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My Turn with Tichaona Zindoga
Let us point out from the outset that former Vice President and Zanu-PF Second Secretary Joice Mujuru is her own worst enemy as she allowed her ambitions to run well ahead of her capacity and even more criminally, beyond the beneficence of those who were responsible for her fairly easy existence.

It is now public knowledge that Mai Mujuru’s fall from grace was occasioned by her working against her benefactor, President Mugabe, whom she tried to unconstitutionally unseat from the very moment he plucked her from some insignificant place in the Zanu-PF leadership pile ahead of more deserving cadres.

That year was 2004.

It was congress time and one Emerson Mnangagwa was leading the pack to land the post of Vice President of the party with the majority of the provinces under his belt.

Then came the machine of the gods.

ED lost and unfancied JTR won. Fair and fine.

The intervening 10 years would have given Mai Mujuru ample time to show her leadership and diplomatic skills.

She showed none.

She should have atoned for the original sin that saw her unfair reward. She didn’t.

She took that opportunity to not only work against her principal, but also do precious little in her job as Vice President of the republic who had the task of supervising key ministries that run the country.

She left everything to President Mugabe. The flak that she was supposed to take went to President Mugabe.

Of course, the buck stops with him; perhaps he deserved it.

Meanwhile, Mai Mujuru didn’t do anything out of the ordinary to prove that she was the natural successor to President Mugabe.

To her, and it appeared to many as well, succeeding President Mugabe was a given – some kind of a foregone conclusion; some divine right.

And she was growing impatient, too, for that eventuality, like that proverbial prodigal son whose impatience would lead him to demand a share of his father’s estate while he was still alive.

But that did not banish the prospect of someone worthier pipping her to the ultimate prize.

That prospect stayed alive and well for a whole 10 years.

If Mai Mujuru was such a genius she would have used the power of her incumbency to banish this prospect by means fair or foul. She is not such a genius.

She didn’t suppress, outsmart, her well-known rival for a whole period of 10 years.

She then fell.

Do not waste tears on her poor, foolish soul – she that lacks even the moral probity beyond certain inveiglements.

Enter the dwarfs

I am afraid I dwelt too much on tracing the downfall of the woman from Dotito where a singular expression of a well-known fact of her folly would suffice.

But then it’s good to put things into context, isn’t it?

However, the nub of this submission is that Mai Mujuru is doing herself no favour by allowing some two gentlemen to be her spokespersons, or to give her the benefit of the doubt, pretend to be her spokespersons.

The two gentlemen are Mr Rugare Gumbo and Mr Didymus Mutasa, both erstwhile members of the ruling party and expelled for plotting to unconstitutionally unseat President Mugabe working with, and for, Mai Mujuru.

If she were clever, which she isn’t, and entertaining hopes better than her present imbroglio, she should have parted ways with these men at the time the plot came to grief, for a good reason, which we shall now demonstrate.

Let’s begin with Mutasa.

For a long time he has been viewed as a very powerful politician who had authority over life and death – literally.

His position in both Government and Zanu-PF party ensured that he could be viewed as such. He even managed to pose as a great liberation war fighter and, for those not in the know, it only took the courage of the likes of Christopher Mutsvangwa who bored holes in this narrative, telling us, in part, how Mutasa flew back from America to Mozambique where war was being waged into Zimbabwe, only to find a safe house away from other guerillas where he could “paramour his beautiful wife”.

In fact, we learnt a lot of things in that interview, including how Mai Mujuru did not down that chopper.

In the bare bones fight that took place in Zanu-PF in the run-up to the congress in December, which Mutasa had manipulated to force the putsch that would do away with President Mugabe, Mutasa first appeared to be up to task.

But then he faltered.

He even fell sick, as did his wife who he had to take to India for treatment.

He wrote President Mugabe to be excused from the congress.

Mai Mujuru skipped it altogether, as did others who had been associated with her.

Apparently there was no Plan B for the putschists, who, if they indeed felt they were so powerful or held sway would have made a strong statement or two when the matter was still hot.

It would not come, and no mobilisation of the imagined grassroots support took place.

The thing just fell flat. Mai Mujuru went underground, cryptically.

A “genius” called Mutasa

The genius in Mutasa the mastermind told him that the big political sway was held by a newspaper called Daily News.

We knew it all along as the opposition MDC mouthpiece, which it is still.

Now it has been lent to Mai Mujuru and her spokespersons Mutasa and Rugare Gumbo.

That the duo believes that screaming in the Daily News, which dutifully strokes their poor egos by describing them as “stalwarts” and such nonsense, will help them put a sustainable political career after being kicked out from Zanu-PF, proves the fatal want of that grey matter between the ears.

Daily News has been in bed with the opposition MDC, eating from the same dirty foreign plate, for the past 15 or so years (discounting the years it took itself from the streets after wilfully refusing to obey the law even when other privately owned papers which shed crocodile tears for it, had complied). And nothing has come out of this unholy matrimony implying that only fools still believe in the power of “Daily Noise” to influence political events in the country.

It is precisely for this reason that this paper once described Mutasa and company as “dwarfs in giant political robes”.

Mutasa did not like it then and would bitterly complain about how “his” paper could call him that!

Only he has proved himself to be, not least for his failure to stop his expulsion as his being barred from contesting the Headlands seat after masquerading as a Zanu-PF member when it was clear as daylight that he had his sorry butt kicked out of the same. In essence, Mutasa is a deeply resented man who has a notorious record of being cruel on top of other ungainly tags such as being a womaniser.

He will not be useful to anybody, anywhere, which is why Mai Mujuru should have steered clear of such a fellow and forthwith reject to be represented by him or be spoken on her behalf. Nor does she profit anything from associating with Rugare Gumbo, an equally useless old man whose career has nothing remarkable save for his pitching up as a rebel without a cause in critical moments in history.

He was a rebel in 1978. He was a rebel without cause in 2014.

He does not have any constituency that anyone can even credulously point to.

His association with Mai Mujuru is more out of bruised ego and an enduring hatred for President Mugabe than anything substantial. Not even loyalty to the poor Joice Mujuru.

Gumbo is not identifiable with any principles, current or past and it is incredible that anyone finds him useful.

The idea of a “People First” splinter party that Mutasa and Gumbo and Daily News are pushing is bound to come to grief and it is rather a pity to see old men and a whole former Vice President of the country believing in their own lies.

Maybe, as a caveat, Joice Mujuru does not believe in it as she has not openly come out stating so but for the terrible twins, Mutasa and Gumbo.

Otherwise, with friends like Mutasa and Gumbo, who needs enemies?