Wednesday 11 January 2017

"Deafening call for Mugabe to step down" - it is us who need the wake-up call. By Patrick Guramatunhu

“As calls from Zimbabweans, including opposition supporters, war veterans and even some in Zanu-PF for President Robert Mugabe to step down get almost deafening, it is becoming increasingly desirable for the nonagenarian to listen to the voice of reason - for the sake of his young family,” reported the Daily News.

The truth of the matter is President Mugabe will never ever stand down because he accepts that he has failed and feels sorry for the people who have suffered all these years. It is not in the nature of a tyrant to acknowledge he has failed much less to give up power. He will have to be forced out of office kicking and screaming or dead!

Like every other public official, if asked, President Mugabe will be adamant that he has served the people of Zimbabwe well, they love him to bits and he has some unfinished business still to do even after 37 years in office. He is here to serve the nation; although he is not as strong physically and mentally as he was in the days gone by he will soldier on regardless, he is the servant of his people.

The real reason he will not step down is that absolute power is sweet and addictive and after a few years one is hooked. After 37 years of enjoying absolute power and the earthly luxuries it brings, giving it up now is simply unthinkable! It is not uncommon to hear of heroine addicts failing to pay their rent because they spent the money buying the drug. Absolute power is an even stronger addictive drug; it is no surprise that President Mugabe spent $36 million globetrotting last year whilst public hospitals under and up the country had no money to buy something as basic as painkillers.

People should not waste time asking President Mugabe to step down, that will never happen, but focus on why those within his own party Zanu PF and the opposition have failed to force him to give up power.

When Margaret Dongo dismissed Zanu PF leaders as “vakadzi vaMugabe” (Mugabe’s subservient concubines) many of us laughed and soon forgot about it. She was on to something and we were foolish not to pay heed to her warning. President Mugabe is a control freak who has surrounded himself with some of the most incompetent, corrupt and useless public leaders one can ever imagine. Zimbabwe has never held a cabinet meeting in 37 years unless Mugabe was there to chair it; is it any wonder that even now, when Mugabe can hardly stay awake for more than a few hours and weak and frail from ill health and old age, still not even one of his subservient concubines has dare to force him to give up power.

The opposition MDC had its golden opportunity to force President Mugabe out of office by making sure the 2013 elections were free, fair and credible. All Tsvangirai and his MDC friends had to do was implement the democratic reforms. The tyrant bribed the lot with the trappings of high office and the $4 million Highlands mansion for Tsvangirai, in return they kicked the reforms into the tall grass.

SADC leaders tried them best to get MDC to implement the reforms but were ignored.

Mugabe went on to blatantly rig the July 2013 elections. SADC leaders blamed MDC leaders for this accusing them of “enjoying themselves during the GNU and forgetting why they were there!” Of course, SADC leaders were right; MDC leaders are corrupt and incompetent and the sold-out during the GNU.

In the last 37 years, there have been many opportunities to end Mugabe’s corrupt and tyrannical rule; sadly, there was no competent politician in the opposition camp and even less likely within Zanu PF itself, to take advantage of one of these opportunities.

We, the electorate, have played our part in this by failing to elect quality leaders. By failing to see people like Tsvangirai and Mujuru for the corrupt and incompetent leaders they are, even with the benefit of hindsight of their past blunderings, we are telling the whole world that we are not yet ready to good governance.

Even if we managed to get President Mugabe to step down tomorrow the chances are we will replace him with either Mnangagwa, Mujuru or Tsvangirai – the nation is so desperate to see the back of Mugabe that many will consider anyone of the three a very significant improvement. We all know that each one of the three is corrupt and incompetent and that should be enough to disqualify them from ever holding public office much less hold the highest office in the land!

We are desperate for change only because we have never made the effort to think through what qualities we should be looking for is a good and competent leader and then go out and seek one.

People get the government they deserve and in Zimbabwe we certain deserve this corrupt and tyrannical Mugabe dictatorship complete with its entourage of corrupt and opposition parties. The economic misery of decades of mismanagement and corruption have caused untold human suffering and many, many deaths but clearly not enough to wake us up from our sloth-like slumber and force us to take the business of select quality leaders with seriousness and urgency the matter demands!

It is not the call for President Mugabe to step down that we want but rather the call to the electorate to stop recycling corrupt and incompetent leaders and look for quality leaders who will not only remove the dictator but replace oppressive dictatorship with the open and progressive democratic rule. If we are serious about wanting an end to the economic meltdown and democratic rule we will have to do a lot more than shout for Mugabe to step down!

4 comments:

  1. If Mugabe was to step down now we will have to appoint Mnangagwa, Mujuru or Tsvangirai president because we have no one else lined up. For the last 37 years we have failed to come up with a competent leaders and so are stuck with these three snakes! This bespeaks volumes of our failure as a nation to govern ourselves!

    We have had 37 years post independence and God knows we have made some blunders already, which common sense would dictate that we have learned something from, and have the over 2500 years of human history to call upon in a search for answers on self government. And the best we can do is remove one dictator after 38 years of corrupt and tyrannical rule with another idiot we already know in corrupt and incompetent. This is like replace one snake with another and hope the later will not bite even though we already know it is a biting cobra!

    Zimbabweans are no taking the business of electing competent leaders with the urgency the matter demands and they will pay dearly for it!

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  2. Speaking during a live interview on South African television station ANN7 on Tuesday night, Tsvangirai said the “big tent” that he has been talking about for months now was not only the best option to end President Robert Mugabe and Zanu PF’s misrule, but it was also the right vehicle to manage the power transition after the polls.

    “We all see the strategic need for it (opposition coalition) and … if we don’t succeed in having the change, we would have betrayed a lot of expectations of Zimbabweans … but it takes everyone to play a part.

    “We are very committed to ensuring that we do not betray the national sentiment about coming together and forging a coalition … we are busy looking at everything,” he said.


    Zanu PF is in power because it has perfected the art of rigging elections, without implementing the democratic reforms designed to stop the vote rigging there is no doubt that Zanu PF will rig the next elections just as they did past elections. Tsvangirai has failed to get even one reform implemented just as he did before the 2013 elections and now is wants the people to believe that as long as he can form this the grand coalition of the opposition he will win. 

    In the March 2008 Tsvangirai won 73% of the vote by Mugabe's own admission but this was reduced by ZEC to 47% after six weeks of recounting 5 million votes! Since then Mugabe has certain improved his vote rigging tactics and he has billions of dollars looted from Marange to bankroll his dirty schemes. How does forming an opposition coalition stop that vote rigging juggernaut?

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  3. Zimbabweans have been asking Mugabe to go for years now and as long as we allow him to rig elections and falsify an people's mandate to rule, he will never go!

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  4. “China is right now in no rush to throw good money into a bad situation. What will probably happen is that, to allow face to be saved all round, there will be some modest release of funds and drip-feed to selected projects,” said London based Professor Chan.
    He was commenting on whether or not Zimbabwe was going to see the revival of the mega-deal projects China agreed to finance back in 2014 but never followed up.
    Zanu PF’s ZimAsset recovery plan was dead in the water soon after the 2013 elections. President Mugabe thought after rigging the elections rigging economic recovery was going to be easy not knowing that by rigging the elections he showed the world that he has no regard for the rule of law. No one is that foolish to want to invest in a country with no rule of law.
    So by rigging the elections Mugabe shot dead ZimAsset!

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