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Joice Mujuru

Joram Nyathi : Spectrum

WE are back in the season the opposition in this country seems to love the most: it’s election time and they have their script done and rehearsed. Grand coalition. Mugabe must go. Electoral reform. ZEC bias. Ghost voters. Political violence. Vote rigging; vote buying. Closed airwaves. Western election observers. The only new addition to this litany is the biometric voters’ roll.The rest is stale song bound to produce a repeat: sure defeat. The private media have outdone themselves trying to nurse the pre-term coalition baby to fitness for the “much-anticipated, make-or-break, watershed, seismic” elections to consign Zanu-PF into the “dustbin of history”.

And finally they see a ray of light.

Zimbabwe People First lost its first foray into the electoral contest to Zanu-PF in Bikita West at the weekend.

That should tame its leader Dr Joice Mujuru when she next engages our tried and tested man of the trenches, Morgan Tsvangirai, in coalition talks. We wait to see the manifesto which comes out of the coalition talks. For that is where Zanu-PF beats them, individually or collectively.

People want something tangible, something to hold on to. Somehow the United States of America has just taught the world that voters don’t eat democracy, the elitist opium our opposition repeatedly try to feed the voters without thinking.

Donald Trump almost single-handedly beat both establishment parties, not by wasting time preaching democracy, which is perhaps taken for granted among the elite, but by going back to the basics of food and drink — jobs. (Resources ownership is largely a settled matter in the developed world, which is why they pretend it should be the same in Africa in general and Zimbabwe in particular, even as their kith and kin refuse to surrender the land.)

Whichever way one wants to look at it, whether it’s immigrants, the great wall between America and Mexico, trade agreements, China and its currency or American companies opening new plants in cheap foreign markets, at the centre of it all was the matter of jobs for the American people.

That is the nearest Zimbabwe’s inept opposition can come to talking to Zimbabweans: if they can come up with a manifesto which clearly indicates how they want to complement Zanu-PF’s empowerment policies, not uproot them.

President-Trump

That is why any political party which bases its campaign on consigning Zanu-PF to the dustbin of history needs to think again.

You cannot talk of consigning Zanu-PF to the dustbin of history without condemning wholesale the land reform programme and its black economic empowerment policies.

That is Zanu-PF history and its legacy. It is the people’s heritage and their primary birthright. Like in every movement, we cannot deny that there is rampant corruption in the country. (Not even the opposition or civic society can claim to be clean.)

Where Zanu-PF must solely take the blame is giving free reign to the scourge. It simply has refused to fight corruption. It should be at the forefront in that fight as the governing party.

There is no defence.

But that failure to root out the rotten apples doesn’t distract from the moral justification or soundness of the principle informing its economic empowerment policies.

People may choose to disagree with Donald Trump, but Americans love him when he insists on “America first”.

That’s the same sensibility which led to the triumph of the Brexit vote in the not-so-united United Kingdom.

The Zanu-PF Government’s empowerment policies seek to put Zimbabweans first. Those policies should have been followed by appropriate skills training and availability of resources. But often where efforts have been made to deliver such resources, the same rotten apples have looted them, knowing, if one may reverse Obama’s favourite phrase, that there will be no consequences.

At party level, Zanu-PF can easily redeem itself by demonstrating that there are consequences to indiscipline — manifest in ongoing internal squabbles and factional disputes which distract from the national agenda; consequences to theft or abuse of state resources, to incompetence, to abuse of public office.

In short, Zanu-PF can redeem itself by demonstrating that there are severe consequences to corruption regardless of one’s station in society or political status.

It doesn’t need to apologise for what is morally right.

Zimbabwe’s natural resources must belong to and benefit Zimbabweans first. On that, beside the stains of corruption, Zanu-PF has delivered, and Dr Mujuru knows that.

So what happened in Bikita West?

Zanu-PF candidate Beauty Chabaya polled over 13 000 against Mujuru’s candidate, Kudakwashe Gopo, who trailed at a distant 2 453. Both parties are making extravagant claims to explain their performances, which is dangerous.

Zanu-PF should not think it is too beautiful to lose.

There is work to be done.

Dr Mujuru must feel deflated. She went into the election believing her liberation war credentials would bring the war veterans vote in Masvingo. But by all indications, she has never been anything other than “former Vice President Mujuru”.

Outside that she is not known to stand for anything. She compounded her case when in her first statement as leader of her People First movement she seemed to apologise for her association with the land reform, suggesting it was wrong or she was against the programme, even as she and her late husband reaped handsome rewards from it.

The simple question from any voter then becomes: what’s the content of your Zimbabwe people first? How do Zimbabwean people come first without their most fundamental natural resource?

At the end of it, there is no lesson for me from Bikita West. Mujuru lost, Zanu-PF won and it’s time to fulfil the electoral promises it made.

On the other hand, the opposition in general and its media, the lesson is that Tsvangirai should lead the “much-anticipated” grand coalition. So it’s more talk about positions, never about serving the masses. That’s how hopeless they are.

The same on the economic front.

Yesterday’s Financial Gazette had a strange story. It was headlined, “Companies defy odds, reopen”.

The basis of the story were prophesies by economists and business leaders last year that many Zimbabwean companies would not reopen after the Christmas shutdown because of a bad economic situation.

They were led by Zimbabwe National Chamber of Commerce chief executive officer Chris Mugaga who warned, “Ten to 15 percent of the companies may not come back after the (Christmas) shutdown.”

In interviews last week, the paper found no evidence of a mass shutdown. Mugaga said although companies had reopened, the operating environment was still tough, which we all know.

Confederation of Zimbabwe Industries president Busisa Moyo said they had not received reports so far of companies failing to reopen.

It was the same story from the Chamber of Mines of Zimbabwe. The paper then let us in on the secret to this odd occurrence, “Analysts said the survival of firms in this harsh environment may be due to the fact that they have adopted mechanisms to withstand the heat.”

Very odd indeed.

Except I recall that Dr Mugaga told us repeatedly last year that bond notes would never work. That SI64 would not work. That the country was headed for an imminent shutdown. That our salvation lay in the South African rand. Orwellian bemusement, I look at prophets to the right, to economists to the left, I can’t see the difference.