The bane of electioneering and sloganeering
Chamisa has seen that MDC-T cannot and will not match the ZANU-PF election machinery, and that is why he is coming under the banner of an alliance with other inadequate political outfits with no chance whatsoever of ever winning an election in Zimbabwe. B
MARTIN Luther King Jnr once said about stupidity: “Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.”
From what we have seen so far in the campaign trail leading to Election 2018, one could be forgiven for suggesting that in politics stupidity is more of a virtue than a handicap, and we are talking of collective stupidity here; that of the leader and the led.
We have heard harebrained utterances ranging from infantile promises to the ludicrous.
We now know that neither Donald Trump nor anyone from his administration ever promised any Zimbabwean bailout money to the tune of $15 billion, yet our people were made to cheer for that nonsense at a campaign rally.
We cannot be as stupid as to believe that anyone we will choose to be our President in 2018 will within their constitutional mandate be able to link Harare and Bulawayo with bullet train rail services, given that it costs about $5.4 million per kilometre in construction costs to build bullet train infrastructure, let alone factoring the cost of the bullet trains themselves.
Yet our people were made to ululate over such a promise.
Apologists of the man who made the silly promises equate him to the dreaming Joseph of the biblical fame. But Joseph was a God seeker, not a vote seeker.
Our trusting villagers in Murehwa are probably looking forward to an airport next to Murehwa Centre, and a cargo plane that will be ferrying their farm produce to international destinations right from their village area, thanks to promises from one of our aspiring presidential candidates.
Well, the man can lay claim to anything he may so wish; like declaring credit for revolutionising Rwanda’s ICT by mere shaking of that country’s President’s hand at some international gathering.
He even had the temerity to produce the handshake pictures to bolster his claim.
It appears like the louder the sloganeering and the singing the greater the vote mobilisation, and the more ludicrous the promises.
The academic question in this election is can the MDC Alliance win this coming election, not will it win? Of course it will not win. The Harare march we saw on June 5 on claimed electoral reforms is a mere cry by the Alliance for a credible, free and fair election defeat; and this writer does not see ZANU-PF failing to deliver on that.
Come July 30, the defeat will be delivered in a free, fair and credible manner acceptable to all.
This election is about ZANU PF under Mnangagwa and the MDC-T under Chamisa.
Chamisa has seen that MDC-T cannot and will not match the ZANU-PF election machinery, and that is why he is coming under the banner of an alliance with other inadequate political outfits with no chance whatsoever of ever winning an election in Zimbabwe.
But six weak parties add up to six weak parties the way six zeroes add up to nothing, but six zeroes.
What we see today is ED Mnangagwa coming into this election in the name of an ideologically reformed ZANU-PF, an investor-friendly political outfit ready to engage investment wheels of this world.
On the other hand, the MDC Alliance believes it has found impetus in the person of Nelson Chamisa.
Does Chamisa have the individual clout to bring down the monstrous institutional might of ZANU PF?
Virtually the MDC-T as a party is a silent factor in this election, yet the Alliance is a creature that hardly has an identity among Zimbabwean voters.
There are no structures at all in the Alliance, except an agreement on the presidential candidate.
Tendai Biti, Elias Mudzuri, Agrippa Mutambara and Welshman all hope to deputise Chamisa in the unlikely event that he wins the election, yet Chamisa himself cannot tell who is second in charge in the alliance; for fear of deadly reprisals.
It is easy to isolate Mnangagwa from ZANU PF and to start imagining a trouncing victory over him in an election: as Chamisa is certainly doing; but it is a completely different thing to face a Zanu-PF Presidential candidate in an election like we are having on July 30.
ED has an illustrious political career to his name, but he is coming into election 2018, not as a messiah, but as the front face of a reformed ZANU-PF whose only mandate is to open Zimbabwe for business with the rest of the world.
In other words, Mnangagwa is powered by the institutional might of ZANU-PF, while Chamisa believes he powers the MDC Alliance by his perceived charisma and fluency.
ED Mnangagwa is a very patient and resilient silent revolutionary whose record has now become apparent.
