Our infantile democracy is once again under siege from nauseating violence fronted by midnight knobkerrie-wielding maniacs and arsonists eager to please their masters. At the behest of their leaders, they ferociously throw debris at unarmed peace-loving Zimbabweans.
The focus of the leadership, which should be to formulate policies that will bring social and economic transformation, has been diverted towards an entirely different objective. While the country is burning and in the throes of a biting economic crisis occasioned by foreign and domestic currency woes, worsening corruption, power deficits and company closures among other challenges, energies are being expended on internal party fights aimed at extending President Emmerson Mnangagwa’s term in office beyond 2028, instead of solving the country’s challenges.
Mnangagwa himself has publicly stated — in the full glare of local and international news channels — that he will step down at the end of his mandated two terms, which come to an end in 2028.
Besides, all these manoeuvres will undoubtedly create an uncertainty that will scare away investors. If the leadership has no respect for the supreme law of the land, then they do not care a bit about the rule of law, for long the albatross around our necks. Power retention has become the objective which they want achieved at any cost. No one cares about the worsening poverty citizens have endured for decades.
We are slowly receding into a hard-hat area, again. Once again, just like with elections, the stakes are high. The administration feels cornered as it seeks to tear apart the 2013 people’s constitution and toss it into the bin.
All what Mnangagwa’s supporters in Zanu PF want is to have their “Resolution Number 1” — that seeks to perpetuate his grip on power at all costs, including bastardising the scared supreme document, if need be. It looks like we are at a stage where they are ready to throw the constitution out through the window. It is getting hot in the kitchen. And when the stakes are high, Zanu PF has a tendency of resetting into default mode — violence.
Violence is Zanu PF’s weapon of choice in pursuit of their sadistic and whimsical political ambitions. This is closely followed up by lawfare — the abuse of the legal system to get court decisions that favour them while throwing dissenting voices into prison for fictitious crimes.
For Zanu PF, violence is an art they perfected during the liberation struggle in Zambia and Mozambique and elsewhere in the front where they killed for power. The good and the innocent among them were criminalised and vanquished. The bad and the brutal who executed the onslaught on the good managed to survive and took the reigns in post-independent Zimbabwe.
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Forty-five years on, they are still brutalising innocent citizens at every opportunity to muzzle dissenting voices in a show of force to retain power.
But the citizens are having none of the macabre “Resolution Number 1” or the 2030 agenda by some in Zanu PF, who are keen to entrench the wilful demolition of the constitution. They just do not understand why a presidential tenure, which is stipulated in the constitution, needs to be altered. In short, they just do not get it. However, the said section in Zanu PF does not understand why the citizens want to resist the move.
Except in Africa and in other autocratic countries, two terms must be sufficient, and to want to add more years of poverty and terror is not far from pressing the self-destruct button. This is what Mnangagwa’s supporters want — to push the government to immediately implement the now-infamous “Resolution Number 1” that they recommended in Bulawayo and upheld at the Mutare conference recently.
Soon after the collective madness that happened in Mutare, opposition figures coalesced to voice their displeasure at the moves towards tearing the constitution. The democrats and constitutionalists should have met for a mere press conference at the academic luminary and researcher, Ibbo Mandaza’s SAPES Trust on Tuesday October 28 to voice these concerns as citizens in a supposedly democratic country with democratic rights as enshrined in the constitution.
The press conference never happened as Zimbabwe woke up to news that the SAPES Trust conference room had been gutted by militant arsonists who do not want anyone to be an obstacle to Zanu PF’s attempt to extend Mnangagwa’s rule. The night guard was reportedly abducted while locks to the gate were replaced.
During the same night, the house of another constitutional proponent, Gilbert Bgwende of the Constitutional Defence Forum, was set ablaze.
When the organisers of the Harare press conference insisted on going ahead with the presser, moving to Argency Gumbo’s law firm in Mt Pleasant, the police were deployed to lay siege on the property and immediately stopped the press conference which had just started.
Meanwhile, citizens in Bulawayo who had also organised a press conference to speak out against the 2030 agenda or whatever it is morphing out to be, were also stopped by police units armed to the teeth. That is the predatory Zanu PF we know, the Zanu PF we have gotten used to since 1980 and before that, the carnivorous party that brutalises its citizens for a living.
Lest we forget, it is the party that presided over Gukurahundi, the sordid act that killed thousands in its wake in Matabeleland and the Midlands provinces at the dawn of our independence. It is the same party that took the lives of hundreds of opposition officials and supporters, especially towards the run-off election in June 2008.
The party does not know how to persuade on the basis of its ideals. They know how to use force — abduct and torture their way to power and power retention. Zimbabwe has always been a political hard-hat area and events of the last week of October have reminded citizens of the reawakened monster, that had temporarily lulled at the euphoric belief that they had successfully decimated opposition movements by incorporating some and violently subjugating others.
The marauding Zanu PF activists have been unleashed as the monster is on the prowl again, seeking whom to devour whatever stands in its way.
Kapepa is a university professor, political activist, social justice proponent and seasoned advocate for democracy. He writes in his own capacity.
