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IT was a few days crammed with matters full of portents. It will be a time to remember, a few days which laid the blocks that will determine the fate of a nation.

It was the week Zanu-PF held its internal healing and reconciliation workshop following what were in instances very acrimonious primary elections. The same day on Tuesday a Pan African Forum Limited survey forecast a landslide victory of 70 percent for the Zanu-PF presidential candidate, Cde Emmerson Mnangagwa.

For the opposition MDC-T, pursuant to the electoral reforms it has consistently demanded ahead of every national election, it must have savoured a consolation prize for its faction leader Nelson Chamisa’s 24 percent performance when President Mnangagwa signed into law the Electoral Amendment Act.

But its grief was set to deepen when the chairman of the party Morgan Komichi revealed that a majority of its members were against alliances with other political parties because they were ceding to minnows constituencies they felt could easily win on their own.

In the past few days it had looked like the alliance was gelling, but apparently the same big egos which cost the MDC in 2008 under Morgan Tsvangirai are on the rise — individuals can already smell power and positions. Things are unravelling fast.

But the momentous events of the week were not over yet. Inspection of the voters’ roll launched by the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission came to an end, also on Tuesday, with more than 5,3 million Zimbabweans said to have been confirmed as registered.

It was also confirmed that voting would be polling station-based, perhaps putting a lid on the vexatious matter of the Diaspora vote.

Then came the big one: President Mnangagwa proclaimed the election date for the 2018 harmonised national elections as July 30. It is a date everybody has been anxious about, a date around which there has been a lot of speculation even among legal minds, who otherwise should help pesky journalists doing dirty work for under-employed non-governmental organisations.

Proclamation of the election date can only create more headaches for the opposition. The Pan African Forum bad news aside, the MDC-T has not finished its version of the divisive primary elections. It is just papering over cracks in dealing with disgruntled senior members of the party who either lost or felt hard done by. Then there is the female constituency which largely feels used, unwanted and disrespected by none other than leader of the party, Nelson Chamisa.

The party has every reason to panic.

Zanu-PF has its work cut out for it.

The primaries are over, but there is a danger of reading too much into the Pan African Forum survey. While it is good as a morale booster in the 60 days to Election Day, the danger is in inducing a sense of complacency among members.

There is a lot of work still to be done, not least because the opposition could play dirty in the hope of ringing a coalition government again from a hung parliament.

That means the ruling party must get all its horses into the span. The national campaign must combine with the healing and reconciliation process to clinch a clear and clean victory to avoid a rerun or a hung parliament.

From a majority victory President Mnangagwa can then make a deliberate choice of who to co-opt into his Cabinet if he so wishes, on the basis of skills.

A forced unity government will suffer the same operational dysfunctionality Zanu-PF endured from 2009-2013. That is a very bad arrangement for a government trying to assure investors of political stability. Many are already excited about ED’s reform agenda, but fresh acrimony from an inconclusive vote can only prolong the nation’s agony.

That is why we believe real work has only begun.

What the survey results do is to buttress the President’s call for a free, fair, transparent and credible election. Zanu-PF has no reason to resort to violence or to rig the ballot. But it must galvanise the nation for an uncontested victory.

It has the goodwill to back its sound policies against an unreformed opposition whose leader , it might turn out, is lying that he wants to be president of Zimbabwe!