The violent street protests
that have grip Zimbabwe these last few weeks is the people protesting the country’s
worsening economic meltdown that has seen unemployment a nauseating 90% plus,
76% of our people living in abject poverty, etc. Meanwhile mismanagement and
corruption, the root causes of the economic meltdown, are getting out of hand.
The regime has just admitted to $15 billion being looted by the Mujurus consortium
alone, according to the public statements by Ministers Kasukuwere and Jonathan
Moyo and Grace Mugabe.
The people have resorted to
street protests to draw this Mugabe regime to their economic suffering because all
peaceful means of registering their suffering have been denied them. Instead of
Mugabe listening to the people he has elected to tease them by asking them to vote
him out of office if they so wished.
“I am at the service of the
people,” Mugabe told his party supporters in Bundura last week. “If the people
say go, I will go!”
He knows that the people of Zimbabwe have no
meaningful say in the governance of the country, never did and thus lies the
heart of Zimbabwe’s problem, How do the people tell a tyrant he/she must go,
when they have no meaningful political voice!?
Mugabe has yet to hold free,
fair and credible elections as former Midlands Governor, Cephas Msipa, has
since admitted. Mugabe was soundly defeated in the March 2008 elections, the
nearest the country had come to holding free and fair elections. Mugabe
withheld the results for five weeks before he finally released the “cooked” results
giving Tsvangirai a lead but not enough to avoid a run-off.
During the next three months
of the 2008 presidential run-off, Mugabe subjected the nation to the worst
wanton violence the world has even seen in his operation “Mavhotera papi!” (Who
did you vote for!) The violence was designed to force the electorate to reverse
their earlier vote for Tsvangirai. Millions of people were forced to go into hiding,
hundreds of thousands were beaten and/or raped and over 500 were murdered in
cold blood. Tsvangirai was forced to withdraw from the race and Mugabe “won”
the one horse race!
“What was achieved by the
bullet cannot be undone by the ballot!” Mugabe boasted, encouraging his war
veterans and party youths who were the storm troopers in operation Mavhotera
papi supported by the Police, CIO and Army personal who carried out the heavy
duty operations of direction the troopers, abducting and murdering.
Even the SADC and AU election
observers renowned for turning a blind-eye and deaf ear to Africa’s culture of all
manner of vote rigging and elections violence could not pretend the 2008
run-off was free and fair and the result a true reflection of the democratic
wish of the people of Zimbabwe. SADC and AU forced Mugabe to agree to raft of
democratic reforms which, if implemented, would result in free, fair and
credible elections whose result would be a true reflection of the democratic
wishes of the people.
Sadly, not even one of the reforms
was ever implemented throughout the five years of the GNU so in the 2013 elections
Mugabe was able to blatantly rig the elections. He used the billions of dollars
he looted from Marange and Chiadzwa to bankroll a very elaborate and expensive
vote rigging scheme.
So when Mugabe told his
audience he will go if the people said so, he laughed because he knew as well
as anyone else that the people will never ever ask him to go. He has the whole
electoral processed rig so that “nothing accomplished by the bullet can be
undone by the ballot!”
Since the economic meltdown is
set to get worse and not better Mugabe can be sure of one thing the protests too
will get worse as the people cry even louder until they are heard because it is
in the nature of human being to seek redress and not to go quietly like sheep
to the slaughter. Zimbabweans have endured economic hardships and political
repression that few other nations would have tolerated but, there is no doubt,
even they have their limit.
By closing the door to
peaceful democratic change Mugabe has left the people of Zimbabwe with no other
option but to resort to violent protest. It is a great pity that the nation has
been left with no other route to ending this corrupt and repressive reign of
terror that has lasted these last 36 years now. What Mugabe and his useless
MPs, Ministers and party thugs must know is that they will be held responsible
for all the destruction of property and loss of lives that will ensue from the
violent protests.
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