LIKE all the previous Zanu PF conferences, the latest instalment was another damp squib. Not that we expected miracles in Mutare. At best, we expected things to remain bad, but our worst fears were confirmed. Bad things just got worse. Zanu PF has once again given us the middle finger in pursuit of one man’s egotistic power ambitions.
Redundant and exiled politicians, eager to do anything to please the regime they once riled, have been roped in to give advice on the best way to steal power from the people. The outcome was the adoption of the infamous Bulawayo conference resolution 1 to create eternal incumbency for President Emmerson Mnangagwa, effectively butchering and burying democracy in some cemetery in Mutare. The immoral extension of Mnangagwa’s tenure beyond the constitutional stipulation through postponing elections is baffling.
As we have stated before, it is macabre and selfish for Zanu PF to insist on banning elections to protect us and ensure stability, thereby denying over 10 million eligible voters in Zimbabwe an opportunity to choose their leaders. The mutilation of our sacred document, which was painstakingly prepared by the Constitutional Parliamentary Select Committee in 2013, for self-preservation of the incumbent, must be condemned in the strongest terms by any sober-minded citizen in both Zanu PF and the opposition.
Those who died for the one man, one vote democratic process in and outside the country during the liberation war must be turning in their graves or wherever their bones lie, seeing that many of them were never properly buried. Those who are still living must be regretting why they left the country to join the struggle to free the country and entrench justice and democracy that never was.
The sinister motive from Mutare is nothing more than self-preservation and a continuation of Zanu PF’s lucrative criminal and corrupt political enterprise, which it has enjoyed for over four decades.
It is a sad day when a self-anointed constitutionalist decides to tear the Constitution to pieces. It is worse when he calls his government a new dispensation without an iota of shame. we We thought we had seen the worst under Robert Mugabe (May his soul rest in peace) yet even at his worst he would not have stooped this low. The latest version of the unelectable Zanu PF elite, which has no respect for its citizens, has just brewed a shocker — collectively agreeing to engage in criminal inventiveness that denies Zimbabweans their democratic privileges and side-steps a basic tenet of democracy — elections. They want to rule the people without the people. The late music maestro Oliver Mtukudzi would liken this to a person who makes a whip, yet he does not have the cows. Democracy starts and ends with the people.
But what the reason for this madness besides the need to self-preserve and protect their ill-gotten loot? What has brought about election phobia? I know the head honcho, the owner of the country, had always lost to Blessing Chebundo in Kwekwe, before the latter joined Zanu PF.
However, they have continued to keep power by manipulating elections, fudging numbers, relying on the compromised electoral body and the State machinery. They may as well do the same drill for the 2028 elections and rob the servers again. What has happened? Have they just discovered that the institutions they had in their pockets cannot be relied upon forever to continue to do their bidding, hence the attempt to avoid elections by all means necessary?
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Besides the brazen attempt to butcher democracy, the Mutare conference has another resolution — to formally declare September 15 Munhumutapa Day in honour of the President’s birthday. How can a day meant to celebrate a kingdom end up celebrating an individual? Unless, of course, the individual is the owner of the very kingdom being celebrated. It has become urgent that the country, or whatever is left of it, needs to be protected from our insatiable leadership, who have turned the people’s democratic project into their family farm, another Animal Farm.
