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Tomorrow we all go out and vote, and between us we choose our President, our Parliament and our local council, so we all need to vote calmly and wisely.
While there has been a lot of electioneering, the choice when we come down to political parties is more limited to those who have nominated a Presidential candidate and at least enough Parliamentary candidates to obtain a majority, and enough local authority candidates to take control of the urban and rural councils.
There are a number of independent candidates at all levels, but between them they cannot form a Government, although they can give their backers a voice.
When it comes down to the parties that could form a Government if they got the backing there are just the choices we have been facing, under a variety of names, for more than 20 years: the governing Zanu PF and the groups arising from the old MDC, with the same faces if not the same party names. In fact the choices are very similar to what we faced five years ago.
But this time we do not have to make any guesses of whether promises and manifestos will be kept, since we can actually look at what political leaders have done, both in Zanu PF and in the ranks of the MDC and CCC.
The Parliamentary majority throughout the Second Republic has been Zanu PF, although that party has done a lot to involve the opposition when it comes to law making, especially in making important changes and reforms to our law, and there has been a surprising amount of consensus as a result, not all the time, but far more often than in the past.
The central Government has been a Zanu PF Government, led by President Mnangagwa. The governing record cannot be shared. It is out there in the open. But most urban authorities have been led by the CCC-MDC groups, and again what has been done and has not been done cannot be shared.
Under Zimbabwean law, municipalities, which include the city councils, operate largely independently from the central government and have full powers to do so.
So the fact that they have been run for the past five years, in fact the past 20, by political groups in opposition to the central Government does not matter. Municipal councils are supposed to raise their own finance through rates and other fees and traditionally there are almost no links between the central and municipal authorities.
So voters are in the fortunate position that they can examine the track records of both main political groupings, which will give them a solid basis to compare the two since what they have done and how they have performed will obviously have a bearing on what they will do in the next five years and how they are likely to perform.
The contest does, in light of performance, seem exceptionally unequal. The central Government has performed well spinning the country into fast economic growth, the fastest in Southern Africa, with huge gains in the value of production in agriculture and mining especially, a bit more than four-fold in farm output and as much as seven-fold in mining output over the past four years.
More importantly that boost in farm output has spread a lot of money across well over a million households in rural areas, in turn creating the huge new market that will accelerate industrial growth, already good, but not yet in the farm and mine league.
The central Government has also been building infrastructure at the fastest rate seen in Zimbabwean history as it rebuilds roads, builds dams, opens up more routes, and at the village level is drilling 35 000 boreholes, and almost every week sees a rural district council, and most of these have Zanu PF majorities, commissioning a new clinic, a new classroom block, or something similar after gaining maximum output from devolution transfers from the central government through community involvement.
After the central Government, Harare is the second largest authority in Zimbabwe with the area under the city council holding about 10 percent of the national population and the metropolitan province being home to around 16 percent of the population. And the record of the last five years is there for everyone to see.
If the CCC council had been doing its job at the same speed as the Government we could have seen over the last five years say 10 percent of the Morton Jaffray Waterworks rehabilitated each year, so by now there would be twice as much drinking water; a major programme of repairing and replacing water mains, so a lot more houses had water in the taps; five new garbage trucks bought each year, so there would now be more than enough to collect all the rubbish; a new clinic and new school built each year in the new suburbs, so no one would have to walk very far for medical care or education and some modest, but respectable markets built around the city centre so vendors had something better than a pavement to display their wares.
It seems a simple, obvious and achievable five-year programme, but it did not happen.
All the councillors appear to have been doing is giving each other stands and the senior officials raising the bail they need to stay out of remand prison. We need to remember that devolution funds go to big cities as well as rural district councils, so extra money was available, along with the high rates the city charges.
We have yet to see the list of what Harare City Council spends its devolution money on. The opposition like to talk about change, and in the areas they control there has been change, but for the worse which is not really the change we want.
About the only major advances in Harare in the past couple of years has been the major roads programme that has seen the major roads rebuilt or fixed, with a growing dent made in the suburban side roads, and now a borehole drilling programme in progress in the many suburbs with almost nothing from Morton Jaffray so people do not have to spend vast sums buying water from private borehole owners.
Both of those programmes are emergency programmes launched by the ever more efficient and caring central Government which has been forced to step in.
So voters can see what has been done by both the central Government under President Mnangagwa and Zanu PF, and by the largely independent local authorities under the CCC, and this explains why the President has used the double record in his electioneering and why the CCC has maintained total silence on both topics.
As a newspaper we report on what is happening, and a good slice of our staff live in Harare metropolitan, but go on assignment around the country, so we can compare and contrast, as the examination questions put it.
For that reason, and purely on the record of Zanu PF and the MDC-CCC opposition where it was in power, we endorse the Zanu PF ticket and President Mnangagwa for his second and last term.
Online Reporter