Harare, Zimbabwe (News of the South)- After the fiasco that was Norton and Themba Mliswa’s independent romp to victory, Bikita was always going to be a nervy spot for ZANU PF, a nerve-fill tendon that had to be stroked, coaxed and friction-ed sufficiently to produce the best results.
This was to be no dainty dating massage that would end in simple smooches and cuddles leaving everything to chance and fate.
ey would go all the way.
That’s why the party gave the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission (ZEC) only-just sufficient ground to amble around in a fake halo of oversight whilst vicious yobs and party fanatics prowled around growling threats of reprisals if anyone dared to vote for the opposition.
A day before elections ZEC even feigned a show of authority with Makarau saying they had requested police reports about reported violence and told the Zimbabwe Human Rights Commission to also submit its take on the happenings. If anything fishy was going on they would stall the elections. Of course they never did such a thing and they were never going to start during the creation of the President’s birthday gift.
Rigging elections is never easy even for ZANU PF and its tentacle-ed octopus hold upon state machinery, that’s why the party uses the primitive cloak and dagger style of the Sicilian Mafia and other shady hindquarters of society, bringing fear upon its enemies with threats of reprisals.
The tale is as old as the decay of ZANU, which began in the 90’s.
Ask any rural villager and they will tell you painful tales of a party that takes no prisoners of those who liberate their minds and think this is America where you can use your democratic right to bring a Trump into power.
2008 was a high stakes game and limbs got severed-off owners whilst other have black buttocks for testimony todays after over stretching their liberty.
In Bikita few if any limbs got severed but fear condensed and the cloud hang over the place like a Damocles sword waiting for ZEC to utter a strange result and someone would die of hunger because suddenly no food would be coming.
Former Education Minister David Coltart knows the tricks and had this to say in the aftermath of the ZANU PF romp, which is a rape actually not a romp.
“It would be interesting to do an exit poll in Bikita to ask people why they voted (if they did) for the ruining party”.
“Results say it all- the power of fear and poverty”.
“There are no other rational reasons why people would vote for the ruining party”, he said.
The Zimbabwean rural villager has always gotten the short end of the political stick voting with his stomach and flesh whilst sacrificing the higher ends of change and progress.
The end result have been strange electoral results in a country which has no currency of its own; has a derelict industry; has a corrupt political upper class eating all and a faces a strange future whose state anyone can predict, diviner, prophet or none of the above.
Thus in Bikita Beauty Chabaya the ZANU PF candidate, garnered, accrued, got or whatever word surmises the act of gobbling a hoarde of votes through spreading fear, 13 156 votes against the nearest trailing rival Kudakwashe Gopo of Mujuru’s People First who had 2453.
In the while the unofficial opposition coalition consoles itself with the thought and knowledge that MDC-T did not contest.
It’s a sure stuffy thought in an already warm clime that makes you sweat later when you read Magaisa’s tweet.
“But it’s also significant that the ZANU PF candidate combined and added to the no. of votes garnered by the 2 candidates who contested in 2013”, he said.
After the evaporation of Russian and Chinese mega deals, the disappeared $15 billion diamond heists, the shady ZIMDEF bicycle funds, the unemployment and the sheer bleakness of life one can’t accrue the rise in ZANU voters to any positive actions on the ground.
So where did the doubling come from if not from the Fear Factor?
That, however, won’t worry the old party which has suddenly got its mojo back and is raring to go in the full billow of seeing Mujuru suffering her first full frontal loss in an election.
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