Saturday 3 September 2016

Professor Moyo, "Mujuru saga or Tajamuka" are NOT the causes of regime change. By Nomusa Garikai

Zanu PF has weaved a web of lies for decades and it is not surprising that the regime is now caught in its own web.
 
“According to Prof J. Moyo, who spoke as the Tsholotsho North MP, the government of Zimbabwe had a "limited space for expansion and policy implementation" since its election in government in 2013. One of the main causes of the Zim-Asset policy implementation draw back had been the advent or existence of Mujuru factor. Moyo explained that the Mujuru factor seized and paralysed the party and government for a year since 2013 October to 2014 December thereby diverting government from real issues of governance,” reported Bulawayo 24.

The truth of the matter is that President Mugabe rigged the 2013 national elections, so it is utter nonsense to claim Mugabe was “democratically elected”.
 
The Zanu PF elective congress of December 2014 was NOT going to elect the First Secretary of the party; all the ten provinces had endorsed Robert Mugabe as their preferred candidate way in advance, as has happened countless times in the past. It was unwritten but well understood rule in Zanu PF that Mugabe would have to voluntarily pass the baton and NOT forced through an election process.
 
The party positions which were up for grabs were the two Second Secretaries (equivalent to the two VPs) and the Party Chairperson. Although the party constitution said congress members will vote to fill these positions; Mugabe had always manipulated the process in such a way that the members never got the chance to vote and instead he appointed candidates who would have lost the vote as happened with the appointment of Joice Mujuru in 2004.
 
The reason why President Mugabe wanted to appoint his assistants rather than allow party members to elect them is that by appointing them they immediately became beholden to him and not the party members.  
 
In 2014 Joice Mujuru was set to win the election for one of the VP position; Mugabe had to stop that happening and he did by accusing her and her supporters of plotting to kill him. Mugabe had Mujuru and many of her supporters booted out of the party. Mugabe got his wish; he and not party members, appointed Emmerson Mnangagwa and Phelekezela Mphoko.
 
Initially VP Mnangagwa thought that his position as Mugabe’s heir was secure but that did not last as Mugabe reminded him that he appointed Mnangagwa and can therefore have him replace with someone else.
 
The assassination allegations against Joice Mujuru died off with no one arrested. Anyone familiar with Mugabe’s modus operandi of harassing his political opponents by charging them with tramped up charges was not surprised the assassination charges came up suddenly only to disappear again just as suddenly.
 
"It became harder and impossible to work for the betterment of the nation under those conditions as there was so much bickering and underhand dealings aimed at removing a democratically elected President Robert Mugabe from power by Mujuru and her Cabal," emphasised Professor Moyo.
 
It is true that the booting of Mujuru and her supporters have sup the energy out of President Mugabe and the party but that is his entire fault. He booted her and others out to impose himself and his minion, Mnangagwa; of course that was bound to displease many of the Mujuru supporters who have remained party members. His attempts to elbow Mnangagwa out in favour of his wife have vexed the latter and his supporters. Zanu PF is imploding and it was President Mugabe himself who lit the fuse by his undemocratic machinations to remain top dog and then to have his wife succeed him.
 
As for the economic meltdown; President Mugabe thought he would rig economic recovery as easily as he had rigged the July 2013 nation elections. He has since found out that was wishful thinking.
President Mugabe bribed MDC members with the gravy train lifestyles plus the $4 million Highlands mansion for Tsvangirai in return for them doing nothing to implement the democratic reforms. So after five years of the GNU not even one reform was implemented allowing President Mugabe to blatantly rig the July elections.
 
President Mugabe has denied there was no corruption in Zimbabwe for decades allowing this problem to grow and spread. In March this year he admitted that $15 billion in diamond revenue was looted in the last six years. Minister Kasukuwere has since claimed that “a chunk” of the $15 billion was looted by Joice Mujuru and her late husband. Yes the Mujurus have been looting but they are not the only ones; President Mugabe himself pocketed a cool $2 billion in 2012 alone, according to Africa Partnership Canada. In other words a hell lot more than the $15 billion has been looted! It is quite possible that Zimbabwe is losing $15 billion a year through corruption.
 
