Comment
Zim Standard
IT has been alleged by many of its critics that Zanu PF has
survived for so long in power by ignoring reality.
Others have predicted that this fatal flaw in the party's collective
psyche is its Achilles Heel which could lead to its final undoing.
Recently, the party has celebrated two events which it loudly
characterised as victories: President Robert Mugabe's controversial
presence
at the EU-Africa summit in Lisbon and its truly extraordinary
"extraordinary" congress in Harare.
The congress's primary purpose was to endorse Mugabe's presidential
candidature in the harmonised 2008 elections. As predicted, the delegates
duly endorsed him, although there were discernible signs that not everyone
was as enthusiastic as they ought to have been.
There was a palpable undercurrent of discontent which may yet manifest
itself in the election. Given the back-stabbing that characterised the
run-up to the congress, this was almost inevitable.
In the first event, the EU-Africa summit, Zanu PF decided, against
reality, that Mugabe had scored a victory for his country by just being in
Lisbon, among the European and African leaders.
The reality was that the man stood out like a sore thumb. He cut a
lonely figure as a pariah. The media paid him special attention, not
because
he had triumphed over the British prime minister, Gordon Brown, who was
not
at the summit, but because of what he had done to his country.
In seven years he had presided over the rapid transformation of a
country with the potential to be the jewel of Africa into an economic and
political basket case.
The media wanted to record his presence for posterity: who was this
man who could achieve this feat of destruction in such a short period?
His country has the highest inflation rate in the world. Life
expectancy has dropped from nearly 60 years to just 34: the health
delivery
system has nearly collapsed. Just who was this blot upon the African
landscape?
For Zanu PF, though, Mugabe had triumphed over Gordon Brown and the
entire EU. Yet not only had Zimbabwe been discussed at the summit, a
number
of leaders had singled out Mugabe for rebuke over human rights violations
and the suppression of freedom of expression in his country.
If he did not leave the summit feeling thoroughly chastised, then it
could only be because, like the party he has led since 1975, reality can
be
suspended and life lived as a beautiful dream.
Zanu PF has refused to accept the reality of the disaster it inflicted
on the country with the land reform fiasco. It clings to the myth that
"the
people have got their land back".
What has been done with that land is not dwelt on in depth. The
pathetic decline in agricultural productivity is glossed over with such
lame
excuses as "successive droughts". Yet Gideon Gono, speaking at the
congress,
like a typical fish out of water, narrated the ugly story of Zanu PF's
refusal to confront realiaty: beneficiaries of the farm mechanisation
programme have sold the implements for cash.
Some of them were given ploughs, tractors and combine harvesters,
although they had no farms or even a small patch of land on which to use
them.
The corruption involved in such acts of dishonesty is unimaginable.
Yet Zanu PF has for long evaded that truth about itself: this is a very,
very corrupt party, which has contributed immensely to the decline of the
economy.
To vote for Zanu PF or for Mugabe in 2008 is to prolong a vicious
cvcle of national looting.
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