Harare, Zimbabwe (News of the South)-Reading the Herald sarcastically going about desecrating the ‘remains’ of the opposition parties in the country one would be liable to think that Morgan Tsvangirai/Tendai Biti/Joyce Mujuru/Welshman Ncube/Simba Makoni and other varieties of their type, are political relics chugging on fumes to their extinction.
According to the many articles by the political analysts, (hired guns with paid mandates really and a smattering of tiny minds hoping for stardom trough the pen ), who write for the Herald and other state media publications, the opposition is a flaccid pipe of desire that can never rise to the occasion.
It simply throbs with lust, prone against the belly, weighted by its deadness.
According to them there is nothing for ZANU PF to fear come 2018 since the opposition is a coalition of dead matter. Someone even wrote about a whitewash as in 2013, and you wonder which type he smokes or the amount he was paid.
Flip to the other side and you read the independent media. Daily News, Newsday, Standard and the like. The matter is a variety of the same.
ZANU PF is in chaos rocked by factional fights over everything. Tyson, The Spirit, Dr Stop It, Jonso. The nicknames imperceptibly inform you that the situation is a cavalcade of reckless might, spirited lunacy and comic stupidity.
There is Command Agriculture, Moyo squimishing with VP Mnangagwa, the First Lady flexing her muscles and hounding former stalwarts Mahoka and Sandi Moyo, in-between allegedly booting out Mazowe villagers slowing her empire’s growth. War veterans springing up into a vibrant limb that could just about tear itself off the larger body and the President rushing to Singapore aboard a private hired plane after another health scare. The sub-plots never end.
According to these publications all that Zimbabwe needs is a coalition of the opposition parties and ZANU PF will be history when the 2018 elections come to an end.
This begs the question about factuality since the literal deduction from these writings is that all of Zimbabwe’s political parties are fatally sick and the vending voter should stand stupidly with his engorged and hungry nature stick, you know, in his hands unsure where to insert it, into the membrane of mucous politics festering with sickness or back into his dried and charped underwear.
Mugabe’s ZANU PF has been said to be so factionally divided and structurally damaged that it’s a ‘whole mess’ that can no longer bring about anything constructive and the present crisis is hoisted as an example. No cash. No jobs. No development.
Tsvangirai is pictured frail and dark and taken as a representation of the whole MDC-T, despite its three-headed Janus of Vice Presidents. No direction. No mojo. No use.
Biti, as always, is picked apart as a bookish barrister with no street creed to muster a challenge. The rest are dismissed in a single line that celebrates the double edged but ironic efficacy of democracy and its ability to grant each man his tiny useless dream. (If you want to be a political party president you can be one in a democracy, never mind the state of your party or the context and in walks Jacob Ngarivhume, Shakespeare Maya, Elton Mangoma, Job Sikhala and Farai Mbira etc)
Thus a country with no currency of its own, nearly ten years using its venerated enemy’s; a dead industry whose workforce is now a multitude of vendors and a bleak future, is going into an election with no viable party to choose from?
Is that what the media is implying?
That I can’t vote for Mugabe since he now is now a faded hero with more behind him than ahead.
(Cue the slow timbre of mournful music, a setting reddish sun and the faded hero, in slow motion, tumbling to the dusty earth and smashing his head to the ground to lie prone, very dead and the assailant standing over him ready to sucker punch again if he so much as coughs).
That I can’t vote for Tsvangirai and the coalition (if it emerges) because they are a mish-mash of foreign- stewed Africans with misplaced agendas and alien tastes; small heroes with huge libidos; Queen Bees that refuse copulation and dead man that resurrect themselves and walk with bandages unremoved (of course they blunder about hitting against posts and stones).
So come 2018 im left with my vote waiting with a blank ballot paper unsure of where to place the X.
Is that what the Fourth Estate is saying?
Of course not. Never can a whole country come up to the election and the nearest logical candidate is a West African Gambian called Adama Barrow, for the sheer romanticism of his ascension pathway.
Amongst the devils we have they should be a better one which, by deduction again, (oh what’s up with this word and politics) means someone is lying about the other or being hyperbolic about the frailty of someone.
Is the opposition that defeated and sick and un-coalitionable (that’s my invention) that all who hope in it are on your marks, get-ready and set to lose again because it’s a vacuous church bell?
The President is old and lethargy, and his party is really caught in some never seen factional frictions but is it really beyond the salvageable to be beaten by the upstarts with law degrees and iphone-ing revolutions into existance? Can’t it offer anything to the people?
Of course not.
Someone somewhere in this soiled fresco of the ambitious, the vapid, the vain, the lame, the power hungry and the blundering, has got to have something resembling an answer to this Zimbabwean fiasco.
Unfortunately it is that someone whom the media is failing to pick out as it gets into the electioneering overdrive which requires the discarding of sense and logic, and sheathing into combat gear that brooks no dissent.
The media is employing a type of campaign-by-reverse, which it, the media, from a winded holier-than-thou stance, regards as nobler than outrightly and directly championing the cause of a legitimate candidate.
For the media its unprofessional to advance, in a direct manner, the cause of a politician who is standing for the truth rather, they choose to attack his opposite as a signal that they support the ‘other’ right candidate.
So for those who feel that Tsvangirai is the better of the two, with Mugabe, instead of expounding the positive standpoints of the MDC-T leader, they would rather attack Mugabe cuing the electorate to read between the lines and decipher that they are saying, vote for Tsvangirai.
Thus the electorate are left none the wiser about what it is specifically that Tsvangirai is bringing to the table which Mugabe can’t offer.
They know more about how the old man stumbled in India and Morocco and slept in Ghana and fell at the airport and hiccupped and spluttered and every other none-essential, than they know about the MDC-T manifesto.
The electorate is told more about the libido of Tsvangirai, or his lack of it, now that he is sick, and his rushing to SA for a pancreatic op, and Elizabeth’s demands and Nathaniel Manheru roils verbosely about ‘Save’s personal demise, Vuhera and every other cavern and orifice of his persona without detailing how Mugabe and the Bond notes will steam us out of this sewerage pond if they win in 2018.
This freaky and sickly way of vain sophistication however ultimately bring us to the current situation where a cross analysis of the media publications seems to indicate that Zimbabwe has no viable political party come 2018.
The media is outsmarting itself with a vain chase for the tail and ends up making clanging sounds that mean nothing, such as repeated disintegrations of a particular party.
Today the headline says the party is shattered, next week the same party is shattered again just as happens the following week.
Zimbabwe is not simply at the crossroads but is dying there and needs a pathway to salvation. The media could assist by bringing sense to the jumble that it publishes.
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