the West, particularly the British, Americans and lately the French; of pushing its regime change agenda through the “puppet” opposition and brainwashed povo.

 

So as far as the Mugabe regime is concerned any Zimbabwean seeking to exercise their basic right to free, fair and credible elections which could result in regime change, a certainty in Zimbabwe’s case given Zanu PF’s track record of economic collapse and tyrannical repression, must be possessed by the evil west. The regime has denied any such Zimbabwean their right to a free and fair vote and the brutal violence against such individuals is to exorcise the devil that possesses them and to serve as a warning to the rest of the population what of the penalty of seeking regime change.

 

There is nothing new in Zanu PF’s denying the people their freedom, human rights and to brutally silence their cries for justice under a cynical cloak of defending the nation’s sovereignty under attack from a fictitious enemy. Ian Smith played the same dirty trick! He too turned up the repression to silence the black majority crying for an end to racist oppression and exploitation under the pretext that anyone calling for change was possessed by the evil communists! He was not fighting to stop black majority rule but rather fighting to stop the spread of communism!

 

In the end Ian Smith’s white racist regime collapsed because a political system that exploited 80% of the population, denying them a fair share of the nation’s wealth and a meaningful say in the governance of the country was not socially and politically sustainable. This Zanu PF dictatorship is set to collapse too because a political system that is indifferent to the wholesale looting of $15 billion by a few whilst the majority are forced to face a crippling economic meltdown with 76% now living in abject poverty is not socially and politically sustainable.

 

Chipanga said if people wanted to remove Mugabe then they should wait for the 2018 elections. He accused the demonstrators of fearing elections and thus trying to employ "unorthodox means" to remove Mugabe.

 

Of course this is a trap! This is a regime calling for elections because it has perfected its vote rigging skill to guarantee it a landslide victory no matter what. In the 2008 elections it cooked the results of the March vote to justify a run-off and then used wanton violence to ensure President Mugabe victory. In the 2013 elections the regime used its vast wealth from its wholesale looting activities to bankroll an elaborate and expensive vote rigging scheme.

 

What is significant about the political change in 1980 is that the black majority had a political voice; we could vote the racist white regime out of office and that is exactly what we did. The mistake we made was that we failed to secure our democratic right to a meaningful say in the governance of the country.

 

At the heart of the on-going social unrest and street protest is the suffering brought on by the economic meltdown following 36 years of gross mismanagement and rampant corruption. Although the people were aware Zanu PF’s corrupt and inapt leadership was delivering the mass poverty instead of the mass prosperity President Mugabe kept promising; they was nothing they could do to remove the regime from power. And so for the last 36 years the nation has been stuck with a corrupt, incompetent and oppressive regime.

 

The on-going revolt will have failed if all the nation succeeds in doing is remove President Mugabe and a few of his cronies from power.  What we must do is implement the democratic reforms to secure the democratic right of every Zimbabwean not just for the upcoming 2018 elections but for all time!

3 comments:

  1. Yes the war to end white colonial oppression should have been "ultimately" a war for free, fair and credible. Sadly the ordinary people of Zimbabwe never understood the critical im-portance of this basic human right and its role as the only guarantee of competent and ac-countable government. It was as easy for President Mugabe to take away the right to free and fair elections from the people as taking a brick of solid gold from a baby. The empty box that contained the gold would be of greater interest to the baby than the gold, he/she can lift the box or push it around like a toy car!

    Zimbabwe is one of the few Africa countries to have had a very significant number of very well educated nationals at the time of its independence. We had people like the late Edson Jonasi Zvobgo, he was not just a Harvard University trained lawyer; he was a lecturer at this great institution of learning, a point he never tired of reminding us minions. And yet it was he who crafted the amendment of the Lancaster House constitution to create the executive presidency; giving Mugabe even more tyrannical powers.

    Our President Mugabe has seven university degrees including one in economic but you would not think so to look at the voodoo economic policies the tyrant has doggedly pursued these last 36 years.

    Every year since independence the country has chained out more and more University gradu-ates than any other country with comparable per capita GDP. If you throw a stone at a crowd of Zimbabweans you are most likely to hit a doctorate or professor. Some people are getting their doctorate in three or five months with no first degree - they are that good!

    Sadly our productivity has not benefited from all this glut of university graduates indeed it has done the exact opposite, our GDP has shrunk year on year for the last 36 years. A case of too many chefs and too few Indians! Why? Simple, most of these University graduates can only read and write and little else.

    Our education system is geared to produce a flock of parrots that can only regurgitate what they learned without a clue as to what it all mean. Our graduates are totally incapable of think for themselves. The system is design to cast the primeval ghetto mentality we all have at birth in concrete so that as adults Zimbabweans are tuned to respond to meaningless slogans and follow whatever leader put before them, be it a tyrant or a village idiot, blindly like sheep to the slaughter.

    You can take some people out of the ghetto but you cannot take the ghetto mentality out of them. Well that is certainly true of Zimbabweans. Seven university degrees failed to take the ghetto mentality out of Mugabe. Even a Harvard University doctorate education failed to take the ghetto out of Zvobgo.

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  2. Yes professor Ncube you are one to talk about the Zanu PF gravy train given you spent five years of the GNU on that train. You and your fellow MDC friends “were too busy enjoying yourselves in the GNU you forgot why you were there!” as SADC leaders charged soon after the July 2013 rigged elections. You failed to get even one reform implemented and thus al-lowed President Mugabe to blatantly rig the elections.

    You are now joining the crowd calling for an end to this Zanu PF tyranny not because you want the gravy train political system dismantled but because you would like to establish one of your own. If you really wanted the system destroyed then why did you not do so during the GNU when you had all the chance to do it?

    You have already proven beyond all reasonable doubt that you are corrupt, incompetent and a sell-out; you are still on the political stage only because the Zimbabwe electorate is very slow in learning. Still you and your fellow MDC leaders will not be allowed to take advantage of the comatose electorate and drag this nation into another hell-hole!

    What this country needs desperately is quality leaders and not corrupt and incompetent lead-ers, especially those like you professor who have already proven that they are village idiots! I am for recycling but not recycling corrupt and incompetent leaders; that is plain dumb!

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  3. How many times have the people celebrated the dawn of freedom and liberty only to be disappointed a few years or even months latter when freedom and liberty are once again kicked into the long grass! The trouble is the people themselves have been quick to judge success before they had done enough to ensure success. They approved the 2013 new constitution on the basis of Tsvangirai's promise that it would deliver free and fair elections, for example, without ever bothering to listen to the warning that it would not do any such thing.
    The nation is going agog with excitement over the street protest; after years of dehumanizing economic hardships. The street protests have finally given an otherwise cowed and subservient people the courage to tell the tyrant that he must go. But by failing to think through what they want to see happen after the tyrant is gone the people are setting themselves up for disappointment because many an opportunists will install themselves as the replacement to the dictator and become a dictator in their own right.
    The removal of one dictator is a big thing but the feel-good factor will not last long if he/she is replaced by yet another dictator.

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