It sounds impossible and unacceptable, and yet possible and acceptable to former South African president, Thabo Mbeki, the SADC, the African Union and the United Nations, that on losing an election, tyrants can imprison all those who dare oppose them, torture them, rape the defenceless defiant women, kill them in horrible ways, burn their bodies and dump them in shallow graves … Intimidate their way back to power …

And Thabo Mbeki, the SADC, the African Union and the United Nations would, very nicely, ask the offending tyrant to accommodate his democratically winning opponents in a government of national unity … Keep control of the same terror ministries formerly charged with the implementation of genocide … The SADC, the African Union and the United Nations have successfully made nausea-inflicting political history over the Zimbabwean genocide.

This marks the inevitable and irrepairable moral decay of the three principal custodians of good governance. Selective justice has remained excessively at play with Zimbabwe’s strong man, Robert Mugabe. A man who has shamelessly achieved political dust-bin legacy by running a lone-man brutal electoral race, self-anointing, and celebrating victory respectively, right below the nose of the policeman organisations. A tyrant who has bull-dozed his way into the African Union and the SADC summits successfully. Mugabe was quoted addressing his supporters soon after “winning” his violence-ridden lone-man race election and self anointment as saying “… I am going to the African Union summit in Egypt!… I want to see he who is clean who will lift a finger against me…” And, indeed, he went and was embraced as a legitimate head of state by all, other than Botswana, Liberia, Nigeria, Zambia, Tanzania and Raila Odinga.

But, generally, his will prevailed. Gabonese president Omar Bongo, another confirmed dictator, was very pleased with the continued swelling of the ranks of tyrants within the African Union so much that he congratulated Mugabe and told journalists that “Mugabe was a hero and president because he had taken the oath of office”.

The SADC, the African Union and the United Nations have, either by design or default, institutionalized a bad precedent. The SADC, the African Union and the United Nations are reigned by window dressing committees without commitments. The supposedly big and bold have successfully nurtured to fruition political dust-bin stuff form of legacy by sinking so low as to allow dictatorships to bloom in Zimbabwe and Kenya. In Kenya electoral fraud left over a thousand law-abiding citizens dead.

In South Africa, Thabo Mbeki massacred multitudes of citizens with his vodooistic HIV/AIDS doctrines. African National Congress loyalists who had voted the party for good health, poverty alleviation, food security and employment. And over Mugabe’s ungodly twenty eight years of iron-fist rule, three times of election rigging, three terms of presidential illegitimacy, one would need a multi-digit scientific calculator to get the correct totals for a non-stop atrocity exercise.

By forming The Movement for Democratic Change {Mutambara} Mugabe had targeted a plus or minus fifty percent split of the MDC which would have been a civilized way of legitimizing the illegitimate. But it did not work! The Movement for Democratic Change {Mutambara} has no chance to see light beyond the March 29 elections. It is a Mugabe Central Intelligence Organisation {CIO} formed and driven party that now comprises of its president Arthur Guseni Oliver Mutambara {AGOM}, Welshman Ncube {WN}, Gibson Sibanda {GS}, Priscilla Misihairambwi-Mushonga, {PMM} Siyabonga Ncube, {SN} Moses Mzila Ndlovu {MMN}, Patrick Dube, {PD}, Gabriel Chaibva {GC}, among the various other political rejects. The decision by the MDC {Mutambara} faction Members of Parliament to vote with the main MDC {Tsvangirai} faction for the parliamentary speaker’s position tells it all.

The losing MDC {Mutambara} faction candidate, Paul Themba Nyathi, an astute man of ministerial caliber, was voted for by ZANU PF. Mugabe’s ZANU PF had not fielded a candidate in respect of its “party-within-a-party” arrangement with the MDC {Mutambara} faction. {A party within Mugabe’s ZANU PF} Former Gutu South former Member of Parliament, Shuvai Mahofa’s Zimbabwe Ndeye Ropa {Zimbabwe is for blood} lyrics and kongonya {violent waist shifting shona liberation war dance} could not play the trick. Zimbabweans had nothing to do with ropa {blood} any more. They wanted good health, poverty alleviation, food security, and good governance as top-most priority, and Morgan Tsvangirai was there to deliver, and he must deliver.

These organizations have failed to rise above ordinary tea parties at a grave hour of need. Yet so express in bargaining for Mugabe’s amnesty for crimes against humanity despite the fact that he still wielded a machete and the bayonate, and still had fresh human blood dripping from his fingers. The three principal custodians of good governance have calculatingly exercised great caution about signaling Mugabe to the international Court of Justice {ICJ} in the Hague where he rightfully belongs. These organizations are here-by challenged to either introspect, self-evaluate, and put on their teeth and bite to enforce compliance from all the offending parties, or else, face the dust-bin irretrievably, rather than continue to take the world for a free and false security ride.

These organizations have, inevitably, gone on a fast lane of moral decay into “dictators galores” where mafia type of dictator gangsterism prevails against democracy in the name of good governance, there-by over-shadowing the lone voices from Botswana, Tanzania, Zambia, Nigeria, Jacob Zuma, Desmond Tutu, Nelson Mandela, Raila Odinga and the entire west. China, Russia, Namibia, Mozambique, South Africa {under Thabo Mbeki} and the Democratic Republic of Congo, among others, have honoured Mugabe for his twenty eight years of brutish, nasty and self-serving rule in various ways. The late Zambian political icon, Levy Patrick Mwanawasa, fought a losing battle. The all mighty God cheated the people of Zimbabwe by untimely calling that political saint whose life would have determined a great difference for the Zimbabwean citizenry. With Ian Khama alone, the SADC remains fully in the doldrums.

The two leaders actively complimented each other, especially, on the Zimbabwean crisis. But the late Mwanawasa and Khama’s endeavours have been failed by the SADC, the African Union and the United Nations who have remained too cosmetic. They all seem to be very much unclear of their mandate. What in Rwanda, Somalia, Sierra Leone and Liberia they called genocide, in Zimbabwe they opted for many names ranging from “sovereignty, crisis, no crisis, bloodshed, some opting for a splendid silence, and later an African victory”. In the true sense the Zimbabwean saga is a pure “African Electoral Fraud” and Mugabe has taken full advantage of it. It has remained an unholy scenario where electoral rejects lawfully prevail over the winners.

Dictators have undergone a rigorous free course on how to lawfully continue to hinge on to power after democratic rejection by the electorate. This is political evolution that trivialises the electoral process and robs the electorate of its will.

Reginald Thabani Gola is a Zimbabwean political analyst, civil society and human rights activist Cell. 00267 75040090 E-mail: regtgola@yahoo.com