The Sunday Mail
By now, we are all aware that new political entrant Zimbabwe People First (ZPF) party is full of apologists in its top echelons.
They have apologised for everything.
They apologised for being part of Zanu PF, claiming they were unwilling members. They apologised to victims of political violence and abductions which they themselves allegedly masterminded. They apologised for the economic demise which again was their brainchild.
That has been their shameless campaign manifesto – apologise and the people will vote for you. It is that simplistic and they expect to do epic things with such a basic mindset.
As for the ZPF ideology, well, that one is a total order. Even its leader, the disgraced former Vice President is dismally failing to articulate what the party stands for. At every attempt it is as if she wants to sell ice to Eskimos.
In an interview with a South African radio station recently, Dr Joice Mujuru burdened the programme with unbelievable stutter and stammer that is unconventional of a recent PhD graduate, clearly exposing her newly-founded party’s survival chances to the likelihood of an ice ball’s existence in hell.
The anti-climax of ZPF is its leadership’s failure to explain their party’s ideology without sounding like the MDC. The more they painstakingly try to do so, the more constipated their ideology sounds.
The result is that it betrays itself as an ideology that is way too shallow for a party that was launched as “tsunami” at a colonial five-star hotel built by the loot of hundreds of thousands of plundered cattle from Matabeleland.
From the leadership’s failure to be original about what their party stands for, everything else became topsy-turvy. They have the tendency of trying to imitate President Mugabe who has always talked of the people being the most important component of the party. Then they are always battling to remember what Morgan Tsvangirai has been taught by his Western backers about working with the “international community” or Britain and America if you like. These are often intertwined into the clumsy ideology of ZPF.
The higgity-piddity manner of this failure to articulate clear polices reminds us of what their own protégé Didymus Mutasa once warned while quoting Mark Twain that “it is better to keep your mouth closed and let people think you are a fool than to open it and remove all doubt.”
Anyone, anyone at all, who ever doubted that Dr Mujuru is a very dangerous entrant to the opposition politics of this country should rewind and review the arrogance and misplaced self-importance with which she responded to questions from listeners who phoned into the South African radio programme.
Almost all the callers asked her to first apologise for bringing the country to its current quagmire but instead, she tried to shift the blame to President Mugabe and condescendingly dwelled on thanking the South African government for taking Zimbabwe’s economic refugees.
In summary, most callers wanted her to apologise, in her personal capacity, for the role that she has played in the current predicament of this country. Instead of answering plainly, she scornfully said she had since apologised in a statement and she would republish it for those that missed it to see that she was “sorry”.
The short and long of it is that ZPF suffers from a public relations disasters of monumental propositions, especially when its leadership is put on air. The pathetic handlers of ZPF leadership just hang them out there to dry and every voter worth half a grain of salt would never elect such a parched rags into the office of a mere village head.
For all intents and purposes, under the leadership of Dr Mujuru, ZPF will continue to be a hard sell that alienates the electorate because it is as off-putting as it is disgusting.
What is worse is that Dr Mujuru still speaks as if she is in power. The tone of her rhetoric is overloaded with a severe and acute identity crisis. She speaks as if she is still Vice President of Zimbabwe and second secretary of the ruling party Zanu PF.
She is of the erroneous belief that since she once held these powerful appointed positions, she can commandeer the entire nation to vote for her at the snap of her fingers and the region will sympathise with her while the international community will fund her.
Clearly, those who hold her hand have selfishly omitted advising her that she is on her own now and that big Zanu PF tent which used to protect her even though she bungled with mind-boggling propensity, is no longer there. She has to find her own material to build her tent otherwise she will soon perish because of exposure to the unforgiving political environment ridden with a brutal and sceptical electorate out there.
Her attack of a single centre of power within a political party such as Zanu PF will also do her more harm than good. Of all people, having been in Government for 34 years, Dr Mujuru should have known that before ZPF, there have been several opposition political parties and their opposition has always been to the centre of power. When the Unity Accord was signed in 1988, both Zanu PF and PF Zapu had realised that more than one centre of power in African politics is not only fatal but retrogressive.
Unfortunately, the Unity Accord and its centralism of power was immediately destabilised within a year by the formation of a short-lived political outfit called the Zimbabwe Unity Movement (ZUM), led by the late prodigal Cde Edgar Tekere who at first was violently opposed to the idea of one centre of power but years later warmed up to the idea after a forgettable spat in the political wilderness.
There have been several outfits and cabals such as Enock Dumbutshena’s Forum Party, Shakespeare Maya’s National Alliance for Good Governance, Daniel Shumba’s United People’s Party, Egypt Dzinemunhenzva’s African National Party, Morgan Tsvangirai’s Movement for Democratic Change, Job Sikhala’s Movement for Democratic Change 99, Welshman Ncube’s Movement for Democratic Change, Tendai Biti’s People’s Democratic Party, Elton Mangoma’s Renewal Democrats of Zimbabwe, Simbarashe Makoni’s Mavambo, just to mention a few. And now we have Dr Mujuru’s Zimbabwe People First.
Just like the other parties, they were all formed because of greed, pride, egotism, power-hunger, selfishness and ironically, for a quest of their very own centre of power. Some are now defunct, some irrelevant, some inconsequential and that is the same fate that will befall Dr Mujuru.
Without a doubt, ZPF will survive for as long as Humpty Dumpty survived. They do not know how they have scaled a political wall and will soon have a great fall such that all the pawns on their political chessboard will not know how to put their eggy party back together again.
Dubulaizitha!