The Zimbabwe economy is subject to the same economic laws governing all other economies such as corruption will destroy the economy. It is therefore not surprising that the Zimbabwe economy is now in total economic meltdown; what economy in the world will survive much less thrive a $ 15 billion looting spree. It should be noted here that Zimbabwe’s GPD is only $14 billion!
 
"From 2013 to 2014 we were consumed with the Mujuru saga. After wards we had a new phase of successionists' issues bedevilling the party even up to today, threatening the stability of ZanuPF. As if that is not enough, we now have the Tajamukas" Professor Moyo argued.
 
Professor Jonathan Moyo is Zanu PF’s undisputed chief propagandist, still even he is now totally confused as to what is the cause and what is the effect. It is the decades of gross mismanagement and rampant corruption are the root causes of Zimbabwe’s economic meltdown. The effect of the economic meltdown has been to make everyone poor and harden their resolve to do something to end the worsening economic hardships.
 
Since Zanu PF has denied the ordinary people a meaningful say in the governance of the country by denying them a free vote, the people have taken to street protests as their only way to demand an end to the soaring unemployment, collapsed education and health services, no water and regular power cuts, etc.
 
Zanu PF is imploding because the members are fighting for the ever shrinking cake to escape the economic misery now affecting millions of ordinary Zimbabweans. Zanu PF has no clue on how to revive the economy and so as long as the party remains in power the economic meltdown will get worse not better and as the nation cake shrinks the fighting amongst party members will grow worse.
 
When President Mugabe adopted this de facto one-party dictatorship; a political system that allowed mismanagement and corruption, the cancers, to grow and spread; he accepted the self-destruct gene that would destroy the party and, if we are not careful, the nation too. It is neither the Mujuru saga nor the street protests that are forcing Zanu PF to finally accept regime change but the economic meltdown caused by decades of gross mismanagement and rampant corruption.
 
“It is the economy, stupid!” President Bill Clinton told his fellow Americans at the time when some were becoming increasingly preoccupied with the President’s sex scandal with a White House Intern. He said this to draw their attention back on the bread and butter issues that really mattered.
 
To paraphrase President Clinton, one can tell Professor Moyo, “It is the economic meltdown, stupid; not the Mujuru saga or Tajamuka; that is forcing Zanu PF to accept failure and ultimately regime change.”

5 comments:

  1. It is hard to believe that any one with any brain in Zanu PF believed for one minute that anyone would bankroll the $27 billion ZimAsset budget given the country's indebtedness and reputation for not paying back its debts! In the end Zanu PF failed to raise any money to finance the plan; both China and Russia give the regime what can only be described as unsigned and undated cheques These were decoy cheques designed to fool the naive into believing Zanu PF could be trusted with other people's money. In the end no one was fooled and so Mugabe has sat there with nothing in his ZimAsset begging bowl but a couple of worthless pieces of paper.

    Even if the Mujuru saga had never happened ZimAsset will still be another pipe dream.

    The irony is without all the grand looting and plundering of resources Zimbabwe would be able to finance most of its own development activities.

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  2. @ Zwelibanzi

    The real tragedy here is that we, the people of Zimbabwe, have allowed this tyrannical regime ruin our lives turn this beautiful and rich country into a hell-on-earth. This madness has gone on for 36 long years land us in this pitiful position where the regime talks of $15 billion being looted as if it is nothing whilst hundreds of babies across the land die every week for lack of something as basic as an incubator. We should hang our head in shame if you had any common sense and humanity!

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  3. @Nomazulu
    “Those people who have engaged in revolutionaries will always remain visionary, fearless and selfless. We see this selflessness and fearlessness in Itai Dzamara and his brother, Sternford Zvorwadza, Linda Masarira, Promise Mkhwananzi, and Pastor Ewan Mawarire today,” you said.

