Zanu PF Panic and pandemonium

By Hatirebwi Nathaniel Masikati

The Zanu PF supreme leader has gone to sleep and is implementing dreams he has for his party forgetting he has Constitutional responsibilities to execute

As some of the political gains of the MDC-T’s entry into the coalition government start to bear fruit Zanu PF finds itself in the unenviable position where it has to find a way to avoid an imminent crashing defeat at the polls likely to be held in the next 18 months.

This is no mean task for a party that has hitherto known no other means of winning elections other than through electoral rigging and violence.

The Constitutional reform juggernaut that the party has tried everything possible to derail is likely to roar into action on June 2010.

There will be huge boulders rolled into its path by desperate Zanu PF supporters wishing away the most threatening coalition government initiative to their Party’s 30 year hegemony on power.

Unfortunately regardless of how intense and well coordinated they will be, the Constitutional reform initiative has gathered enough momentum to crush through any resistance that Zanu PF will mount to its completion.

The Zanu PF party leadership has long resigned to that reality as it has been made clear to them that Sadc and AU will not countenance any attempt by Zimbabwean political parties to derail or defer the democratization processes underway in the country aimed at restoring electoral credibility.

This message was made clear and unambiguous at the meeting of former African Liberation Parties held in Dar es Salaam, from 5 - 7 May 2010.

Ever since that meeting Zanu PF has realised that its days in government are numbered unless it mounts a credible and convincing violent free election campaign.

Preferably Zanu PF would like to get to the polls as the sole party in government such that it will have the monopoly of staging elections and advantages of unsupervised rigging thereof.

Zanu PF believes the reconstituted Zimbabwe Electoral Commission (ZEC) will not be in efficient enough to detect its established and complex election rigging methodologies other than violence and media space denials for opponents.

Zanu PF is not unduly worried about the raft of changes in the Media and Electoral Commissions that are under the ministries headed by its Ministers who will neutralize them if need be.

The Zanu PF focus is on how to weaken the MDC-T structurally and project it as an ideologically bankrupt party in the eyes of its multitudes of supporters.

On the legal side of matters it has been resolved that the Electoral Court must be onside for Zanu PF and the Judge President being the head of that Court will play a crucial role as witnessed in past electoral challenges hence the appointment of Justice George Chiweshe to that position.

Other unilateral appointments and vitiations of Constitutional Amendment No19 are in the grand scheme of the Zanu PF campaign to divert the MDC-T attention from pursuing the democratization agenda as its hands are tied with disputes in the coalition government power sharing modalities.

Zanu PF wants the disputes to cause the MDC-T to pull out of the coalition now that the transitional political arrangement is heading into the home stretch of what it was conceived to achieve and there will be no time to replace it other than through a Zanu PF managed election.

On its part the MDC-T is fully aware of this Zanu PF strategy to exclude it from managing the staging of the next elections and is working behind the scenes to ensure that election rules will not give Zanu PF sole responsibility for staging elections.

The fact that the President is mandated to set the next election date in consultation with the coalition government principals is causing butterflies in Zanu PF who would rather the President retains previous monopoly in fixing election dates.

That is why Zanu PF has now thrown all caution to the wind and is openly breaching the coalition government constitution to test the waters ahead of the planned unilateral election decisions the President will be asked to make.

If the MDC-T is not careful and does not act with speed to stop the current wave of unilateral actions on the part of the President it will be face with the reality that the President will call for an election next year the results of the constitutional reform process notwithstanding.

Forget all these sidelining events emerging from the coalition government because they are Zanu PF political ruse that can be corrected by the next government.

What is critical for now is for the MDC-T to keep Zanu PF as occupied with its decoy politics of unilateralism while the party works hard to craft laws and rules that will govern the conduct of the next elections and close the Zanu PF rigging avenues.

In that regard Gorge Chiweshe’s appointment as Head of the Electoral Court must be fought on every turf available and he should never be allowed to have a role in managing elections again after his failure in 2008.

All the noises about unilateralism are justified from the MDC-T but more importantly it is the action that will show the nation that President Mugabe is not as free to act as he has hitherto portrayed himself to be and there is no better signal than a Parliamentary challenge of his unilateralism of late.

That will exacerbate the panic and pandemonium gripping the party of geriatrics at present.