Harare, Zimbabwe. (News Of The South) – In his Elizabethan drama written in approximately 1598 Shakespeare writes that, in a false quarrel there is no true valour.
However Zimbabwe is currently caught up in a true quarrel but with plenty of false heroes. Such is the falsity of many that for long, the country has been facing a 2018 election with generally two dishes for political choice.
The first is a nationalist staple diet that has seen the Southern African country being led by 92 year old Robert Mugabe and ZANU PF since independence in 1980.
The liberation party has however in these latter days skewed economics of the country to an extent of little functionality or progress. What is being termed growth and progress in financial statements from the Reserve Bank and Finance Ministry are actually corrective steps back to sanity and light from much murk.
The steps are the patter of a toddler given to much dawdling and confusion.
In all this time and towards the 2018 election ZANU PF and Mugabe have been playing their liberation and sovereignty card and it almost always wins them plenty of villagers in hunger ravaged areas where they use state machinery to provide free food.
The other side is the opposition camp but there is nothing unitary in their being called a camp. They are actually a mélange of the demented, the opportunistic and the hopeful. They are only a camp in so far as they are The Other Guys.
This opposition camp is driven by the abiding urge to simply remove Mugabe and ZANU PF. Anyone with the same agenda has room in the camp and many urbanites have flocked there squeezed dry by a comatose economy with no jobs or cash.
MDC-T led by Morgan Tsvangirai is the strongest and provides the most hope. His former allies in the People’s Democratic Party (PDP) led by former Finance Minister Tendai Biti are a ‘high’ feeling that won’t lead to much.
Professor Welshman Ncube and the other MDC have become a party for ideas in an ideal environment, but Zimbabwe isn’t that. So they are fizzling out in the background.
Other ragtag opposition parties are there but they are just that, rag-tag rags.
It’s however the coming of People First led by former Vice President and ZANU member, Joyce Mujuru that has seemingly created a third path. By squaring with Mugabe, after being booted out mind you, Mujuru has become a hero for that.
The people have been looking for a third option after the previous elections, for opposition supporters, saw their parties losing, and for ZANU supporters, the economy losing further starch.
People First and Mujuru have however tried to catwalk down the middle ground with genetical dispositions from both sides of the field.
They have adopted the liberality of the MDC’s, espousing many freedoms, security of private property and other ZANU trashed corners of law whilst maintaining the umbilical connection of being freedom fighters.
They have nothing groundbreaking besides their standing there and saying we are here too for your votes. The dirt in personnel from the Mugabe camp can be found in PF. They have been there when the country rotted.
Scoffing at talk of change by his opponent Amama Mbambazi, Ugandan President Museveni recounted the former’s past.
‘Rt. Hon Mbambazi has been at the centre of our systems all these years; he was in the security services, he was in the parliament, he was minister for security for a long time, he was secretary-general of the ruling NRM party, and eventually he was the prime minister. If there is anybody to be questioned about the weaknesses of government, Rt. Hon Mbambazi is one of them”, he said.
The same illness afflicts the PF people who have grown whiskers as ZANU members.
However their ‘newness’ has still cranked up anticipation that 2018 may be a year of change especially through a combined group of opposition parties with Mujuru leading or the vice again.
After all the years it’s a pity that the Zimbabwean electorate has found itself in a position of choosing between the original and a splinter group of the very people they accuse of destroying the country.
How the association of chucked out guerillas called PF can turn around the economy is hard to believe after so many years of their being the very core of ZANU.
Despite there being a third name on the menu list the dishes have remained the same for Zimbabwe.
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