No-regime-change elecvtions are stingless bees - they will never drive badger tyrant out of office. By Nomusa Garikai

“ANC Secretary General, Gwede Mantashe, has once again warned against western powers' apparent attempts at destabilising former liberation movements in Southern Africa,” ENCA reported. 

 

“Mantashe who recently attended a meeting in Zimbabwe, says the movements have become powerful governments.”

 

On the contrary Secretary General Mantashe, liberation movements came into power on a wave of public good-will as the bodies that brought about black majority rule. But once in government movements soon found that promising the people economic prosperity was one thing delivering on that promise was a different thing.

 

After decades of being promised clean running water, employment opportunities, better housing, etc., etc. the people, naturally, soon disillusioned with the movement’s leaders. It is said one can fool someone about the cooking oil used in their dish but not so about hot chili! The people know when they are suffering and no amount of cheap propaganda or empty slogans will fill an empty stomach!

 

There is nothing like power, corrupt and greed to transforms a benevolent liberator into a ruthless selfish thug. Power and looted wealth not only distract the leaders from the set task of uplifting the masses from poverty but worse still in their search for absolute power the leaders fail to see right from wrong and are transformed into monsters.

 

President Mugabe has squandered $1 million on his birthday party, $5 million on his daughter’s wedding, $2 billion on his Blue Roof mansion;  a few weeks ago his daughter went to the Far East to have her baby at the cost of $6 million plus, etc.; all paid from public funds, for example. Meanwhile the maternity ward at Chiredzi General Hospital serving the needs of hundreds of thousands of ordinary Zimbabweans was condemned as “unsafe” by the regime’s own Minister of Health. The ward’s one room was built by the white regime in 1967 and is in a deplorable state due to decades of poor funding.

 

President Mugabe admitted that $15 billion of the diamond revenue from Marange was looted.

 

The ruling elite’s insatiable greed has allowed the economic gap between them and povo to grow into an unbridgeable chasm!

 

“As we mobilise our people, we must say be vigilant. You must see through anarchy and people who are out there in a programme of regime change. We are aware of the meetings taking place regularly at the American embassy,” Mantashe told thousands of ANC supporters at the Union Buildings in Pretoria recently.

 

“Those meetings in the American embassy are about nothing else other than mobilisation for regime change. We’re aware of a programme that takes young people to the United States for six weeks, bring them back and plant them everywhere in the campuses and everywhere.”

 

The mentality of failed liberation movement leaders is the same be they ANC members in SA or Zanu PF in Zimbabwe. For all their pretenses of accepting multi-party democracy, free and fair elections, etc.; deep down they are tyrannical autocrats determined to impose their de facto one-party dictatorship even if means riding roughshod over the people’s freedoms and human rights – the very things their liberation movement was supposedly set out to accomplish!

 

ANC Secretary General Mantashe, like Zimbabwe’s Zanu PF leader Robert Mugabe, accept free and fair elections on the one condition that the said elections do not produce regime change. Of course this is an oxymoron; how can the elections free if the voters or the process produces a predetermined result!

 

What makes Zanu PF and now ANC’s accusing that the West is pushing for regime change so hollow and ironic is that Western nations have wholeheartedly embraced free and fair democratic elections, they have had regular regime change and, here is the twist that neither Zanu PF nor ANC can ever deny, they have benefited from it greatly.  

 

The truth is power, more so absolute power, has transformer the benevolent leader into the marauding honey badger. To have elections with no meaningful prospect of regime change is to have a bee without a sting; the stingless bees have as much chance of driving the marauding honey badger out of the hive as the voters have of removing a corrupt tyrant from office!