Zim's salvation will not come from uniting a corrupt opposition but from the awakening of a laid-back electorate! by Wilbert Mukori

Zimbabweans “are resilient” Foreign Affairs Minister Simbarashe Mumbengegwi told SADC leaders last August in Victoria Falls. He was explaining why Zimbabweans had never protested against the regime in the face of all the suffering, trial and tribulations the ordinary people have had to endure with even worse to come. Resilient my foot!

 

Zimbabweans have never protested because we a very laissez-faire, laid-back and light-out people. Things that would outrage and steer other people into action demanding answers from those responsible do not make even a ripple in our glass surface of tranquillity; to us they are all water off a duck’s back!

 

Where else in the world would unemployment be allowed to soar to 80% plus and stay there for over decade and a half now and yet no one has really said anything about it. Even on Labour's Day, only a handful of people turned up to show they are concerned.

Zanu PF went crazy with its money-making project, printing more and more paper money of higher and higher denominator. Zimbabwe became the only nation in the whole world where everyone was not a millionaire but multi trillionaire and yet we were all as poor as church mouse. It was all worthless paper money; inflation peaked at 500 billion per cent, a world record, wiping out people's life savings and businesses. And yet, other than the odd scuffle at the bank when a few people vented their frustration at being told they could not withdraw more than 20 US cents or so a day which was a very common practice, no one ever protested.  

After the discovery of diamonds in 2006 in Marange and Chiadzwa valued at $800 billion, where Saudi Arabia has oil we have diamonds, the nation’s economy should have picked up considerably and with it people’s standard of living. Instead of the diamonds being a blessing they have become a curse.

 

President Mugabe and his cronies are pocketing all the profits from Marange and Chiadzwa diamonds. During the GNU the nation got $400 million, even then it was half of what the then Minister of Finance, Tendai Biti, expected. Since the rigged July 2013 elections which saw President Mugabe and his Zanu PF return to power with a very comfortable majority; the revenue from Marange and Chiadzwa has since dried up completely. The looting and plunder has gone into overdrive, in September last years the Russians joined in the looting; the ruling elite and their foreign partners are making fortunes it is just that the ordinary Zimbabweans are getting none of it.

 

In 2012 President Mugabe reportedly pocketed $2 billion according to Partnership Africa, Canada. No doubt some of the looted wealth was used to bribe MDC leaders so they would kick the GPA democratic reforms into the tall grass, to pay Nikuv to corrupt the voters roll, to pay the cost for bussing the hired crowd to Zanu PF rallies and multiple voters on voting day, etc.

 

So instead of the diamond bounty giving the people the economic leg up it has instead given Mugabe and Zanu PF the source of funds to pay for their no regime change agenda.

 

Of course there is no Zimbabwean out there who can swear they do not know corrupt is a serious problem, the nation is being rob blind in broad day light, especially in Marange and Chiadzwa and yet many people pretend they do not know. It is easier to pretend not to have noticed, it makes it easier to justify why one has said or done nothing about all this looting and plunder!

There is odd occasion when the Zimbabwean people have been rouse out of their comatose slumber in 2008, for example, when the economic hardship forced the people to go and vote. They wanted democratic change but instead of staying awake and make sure that man, Tsvangirai, they had given the electoral mandate to deliver the change carried out the task; they switched-off just days after the elections.

 

With no one supervising them, Tsvangirai and his MDC friends soon forgot where they were in the GNU and so not even one reform was implemented and the golden opportunity to end the Zanu PF dictatorship was lost.

 

Not even the worsening economic meltdown of the last two years, the by-product of three and half decades of gross mismanagement and rampant corruptions, has raffled the feathers of the laid-back Zimbabweans. With unemployment 80% plus for over 16 years now many people have used up all their fat reserves they have none left; millions now live in abject poverty, they are so poor they cannot afford even one decent meal a day.

Where there is poverty and hunger, disease and death are there too! People are dying like flies. Zimbabweans are showing just how “resilient” they are by quietly burying their died, go back home and continue to suffer in silence whilst they wait for their turn to die!

 

One of the favourite pass-time occupations of the laissez-faire, laid-back and lights-out Zimbabwe electorate is complaining why the country’s fragmented corrupt and incompetent opposition has failed to unity. They are just doing what they do best; pretend they cannot see that the opposition is not just fragmented but, worse than that, they are corrupt and incompetent. If they stopped pretending they will be forced to do something about getting quality opposition leaders; they are too lazy to do that, they will be breaking tradition with their laissez-faire disposition and that is sacrilege.

 

Zimbabweans have done nothing to protest the complete collapse of the nation’s economy, they are starving in the Garden of Eden, not because they love suffering or they are resilient; on the contrary they are suffering and feel the pain like anyone else and they are now dying of poverty and hunger. They have never protested about the criminal waste of the nation’s human and material resources because they are a laid-back people who would rather suffer and die in silence than protest against this man-made tragedy.

 

Unless the people snap out of this comatose slumber Zimbabwe will never get out of the hell-on-earth mess Mugabe’s misrule has landed us in. A healthy and functioning democracy, a government by the people, demands an attentive electorate with the courage to hold the leaders to account and not a laid-back one who will habitually let the evils of incompetence, corruption and downright betrayal go unnoticed.

 

Zimbabwe’s salvation is not going to come out of uniting a corrupt and incompetent opposition but from a populous awakened from their laissez-faire slumber!