Mnangagwa lets the cat out of the bag

VICE-PRESIDENT Emmerson Mnangagwa’s statements last weekend at the launch of wife Auxilia’s campaign for the Zibagwe-Chirumanzu constituency seat reveal a lot about what Zanu PF has been doing over the years and will continue doing regarding elections.

VICE-PRESIDENT Emmerson Mnangagwa’s statements last weekend at the launch of wife Auxilia’s campaign for the Zibagwe-Chirumanzu constituency seat reveal a lot about what Zanu PF has been doing over the years and will continue doing regarding elections.

His pronouncements indicate that elections in Zimbabwe have nothing to do with free expression of choice, can never be fair, and would never be independent of the long arm of Zanu PF.

We might be chillingly told by him that elections from now on will follow a prepared Zanu PF plan where voting on paper will only be an endorsement of a known result. We might already have results of the 2018 general elections. Election queues will from now on be Zanu PF queues.

Election agents for Zanu PF are headmen, party chairpersons, and councillors. We believed at some point that some of these were apolitical, but we have been wrong all along.

Mnangagwa’s statements and directives to voters are all the more chilling considering that he is a man who was taught to kill. There is no way that an ordinary councillor and headman will act contrary to Mnangagwa commands.

They will lead the electorate to vote for Zanu PF. We have coldly been told that whoever votes for anything other than Zanu PF will be shut out from all privileges that go along with being a rural dweller.

That means farming inputs, seeds, fertilizers, will no longer be given to what is considered voices of dissent. While all along Zanu PF has been rigging elections underhand, the process is now overhand.

In addition, a voter can no longer think of voting anybody else into office other than Zanu PF; a voter has to be Zanu PF and nothing more.

Let us hope that the recipe Mnangagwa has for Zibagwe-Chirumanzu is not a national one, but a much localised piece of nonsense.

If the trained killer’s words indicate what the entire country has to expect in the future as new trends in elections, then the precedence being set in the Midlands cannot produce anything else but a bunch of bridled Zimbabweans mutely queueing every so often to seal one electoral doom after another. Who will dare so talk of electoral apathy?

The latest disclosure by the second most powerful politician in Zanu PF probably gives credence to claims by MDC-T leader Morgan Tsvangirai that he was robbed of victory in the controversial July 31 2013 polls. Mnangagwa has the keys to his party’s uncouth election strategies.