The Sunday Mail
After a near disastrous electoral result in 2008 in which President Mugabe was outpolled by MDC-T leader Morgan Tsvangirai in the first round of harmonised elections and Zanu-PF for the first time ever lost its majority in the National Assembly, the ruling party made a spectacular recovery in 2013.
That result was thanks to the party’s more appealing policies whose central plank was a deepening of the land redistribution programme through black economic empowerment on the one hand, and failure on the other hand by the MDCs to justify their tenure in the inclusive Government by way of clear policy initiatives or ability to resolve so-called “outstanding issues”.
They went into the inclusive Government promising to effect change from within but fell asleep before they could accomplish the task.
They were entranced by the trappings of power. Former secretary-general Tendai Biti would concede obliquely after the MDC-T and Tsvangirai lost the 2013 harmonised elections that while Zanu-PF was selling sound policies which resonated with Zimbabweans, his party was trying to sound “sophisticated”, exposing just who was in touch with the electorate between the two parties.
Zanu-PF came out of that election with a fresh spring in its step after regaining its dominance on the local political scene with a commanding total of 197 seats against MDC-T’s 70. President Mugabe won a clear mandate at 61,09 percent against Tsvangirai’s 33,94 percent.
Bhora Mughedhi/Ibhola Egedini had paid off. Electorally, that is the status quo.
Like the boy who pesters village elders with his cries of “wolf, wolf” so often when in fact there is none, Tsvangirai’s howls of electoral rigging masterminded by Nikuv were dismissed with the contempt they elicited given the wide margins at the constituency level and in the presidential tally.
He didn’t have the conviction either to carry through his threats of challenging the electoral results in the courts.
But a new mischief was afoot within the victorious ruling party.
Factionalism, or succession politics, was brewing once again to a point where the party’s winning Zimbabwe Agenda for Sustainable Socio-Economic Transformation (Zim Asset) was becoming the biggest victim of internal sabotage.
And so was the very policy of indigenisation as the factions rivalled to position themselves to succeed President Mugabe.
The December National People’s Congress would be the venue for a final showdown, where the President’s fate would be sealed in a vote of no confidence. This mischief was thwarted.
But it’s becoming clear that there are efforts to make sure Zanu-PF is kept distracted and that internal divisions deepen into unbridgeable chasms.
Lately that has taken the form of Zanu-PF’s own provincial coordinating committees demanding that MPs who are allegedly linked to ousted former Vice-President Joice Mujuru be “recalled”.
It doesn’t matter whether the number of MPs said to be at the beck and call of Dr Mujuru is 50 or 100.
That Zanu-PF could even contemplate such a decision verges on suicidal brinksmanship. It would be worse than bravado. And opposition parties are said to be gloating and salivating at such a prospect. Who wouldn’t?
Never mind the pretence that they are concerned about the wellbeing of Zimbabweans, the country’s economic recovery and that “electoral reforms” which they failed to effect while in government for nearly five years have not been carried out.
Without even thinking about the cost of the election, why should such a senseless prospect be tantalising to the opposition beside the chance to destabilise the country by once again appealing to foreigners to finance the election just as they did the constitution-making process, thus forcing in dangerous clauses which allow dual citizenship for Rhodies?
Interestingly, the agenda to recall the MPs is being pushed even after the party’s National political Commissar Saviour Kasukuwere made clear that the purges which preceded the National People’s Congress should be stopped until further notice.
Last week Professor Jonathan Moyo was forced to take a stand, stating the speculative canard about an imminent recall of 100 Zanu-PF MPs necessitating an election was “wishful thinking”.
The relevant section 129 (k) of the Constitution states that the seat of an MP becomes vacant if he/she has “ceased to belong to the party of which he or she was a member when elected to Parliament and the political party concerned, by written notice to the Speaker or the President of the Senate, as the case may be, has declared that the member has ceased to belong to it”.
From what Prof Moyo said last week, Zanu-PF has neither written such a notice nor expelled any of the MPs in question.
In any case, President Mugabe was very clear at Congress. While VP Mujuru had been expelled from Government, he said, she would revert to being an ordinary member of the party.
How then would Zanu-PF allow Dr Mujuru, the principal, to remain a member while expelling her agents (the said MPs) from its ranks?
This leaves the Commissariat department with a mammoth task to educate its rank and file about the implications and ramifications of their calls for the expulsion of elected MPs.
The economic costs are just enormous. But even more scary are the chances of the ruling party losing its parliamentary majority to spoilers whose mission is underlined by calls to revise the Indigenisation and Economic Empowerment Act for the pleasure of an unquantifiable number of prospective saviour Western investors.
This is a new year. People are desperate to start picking the low-hanging fruits from the Zim Asset tree and a reckless and costly election is not one such hanging fruit.
While such elections are permissible and possible under the Constitution if Zanu-PF wants them, they are improbable under current circumstances and they rank as one of the riskiest enterprises ever undertaken by a ruling party so soon after winning by such an overwhelming majority.
Happy New Year.
