An African proverb says something to the effect that, “To keep someone in the mud one has to be the in the mud”.
NEWSDAY EDITORIAL
This appropriately describes how Zimbabwean politics is playing out at the moment; and this applies across the board.
The Zanu PF succession politics can now be described as the politics of the mud. The two main factions are now involved in a mud-wrestling contest which threatens to choke all players to death. The weakness of this mode of fighting is becoming clearer by the day; both sides are beginning to lose respect. Whether they call themselves “The Gamatox Faction” or “The Weevils Group”, they have both just become heaps of rubbish politicians.
The fight doesn’t move the country forward at this critical juncture when the people need some relief from the daily travails they have had to endure since the turn of the millennium.As the infighting intensifies, it has become clear that government ministers have abandoned their workstations to concentrate on the skulduggery that goes with their daily fights.
As if the ministers’ truancy is not bad enough, the country’s chief executive — Robert Mugabe — has fuelled the fighting by taking sides thereby pushing one faction’s back against the wall, giving it no choice but to fight back with the tenacity of a feline. And, he doesn’t seem to care that the country is grinding to halt.
His aloofness is evident from the fact that in the past few weeks he has flown out of the country at least thrice on trips that removed him from the thick of the fights he should be putting an end to. Mugabe has been to New York, Rome and recently Vienna in quick succession. During his absence the fights naturally intensify and supervision of government business is relegated to the periphery.
The situation is not helped by the fact that the opposition is also involved in its own mud fight. When opposition political parties should be putting in checks and balances into how the ruling party is running the country, it is itself involved in unwieldy fighting that has given the ruling party free rein.
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Besides continually splintering into smithereens, the MDC and its eponymously named shards have been such a let-down to the country.
In the past 15 years many in the country had placed their hope in the emergence of a robust opposition political movement. Indeed during the years of the government of national unity the country seemed to move forward a bit. Debate in Parliament was strong and refreshing; the portfolio committees superintended government business. Although these committees continue to make noises here and there, they are clearly not as effective as they were only a year and half ago.
Now there seems to be no hope that opposition politics will rise again from the mud into which it was thrown not only by electoral defeat in July 2013, but also by their own endless infighting.
The result is that the general populace has lost all faith in politics and it is not too far-fetched to say that the situation is fast becoming ripe for popular protests.
