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Joice Mujuru

MY TURN WITH TICHAONA ZINDOGA
There is little doubt the campaign season for next year’s harmonised election is in full swing. President Mugabe is leading his party through Presidential Youth Interface Rallies.

The juggernaut is in Mutare on Friday, after starting off in Marondera a fortnight ago. Last week, the main opposition led by Morgan Tsvangirai was in Gweru. Aside from these protagonists, there are some stirrings of life, be it Joice Mujuru with her National People’s Party or Jacob Ngarivhume with his Transform Zimbabwe.

Meanwhile, new political parties are being formed every day. Impossible as it may sound, Zimbabwe now easily boasts of more than half a century in party organisations. Bet that there will be a few more by 2018.

That’s the beauty of Zimbabwe’s democracy. Not that it pleases everyone. Some, especially those whom we presume to be democrats, many a time rail bitterly over the proliferation of new parties and individuals seeking glory in national politics.

The supporters of Morgan Tsvangirai, especially, see any new player and claimant as a spoiler bent on “splitting the opposition vote”. You tend to wonder just how only the opposition, or specifically Tsvangirai’s vote, is the only one to suffer thus.

Think about it: if Mr Another Party comes through, why won’t he eat into President Mugabe’s vote? But Mr Another Party is likely to be lynched by the opposition, Tsvangirai’s opposition. You then understand the current problems around the constitution of the so-called grand coalition.

There is a huge argument and fight going on. On one hand, there are people that say Tsvangirai is “the natural leader” of the arrangement.

Joice Mujuru’s supporters do not agree. In fact, Mujuru herself does not seem to believe so and has been touting herself as the rightful leader of the yet to be consummated agreement. She is standing on the backs of women against cruel men of the world.

She says she represents war veterans. The prospective coalition of these people appears headed for intolerably choppy waters.

Let’s see who blinks first. But the debate brings another worrying dimension to the run up to the election: the glaring lack of ideas, big ideas, to get us into the next election. Joice Mujuru and NPP: zero ideas.

Morgan Tsvangirai and MDC-T: zero ideas. Tendai Biti and NPP, et al: zero ideas. Perhaps there are some ideas there, but they are so small as to be negligible. Unless the idea about the grand coalition is the big idea, according to opposition. And, oh, that Mugabe must go!

Morgan Tsvangirai

It becomes clear just why the opposition will lose to President Mugabe and Zanu-PF. Zanu-PF has the big idea of Command Agriculture and it has saturated the political messaging market.

It will increasingly talk about a couple of command somethings, depending on the sector.

Like Command Mining.

Like Command Fisheries.

Like Command Wheat.

Whatever.

And these various command sectors will be aggressively promoted and sold to the electorate. The various command initiatives dovetail with existing messaging infrastructure and policies such as land reform and indigenisation. Land reform is alive.

The two million people on the farms still know that the land is the economy and the economy is the land. They also know that their land and their economy remain in the present and continuing danger of the politics of Tsvangirai. And Joice Mujuru, too, given her histrionics about wanting to compensate a white farmer, etc.

She can easily reverse the land reform in order to present an acceptable face to Western funders. That will be the political message. Mujuru herself has not done enough to assure farmers on the land that their land, economy and their historical possessions are safe.

Never mind how Patrick Zhuwao has ill-served indigenisation and its political currency, the narrative of indigenisation can still be dusted and presented authoritatively and decisively just ahead of elections.

There are a number of outstanding indigenisation issues which can rouse the voting public. And indigenisation is Zanu-PF.

Add to this mix, Zanu-PF’s thrust on housing and providing land to the urban poor. We have seen how the provision of land has created new landlords while remarkably de-congesting the landless/lodgers category.

Illustratively, today June 14, one is likely to find a vacant room or house in any suburb that used to have a tenant.

So much has changed and the greatest joy to the greatest number of people!

Tendai Biti

One can also talk about the Beitbridge/Chirundu Highway dualisation. It is said to be going to create 300 000 jobs — and only knobs think that all those jobs are supposed to be the manual labour on the ground.

The billion-dollar project will have good spin-offs.

Politically, not least. On the other hand, the opposition does not have anything to sell, except the difficult dream about a coalition. It has also been raising the straw man about biometric voter registration and the Red invasion by the Chinese, but this excuse has now been abandoned, with Tsvangirai apparently taking the advice of Alex Magaisa, the man the British loaned to advise him during the inclusive Government, on the untenability of raising the BVR strawman.

By the way, and this is very important, about a month ago the MDC-T came up with its “alternative policy blueprint” called SMART. According to the party, SMART constitutes “new, updated, simplified and user-friendly policy proposals replacing the current Agenda for Real Transformation (ART) policy document and JUICE, which are now outdated.”

According to the party vice president Nelson Chamisa, who is also party policy chief; “The alternative policy narratives have been developed in areas of governance, the economy, infrastructure, devolution, dealing with corruption, health, education, social interventions and citizen rights and protection including foreign policy.”

That was last month. Nobody remembers anything of this SMART because it may as well have been dead before the ink dried on it. Let’s see if it can be taken from its apparent stillbirth to excite people ahead of elections. Mujuru has not come up with any policy document since forming NPP after abandoning Zimbabwe People First, where they had the BUILD document.

Not that it was compelling, either. Much worse, she has not held a convention, something that is being used as a stick to beat her by her opponents vying for the coalition.

It’s going to be very brutal for the opposition and it is running out of excuses.