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Martin Stobart
ONE would have thought that with Zanu-PF having posted a resounding victory in the 31 July harmonised elections, the party’s detractors such as the myriad NGOs and MDC-T especially, would zip up and accept defeat with humility. But no, their penchant for cavilling is ever so strong. The fact is, though, that Zanu-PF has won these elections and will rule Zimbabwe for the next five years. As for the opposition it is all over for the shouting. The results are irreversible come hell or high water.
Their obsession with the state of the voters’ roll is kindergarten stuff. So is the gripe about the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission (Zec). Justice Rita Makarau, the Zec head, put it succinctly after the elections: “The voters’ roll does not vote. It is the electorate, the registered voters, who cast the ballot no one else decides for us.”
Sadc, AU, church organisations, the NGOs and the lot can only observe. That is the long and short of their role in a democratic election such as the just-ended 31 July 2013 election.
Pre-election alliances between and among organisations do not guarantee anyone a victory. Only cowards and I mean those politicians and their organisations who do not have sound and credible manifestos to sell to the electorate, and who become desperate, resort to entering into these sorts of alliances.
They don’t go to the people to sell their policies. They then resort to making cacophonous and eardrum rupturing noises as produced by ill-tuned cymbals. Removing Cde Robert Mugabe and Zanu-PF from office is not a manifesto nor is it a policy.
MDC-T leader Morgan Tsvangirai spent his five –year term of office, not in his office but being a perpetual guest of Sadc, the US and the EU and generally running around like a headless fowl. He and his party failed to consolidate the opportunity presented to him by being part of the inclusive government, albeit having got into it through the back door.
This is unlike the politically experienced and organised Zanu-PF whose members, soon after the formation of the inclusive government, went into serious business of ensuring the party bounced back into power not as a partner in government but as the ruling party. MDC-T and its allies are complaining about the number of people who intended to vote but were turned away.
Well, while I am not a qualified political analyst I can quite easily and confidently aver that my practical experience will bear me out when I postulate that the said people never ever intended to vote in the first place. They were bussed in big numbers by MDC-T to polling station so that they could be turned away in order to authenticate and validate the party’s false allegations thereby undermining the ability of Zec to conduct a credible election. These were bogus voters.
One would be forgiven for asking if these people were registered at all in the first place. I should elaborate on the post 2008 scenarios. Barely two years down the line into the inclusive government term, credible pollsters began to predict, albeit cautiously, a victory for Zanu-PF come 2013.
MDC-T and its NGO allies scoffed at and treated the predictions with undeserved contempt and adopted a slip-shod approach. Tsvangirai continued to globe-trot sourcing funds to consummate his divorce and to purchase an up-market house whose renovations alone, according to media reports, is in excess of the cost price.
This is hardly the way a leader of the people should behave. Now we hear Roy Bennett, the former MDC-T treasurer-general who is holed up somewhere in South Africa saying his party’s supporters should protest on the streets against the election results. This is typical of racists who think that Africans are moronic idiots who cannot think for themselves.
May be he is correct only to the extent that he is referring to the Africans in his party. I suppose even they are much wiser than he mistakenly thinks they are.
The resounding victory by Zanu-PF is unambiguously and unequivocally a clear message to the MDC-T (never mind its smaller scions) that its demise is nigh. The organisation’s popularity has always been artificial in the same way that its very existence has been fictitious. Scribes, Sifelani Tsiko and Lincoln Towindo in their opinion piece in Chronicle recently gave the paper’s readers an incisive analysis and well researched analysis of Tsvangirai and his MDC-T.
The party, collectively, went into the election as (external) auditors expressly to audit Zec forgetting that elections are won by campaigning and selling your programmes to the electorate. Complaining and fault-finding has never won and can never win an election.
Indeed the MDC-T virginity has been deflowered and consequently it now resembles a weak, old bicycle that no self-respecting suitor takes seriously.
One could also say that the party has become the proverbial Biblical harlot. In fact, MDC-T has always been a harlot if we look at its composition and the reasons and purposes of its founding. When it entered the inclusive government, MDC-T went to sleep. As it is the party is dazed with losing the elections.
Going to court won’t alter the outcome of the election one iota although we acknowledge the fact that it is every Zimbabwean’s inalienable constitutional right to seek redress in a court of law if they feel aggrieved. Yet rational people also agree that MDC-T as a party has abused this fundamental human right.
The 31 July harmonised elections should be accepted for what they are that Zanu-PF has recaptured or reclaimed its niche and dominance in the politics of Zimbabwe. Anyone who held, or still holds, a contrary view is being delusional to say the least.
Zimbabwe is not and will never be a banana republic as long as Zanu-PF is in power. Quite frankly, no rational person can gainsay the fact that Zanu-PF, as a partner in the inclusive government played its part to the fullest extent possible under the circumstances especially given the calibre of some of its partners singling out in particular the MDC-T.
This writer is aware that there are some Sadc leaders whose stance and attitude over President Mugabe are not inimical to but clearly anti-Cde Robert Mugabe and, by extension, anti-Zanu-PF as well. The 2013 harmonised elections have come and gone, clearly and fully indicating that we have managed, as a nation to solve our internal shortcomings.
No-one, no Sadc leader, should detract from this reality, and should I say achievement. Zanu-PF won the elections. What else should Zanu-PF do to satisfy its detractors? Indeed how long should the MDC–T be allowed to hold Zimbabwe to ransom? There is an English saying to the effect that when the going gets tough only the tough get going.
Hence, I have said in this piece that from 2008 when the inclusive government was inaugurated Zanu-PF notched up gear upon gear while the MDC-T slept or believed that its funders would do the work for it.
After the 2008 elections MDC-T became complacent. The party put itself in a false comfort zone and did not even bother to conduct a postmortem. This is unlike Zanu-PF whose “scalpel” dissected the party to find out what might have gone wrong in the elections. That is what is called skill, and that comes with experience over time as opposed to overnight.
When Tsvangirai, Bennett and others incite “people” to demonstrate I begin to wonder and ask myself the pertinent question; “Which and what people since the just-ended harmonised election revealed that MDC-T has no support base to speak of by comparison with Zanu-PF’s?”
The people of Zimbabwe deserve a break from the 13 years madhouse politics of MDC-T. You don’t enter into an election as if you are getting into a bed laid out with crispy and sweet-smelling linen, which is what is the MDC-T seems to have done going into the 2013 election.
In fact from the start, MDC-T knew pretty well that they were headed for a humiliating and crushing defeat at the hands of Zanu-PF hence they proceeded to make things difficult for Zec. If MDC-T didn’t know their fate at the polls then they shouldn’t be in politics in the first place.
MDC-T is a gutter street organisation. These MDC-T guys are a bunch of nondescript politicians. The likes of Douglas Mwonzora and Tendai Biti spent a glorious five years insulting President Mugabe, itself an unAfrican practice if ever there was one under the blue sky. The MDC-T as a political party is a nuisance at best and a liability at worst.
The idea of an eruption in the streets as urged by Bennett and Tsvangirai does not sell among Zimbabweans. Bennett especially, cannot participate in any confrontation if it were to happen as he is living in comfort in South Africa thanks to the money he and his forbearers stashed away by exploiting Africans for nearly a century.
Now he has the effrontery to incite Zimbabweans to rise against their own kith and kin. To Mwonzora and Biti how does it feel like to lick one’s own wounds?
Online Reporter