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Fungi Kwaramba-Political Editor

AHEAD of this year’s elections, even the blind can see an impending Zanu PF victory, the tell-tale signs are there, festooned on modern roads in every part of the country, dams, and remarkable progress towards attainment of Vision 2030, to become an upper-middle income economy.

Reaching every part of the country, President Mnangagwa has ensured that even far-flung areas like Binga, often out of sight and mind during the First Republic, are benefiting from the national project regardless of the economic sanctions constraints.

A polytechnic college has opened its doors in Binga, boreholes have been drilled in every village and just like any other part of Zimbabwe, development that leaves no one and no place behind is taking place in that area.

While in the past, places like Binga were stalked by hunger, the Second Republic has stepped in, implementing President Mnangagwa’s deliberate steps towards ensuring not only food security but also food sovereignty, both anchored on the rapid innovations in science, communication and digital technologies.

Placing Binga on the map, the President on Saturday launched National Culture Month in the district that has for years been on the fringes, forgotten, but now is stepping out of the shadows to partake in national events, of course, no price for guessing where the vote, in August, will go.

Broadly speaking, it is little wonder that bellyful Zimbabweans will, even by the admission of one of the world’s largest rating agencies Fitch Solutions, vote for President Mnangagwa and the party he leads come elections.

Fitch Solutions, a global advisory and credit rating agency based nowhere else but in the United States, said in its report on Zimbabwe, “At Fitch Solutions, we believe that the incumbent President Emmerson Mnangagwa and his Zanu PF party will win the upcoming general elections due to be held by August 2023.

“Zanu PF’s overarching resources and influence compared to the opposition CCC, headed by Chamisa, will preserve its support in rural strongholds and win key votes in low-income urban areas.

“Central to our belief that Zanu PF will win the elections is the party’s far greater political and economic resources it has to sway the vote in its favour.”

This is despite the desperate attempts to turn the masses against Zanu PF rule as was the original intention of the United States, an intention which persists to this day and which is manifest in the current price madness confronting the nation, on the eve of the August elections.

There is a method in the price madness.

In June 2000, while preparing for a debate in the US Senate on the misnamed Zimbabwe Democracy and Economic Recovery Act, former United States assistant secretary of State for African Affairs Chester Crocker made it clear that the purpose of the sanctions was to squeeze Zimbabwe and make the people turn against the Zanu PF Government.

“To separate the Zimbabwean people from Zanu PF, we are going to have to make their economy scream, and I hope you, senators, have the stomach for what you have to do.”

Today the sanctions persist but Zimbabweans have remarkably weathered them, with the Second Republic riding the tide thanks to a cocktail of measures that have stabilised the economy, and revived key sectors of mining, agriculture, and tourism, notwithstanding global shocks caused by the Covid-19 pandemic, the Russian-Ukraine conflict and the ever-present effects of climate change.

Having failed to use the political channels to squeeze Zimbabweans and make them turn against Government and with the opposition in a comatose, quite dead as a dodo, the same people who imposed sanctions on Zimbabwe have a hand behind the price madness, in a fresh economic onslaught that they seek to use to turn the people against Zanu PF.

With no opposition to talk about, manufacturing chaos through economic sabotage is the new frontier that the merchants of regime change have employed, indeed there is a strange coincidence that when the opposition cannot offer any opposition the economy is sought and used as a battlefront by some called-captains of industry to create mayhem that is expected to achieve what the politicians have failed to achieve.

Is it now clear that the destabilisation of the economy characterised by below-the-law and out-of-the-law activities is emerging as the only credible challenge to an overwhelming Zanu PF victory as indeed predicted by a respectable US agency.

Is there a hand that seeks to breathe life into a dying political outfit whose leadership’s political manifesto is seemingly a collapsed Zimbabwean economy – there have no ideology, no structures, and no ideas to convince the masses to vote for them.

Legacy of rot and ruin

Utopian to the point being of infantile, the CCC leader Mr Chamisa dubbed cities and towns that his party won in the 2018 elections zones of excellence, but there have turned into zones of ineptitude, with giant anthills of uncollected garbage, no water, rivulets of sewage and corruption being the order of the day.

Indeed, while President Mnangagwa is building Zimbabwe brick by brick, the opposition is destroying towns through primitive accumulation of wealth, and abandonment of their civic roles in councils and are largely to blame for the recent cholera outbreak as they failed to provide leadership at the local authority level.

Already, Government is intensifying efforts to close murky and clandestine channels that are fuelling the parallel market and other illicit financial activities and from the market, it is clear the price manipulation will be solved, and businesses that dabble in politics will only have themselves to blame.

Shortly, Zanu PF, which has got structures, and proven members will have its manifesto launched, a dystopian opposition, operating like a secret society with no structures playing hocus-pocus with the electorate bank on their handlers to cause an economic implosion, being cruel in order to lead, as they have nothing more to offer to the electorate.

But Zimbabweans are more the wiser and will, as predicted by pollsters, vote for Zanu PF and reject legends of doom and their intrusive handlers who are bizarrely interfering in the country’s elections uninvited, squandering and playing roughshod to their host goodwill.