“Zanu-PF has retained the Zaka East parliamentary
seat after its candidate Clemence Chiduwa polled 7 119 votes to romp to a
landslide victory in a by election held on Saturday,” reported Zimeye.
“He swept to victory with a wide margin as his
nearest rival Mr Derick Charamba of MDC Alliance came second with 1518 votes.”
To a visitor from Mars, familiar with the immediate
economic and political reality in Zimbabwe, this Zanu PF landslide victory does
not make any sense.
Zimbabwe’s economy is in total meltdown;
unemployment is a nauseating 90%; basic services such as health care and supply
of clean running water have all but completely collapsed; the country is
suffering from serious shortages of fuel, electricity, medicine, cash, foreign
currency; inflation is 500% and rising; etc. ¾ of the population now live in
abject poverty; making do on US$30 or less per month in a country with a
poverty datum line drawn at US$ 650 per month. Surely the voters would be
clamouring for meaningful political change.
Our Martian visitor would have been left in no
doubt that ordinary Zimbabweans are sick to their back teeth of Zanu PF and are
desperate for change if he/she attended the late Robert Gabriel Mugabe’s funeral
service a week ago. The National Stadium was eerily empty.
Mugabe was the founding father of the Zanu PF
dictatorship and was top dog for 37 years of the last 39 years. The party had
picked the National Stadium, for his funeral service confident the people of
Zimbabwe would turnout in their tens of thousands to honour the “iconic
liberation hero”, as Mnangagwa called Mugabe in his eulogy. Mugabe was a
corrupt, incompetent and ruthless tyrant, not a hero at all, and the ordinary
Zimbabweans voted with the feet – stayed away from his funeral.
So, yes, the Martian visitor will be rightly surprised
Zanu PF won the Zanu PF bye-election resoundingly! There is a very simple
reason why this happened – these elections were not free, fair and credible.
“Observers widely reported on efforts to undermine
the free expression of the will of electors, through inducements, intimidation
and coercion against prospective voters to try to ensure a vote in favour of
the ruling party,” stated the EU Zimbabwe (2018) Election Mission final report.
“Such practices also included direct threats of
violence, pressure on people to attend rallies, partisan actions by traditional
leaders, collection of voter registration slips and other measures to undermine
confidence in the secrecy of the vote, manipulation of food aid and
agricultural programmes and other misuses of state resources.”
The Martian visitor should know that the rural
voters are the poorest segment of Zimbabwe society and therefore most dependent
on government aid and under the thumb the traditional leaders and party thugs
and therefore the target of the regime’s political machinations. Our visitor
should know that Zimbabwe is in the middle of one of the worst food shortages
with 80% of the rural population facing starvation. Zaka East is a rural constituency
and one of those certain to need food aid.
The people in Zaka East voted for Zanu PF or they
risked starvation and worse.
In 2008 Zimbabweans voted for the MDC opposition in
the March vote and Zanu PF cooked the result to deny MDC victory and then used wanton
violence to force the people to vote for Mugabe in the presidential run-off.
“If the elections are a farce with Zanu PF free to
use all manner of dirty tricks to rig the elections, then why the opposition
participating and giving the process some democratic semblance?” our Martian
visitor may well ask.
The answer to that is; the opposition, especially MDC,
are now working in cahoots with Zanu PF. During the 2008 to 2013 GNU, MDC
leaders had the golden opportunity to implement the democratic reforms designed
to dismantle the Zanu PF dictatorship. Mugabe bribed them with the trapping of
high office and they forgot about the reforms. They failed to implement even one
reform in five years.
Ever since the GNU MDC leaders have participated in
elections regardless how flawed and illegal the process happened to be. They
knew Zanu PF would give away a few gravy-train seats and a share of the cash paid
out from the Political Party Finance Act to entice the opposition to
participate and these are the scraps the opposition are after.
MDC has just received a fat cheque of $3.4 million
for this financial year of which Nelson Chamisa, as leader of the party, will
get $680 000.
It is clear that MDC are happy with the present
political arrangement and will not the pushing for any meaningful reforms and
upset the apple cart.
At the top of the Zanu PF Zaka East candidate poster
was the picture of Mnangagwa with the caption “#ED Pfee 2023”, proof the party
is already campaigning for the 2023 elections. With no meaningful reforms in
place, Zanu PF will still blatantly rig the elections and still get away with
it because MDC will participate regardless how flawed the process.
No comments:
Post a Comment