HARARE - The chickens are truly coming home to roost for President Robert Mugabe and Zanu PF — and this has absolutely nothing to do with so-called sanctions, the “evil” West, Morgan Tsvangirai or the MDC.
Things are so bad that there is now no way of hiding them or papering over the cracks as used to happen, even for Zanu PF’s relentless propaganda apparatus.
In yet another stunning revelation on the party’s deadly infighting, its secretary for women’s affairs, Oppah Muchinguri, reported on Monday that more cases of kidnappings and intimidation had taken place ahead of the party’s 6th Women’s League conference which begins in Harare today.
Muchinguri disclosed this while addressing a media conference in the capital, following last week’s chaotic National Youth Conference that was bedevilled by allegations of vote rigging and manipulation.
“In some cases, the League has received reports which border on criminal conduct where its members have been kidnapped or sequestered against their will and without the knowledge of their families who do not know the whereabouts of their loved ones,” she said to the shock of the gathered journalists.
She said such kidnappings had been reported in Manicaland, Mashonaland Central and Masvingo.
Last week, Gokwe-Gumunyu legislator Melania Majovani reported minister of State in the President’s Office Flora Buka to the police for allegedly abducting and holding members of the wing hostage in a FROM P1
desperate and ultimately unsuccessful bid to force them to vote for her.
To add fuel to the fire, a Pandora’s box was opened when First Lady Grace Mugabe was recently and ill-advisedly appointed the new leader-designate of the Women’s League.
This has not just widened the existing factional fissures within the party, it has also opened new war fronts for the feuding warlords fighting to succeed Mugabe, as well as to control national resources and the politics of patronage that is central to Zanu PF’s hold on power.
It has also not helped that the First Lady, who is supposed to act as the nurturing mother figure in this chaos, is seemingly incapable of not putting her foot in her mouth regularly, in addition to harbouring dictatorial tendencies and having a problematic predilection for the fine things in life, including irregularly acquiring multiple farms.
But as the Daily News has reported countless times before, all of these myriad problems that are afflicting Zanu PF, and which have a deleterious knock-on effect on the country at large, are a result of the party’s compounded misrule and unbridled corruption that has gone on unchecked over the past 34 years.
The brazen pillaging of national resources by Zanu PF bigwigs has now got the country to its knees — with ever so fewer resources still left to be shared among the band of looters that masquerade as our rulers.
If there is any consolation for the Zanu PF supporters that now find themselves at the receiving end of their party’s primitive misrule, it is that most of them, at least for now, are living to tell their horror stories.
It is a sickening fact that thousands of opposition supporters have needlessly lost their lives since independence in 1980, and that they did not just suffer harassment and deprivation of the democratic dividend when they chose to support other parties beside Zanu PF.
And Zimbabweans are entitled to ask that if these ugly things that Muchinguri and Mugabe himself say are happening in Zanu PF, how can anyone in their right mind believe that our national elections are free, fair and legitimate — not to speak of the preposterous argument that violence in Zimbabwe is perpetrated by the opposition?