Officials admit Mugabe a bad choice for poll
“It’s only an ill-advised fly that follows a corpse to the grave,” said a senior ZANU PF central committee member, summing up the mood here over President Robert Mugabe’s decision to seek re-election in next year’s watershed ballot.
While the state media raved and ranted over the four-day talk shop, senior Zanu PF officials and party stalwarts who spoke to this reporter on the sidelines of the conference were clearly worried about Mugabe’s gamble in the March election.
Speaking in hushed tones and away from the ears of hordes of state security agents who swamped this otherwise quiet and hot resort town, they made clear Mugabe needed nothing short of a miracle to shrug off a fierce challenge posed by Morgan Tsvangirai of the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC). “Campaigning for Mugabe is a futile exercise.
People are tired of him and it is clear to all of us that the writing is on the wall,” the central committee member said. “It will be a miracle if we win. I have already prepared myself for the shock and I believe that this is our last annual conference in power,” the official said. He and others who were interviewed by the Financial Gazette predictably declined to be named for fear of being victimised.
The haggard looks of most of the 7 000 or so delegates and the tense and solemn atmosphere at the Elephant Hills Golf Course, venue of the ruling party’s annual conference, painted an unsettling mood for Mugabe, Zimbabwe’s ruler of 21 years. A Zanu PF stalwart from Matabeleland said: “I know I might sound unpatriotic but the signs are there for all to see.
We are going to see another protest vote because people are still languishing in poverty. We have given people land but this has not significantly swayed the vote back to us. It is too late for us to try any new tricks.” Of concern to those delegates spoken to was Mugabe’s age.
He turns 78 in February next year. They said he should have allowed a younger politician to stand to save Zanu PF from a possible humiliating defeat. One delegate from the Midlands said: “He wants to be in State House up to his 83rd birthday and I don’t think this augurs well for the party at this crucial time in our country’s history. In Tsvangirai, the electorate sees a free person with young ideas.
Even those who are against the foreign-funded MDC might be forced to vote for Tsvangirai because of the age factor. We might physically clobber the electorate but it seems they have made a decision because how do you explain our poor showing in Chegutu, a Zanu PF stronghold in Mashonaland West?” he said, referring to his party’s drubbing by the MDC in the recent mayoral poll in that town.
Not even the overzealousness of officials from the Department of Information and Publicity in denying this reporter accreditation to the conference could hide the fact that all was not rosy within the ruling party as it gears itself for the do-or-die poll. Mavis Gumpo, herself in a very intolerant mood typical of her party, ordered this reporter out of the venue of the meeting, alleging that the Financial Gazette was an enemy of the state.
“You have no reason to be here because your paper writes negative stories about our party and the government,” Gumpo yelled at me. “This is a Zanu PF conference and you and your paper are an enemy of the state because you demonise our government. Get out of this place or else I will call security to deal with you,” added the official of the Department of Information and Publicity in the President’s Office. Away from the venue of the meeting, residents and business leaders blamed the Zanu PF gathering for disrupting their normal day-to-day lives and operations.
A businessman who flies tourists above the Victoria Falls claimed to have lost US$3 000 a day during the four-day jamboree because all aircraft operators had been banned from overflying the area for security reasons. “It’s a loss of income of about 25 percent of our monthly turnover. We have had to refund some clients and some tourists have fled to the Zambia side because of the behaviour of some war veterans,” the businessman said.
He spoke as it emerged that some war veterans, Mugabe’s most militant supporters who are occupying most of Zimbabwe’s commercial farms, had vandalised the world-famous statue of British explorer David Livingstone at the Victoria Falls. Bhekithemba Sibindi, a political analyst based in Matabeleland, described the Victoria Falls gathering as “a sublime mysticism of nonsense”.
“There was nothing new except signs that the party is going to continue with its destructive politics. How do you explain the destruction of David Livingstone’s statue and the arrest of a tourist who photographed the presidential motorcade?
These are signs of a violent party,” he said. “The conference was staged-managed. People who presented papers on the state of the economy said nothing new. Only senior and provincial members were given a chance to talk,” he said, adding: “It is also misleading for them to say the conference endorsed Mugabe (as Zanu PF’s presidential candidate) because everyone knows that he was endorsed long back.”
Posted by Wellington Chadehumbe
on December 21, 2001. Filed under Politics.
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