    I wish I could agree with you! You would agree with me, am sure, that Mugabe, Mujuru and even Tsvangirai would rightly claim that they have “engaged in revolutionaries” in their time but, looking at what they have done when they got into power, there is no shred of evidence they have “always remained visionary, fearless and selfless”!

    I am not suggesting that Zvorwadza, Masarira, etc. will not always remain selfless what am I saying is that we must build institutions, be they at party level or national level, which do not allow today’s liberators to become tomorrow’s oppressors as has happened so many times in our history.

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  4. “Indeed, President Morgan Tsvangirai is the only opposition political party leader who managed to beat Robert Mugabe in a Presidential election in March 2008,” you said.
    Well that is true but that is only half the story, Mr Gutu. Tsvangirai did beat Mugabe in the 2008 elections but was foolish enough to give back the presidency to Mugabe in a silver platter by accepting to go in the GNU. And, as if that was not foolish enough, Tsvangirai failed to get even one democratic reform implemented in five years in the GNU and thus allowed Mugabe to blatantly rig the 2013 elections and retain the presidency!

    Without doubt Morgan Tsvangirai is certainly one of the most corrupt and incompetent politicians in human history!

    The people of Zimbabwe were naïve and foolish to have trusted him and his equally corrupt and incompetent fellow MDC leaders to deliver democratic change. Tsvangirai does not have a clue what these democratic changes required are; he is too incompetent to know that. How can he ever deliver something he does not know?

    The sooner the people of Zimbabwe wake up to the reality that Tsvangirai and his MDC friends are breathtakingly corrupt and incompetent, they will never ever deliver free, fair and credible elections, the sooner the nation will get out of this hell-hole Mugabe has landed us in.

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  5. @ Gutu

    “This is the major reason why, under the NERA trajectory, the MDC has joined more than seventeen other opposition political parties in fighting for the adoption of electoral reforms before Election 2018.The MDC strongly believes that without electoral reforms being adopted, the ZanuPF regime will always continue to rig elections and thus, deny the people of Zimbabwe their constitutional right to choose a government of their choice in a free and fair election,” said Gutu.
    There are five key points to be raised here:
    1) MDC had five years during the GNU to implement all the democratic reform to ensure the 2013 elections were free, fair and credible; they failed to get even one reform implemented. Zanu PF would not have rigged the 2013 elections and we would not be messing around calling for reforms now if the reforms had been implemented.

    2) MDC-T and the other 17 opposition parties keep wittering about “electoral reforms” and yet none of them have ever given any details of even one such reform because they know aligning the existing laws to the new constitution will not be enough to deliver free, fair and credible elections. They have been warned that electoral reforms will deliver nothing but, just as they about implementing reforms during the GNU, they refuse to listen.

    3) We need to implement are structural reforms called for in the 2008 GPA as contrast to the realignment of existing electoral laws called for in NERA. MDC-T has carefully avoided the GPA reforms because it will then be forced to admit that it failed to implement these reforms during the GNU. We cannot afford to waste time on the wrong reforms just to help hide the truth that MDC leaders are corrupt and incompetent.

    4) If we agree that the reforms we need must deliver free, fair and credible elections, let us put aside the question of what these reforms are for a minute; it is self-evident that it is naïve to expect Zanu PF to implement such reforms because we all know Zanu PF will never win free and fair elections. And yet MDC and their 17 other opposition friends are out there on the street demanding that Zanu PF implement the reforms. It is clear why it was for MDC not Zanu PF to implement the reforms during the GNU.

    Post GNU, the only realistic chance to get the reforms implemented is by an independent body; some people have proposed the National Transition Authority, the name and composition of such body is not important that this point. MDC and their friends have in their usually foolishness rejected the independent body in favour of asking Zanu PF to implement the reforms!

    5) The responsibility for getting the democratic reforms implemented must now be with the people of Zimbabwe and not with Zanu PF or the opposition parties because Zanu PF has an invested interest in maintain the status quo, it is the only way the party can ever hope to stay in power. As for the MDC-T and other NERA supporters they are a confused lot who do not know their right hand from the left and it is folly for the nation to entrust its destiny in such irresponsible hands.

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