Surely he did not survive the deadly plotting from former president Robert Mugabe and his all marauding rapacious wife so he could be defeated by a mere opportunist whose stolen mandate was necessitated by the tragedy of death on the part of Morgan Tsvangirai.
I am afraid the Alliance and Chamisa are where ED wants them to be, and I can only imagine what awaits the excitable novices in the coming weeks.
This is not propaganda to prop Mnangagwa, but sheer analytical observation on events obtaining at the moment, especially in regards to the new democratic space in the country.
We know that the MDC-T under Tsvangirai imploded under factionalism, and in the process expelled many sitting MPs from Parliament, necessitating unnecessary by-elections that were largely won by ZANU-PF after the MDC chickened out of the races fearing further humiliation by ZANU-PF, after the humiliating trouncing in Election 2013.
Of course, we were told at the time that the MDC-T was not going to legitimise “stolen elections” by participating in these by-elections.
We knew at the time that come Election 2018, the MDC-T would overrule its boycott mantra and head straight for the election, and that is exactly what has happened, despite all the bravado that there will be no election until Chamisa and his friends say so.
I heard Chamisa saying ZEC cannot hold an election unless he agrees, and I did not know whether to laugh or to feel sorry.
The truth is Chamisa is too ambitious to boycott this election, and even if he were principled enough to follow up on his threats, the election would proceed without him; and he and his friends would do absolutely nothing about it, except sliding into political oblivion.
We need politicians whose lives are committed to the realisation of defined convictions.
Instead, we have this unfortunate reality where any fool with eloquence of speech and a voice can pull it through the electoral process.
We have for a long time rewarded mediocrity to our own detriment.
We have for long confused cheap populism for revolution and this needed to stop. Mnangagwa has departed from the cheap revolutionary rhetoric of yesteryear to pragmatic engagement with the world so Zimbabwe can be back in business again.
For long our elections have been premised on slander and populism; and we allowed in the past the sad prevailing of irrationality, gullibility, naivety and plain stupidity in our politics.
July 30 is only seven weeks away, and we are heading into an election that will define an end to the era of gross economic deprivation.
It is easier to run an opposition than government, yet our opposition is currently more chaotic than the ruling party.
It is hard to see how a political outfit so chaotic can count itself capable of running an entire country.
The electorate has to choose between the completion of work in progress by ED Mnangagwa and the fanciful promises by one Chamisa; who is dismally failing to stamp authority within his faction of the feuding MDC-T, if the chaos in the primary elections is anything to go by.
For the first time since 2000, we are having an election that will surely come with transformation for the voter.
Indeed the transformation has already started with the many investment deals that have already been lined up for implementation.
We can only go forward now, not backwards again.
Gone are the Zhuwao-Kasukuwere days where politicians would openly brag about partisan utilisation of national resources for vote-buying; those days of superior political beings who enjoyed immunity from political competition or contestation.
Then we used to be told that contesting certain politicians constituted the crime of “undermining the party,” and at one time we were even told investigating a thieving Jonathan Moyo amounted to “a national security threat.”
Now all that is behind us as ZANU-PF goes into this election with candidates that were democratically elected through primary elections within the party, although some of them stand on contested results.
On the other hand we have a blinkered opposition whose idea of open-mindedness is tantamount to having brains falling out of the skull.
Our opposition politicians believe the electorate should all turn up and vote for opposition candidates purely on the basis of this hate they have for their political opponents in Zanu-PF.
It is a grave mistake to believe that there is a contagious hate for ZANU-PF across Zimbabwe, and it is equally harebrained to hope delusions of grandeur are transformable into hard reality.
There is no revolution without material transformation — the kind of transformation that resulted in us seeing the mass construction of schools, clinics, dams, roads and the rapid urbanisation drive in the aftermath of national independence.
We cannot meaningfully deride the shortcomings of Zanu-PF today without acknowledging the party’s moments of success in the past.
This is something our opposition will need to learn fast. It is simply preposterous to say Zimbabwe has been a sorry state for the past 38 years. We started off among the best of the best in Africa, and we stayed at the top for almost two decades. We are still among the best in terms of human resources, and there is nothing that can take away that.