THE NATURE of national politics is that State leaders select their Cabinet according to the prevailing situation within their country. For example a country at war will have its leader select a war cabinet.
-Cont Mhlanga
Zanu PF led the 33-year-old country to a mix-masala mess and the mess now needs some fixing. President Robert Mugabe and his advisors have given the country a fix-it cabinet.
From our opposition ranks, I already hear voices that are quickly dismissing this fix-it cabinet as recycling of deadwood.
I can only say to the opposition please trade with care because I don’t see deadwood here. I see the best fix-it Cabinet on the ground.
The crucial question to ask is what will they fix and who will be the casualties along the way?
Don’t mind how they will fix- it as we are all familiar with how this team operates. For an answer we have to be patient and wait for the Zanu PF December national conference where we will get to separate election talk from guiding policy resolutions that will inform the operations of this fix-it Cabinet.
So to the question what will they fix and how, I don’t want to speculate I will wait for the December conference where Zanu PF’s full intentions will unfold to the country.
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After December when the team has had enough time to come together to find each other’s plans and deliverables, we can start on a one-on-one hard talk.
Can our opposition handle this fix-it Cabinet? is the question I want to discuss in this article.
I am afraid that the answer at this stage comes from opinion articles coming from the majority of the opposition names whose content is too obvious and predictable (excluding Tendai Biti’s).
I can only feel pity for the opposition because they have a bad tendency of taking Zanu PF for granted and dismissing it as a clueless finished, bunch of old people.
This attitude is costing our opposition’s revolution. The opposition needs to quickly reorganise its attitude if they want to survive this fix-it Cabinet and come out victorious in 2018.
With this fix-it cabinet loaded with balanced talent, time is not on the opposition side. To borrow from Zanu PF’s own phrase after the July 31 election; “the people have spoken”, what did the people say?
Zimbabweans just said you people messed up our country and our lives so you are not going anywhere before you fix your mess. We are not going to allow anyone to fix your mess while you walk away stinking filthy rich as we wallow in poverty with appalling service delivery.
We give you five years to fix it. So fix it!
Zanu PF got this massage and challenge from the people of Zimbabwe and they have responded with an excellent fix-it Cabinet to do the job.
By the look of this Cabinet, Zanu PF is in a no celebration mood and they will hit the ground running in all directions.
A Cabinet of 26 people and a government of 64 to lead a national assembly of 270 people is not a bloatted government.
It is the National Assembly that is blotted and not this government. However, the matter of the size of the National Assembly is a matter of our constitution and not a Zanu PF matter.
The opposition is looking and seeing only deadwood being recycled, but it all depends where you are looking.
Look at the line-up of Zanu PF’s deputy ministers and show me deadwood.
I see a Zanu PF that is headed for a full cycle of reinventing itself for the future after missing the road in 2000.
I see the late Vice-President Simon ‘Mzee’ Muzenda being reborn right there before our eyes and soon it will be Bona Mugabe winning a constituency seat in Lupane or Marange. Why not?
How can a party loaded with elected young deputy ministers run out of new ideas?
These young politicians are in the ranks to bring in the much-needed new ideas and one can only underestimate them at their own peril.
The old names in the field are there to provide the necessary experience and wisdom while shielding the young and upcoming ones from the enemy.
And you call such an elaborate strategy of party leadership succession deadwood? Be serious. It must dawn now to the opposition that they are facing a new Zanu PF institution.It is also interesting to hear from some corridors of analysts’ talk of demotion of ministers in this new Cabinet.
Really? I see the hard and tough Zanu PF team players who are no nonsense fixers being moved to the messy zones to fix things there while the methodological managers have been moved to stabilise when fixers are done with their jobs.
The party elders have been moved closer to the president to assist the aging captain to create assignments for what needs to be fixed. He needs that support more than ever for several reasons and that is normal depending on the situation faced by the selected Cabinet team.
We all saw Water minister Saviour Kasukuwere aggressively shifting mindsets and bringing in new uncomfortable frameworks in the Indigenisation ministry and we heard and saw people scream and run.
Now the quiet and methodical former Environment minister Francis Nhema moves in to take over the ministry to cruising altitude and to safe landing.
Kasukuwere is moved to the parks where some families and their foreign connections are still playing god with our natural game and tourism products within the parks.
I can only say watch out boys and girls, Tyson is now headed to your door steps in those jungles and you better have some good coffee to offer him and speak his language when he knocks on your doors, or better still start running.
He is coming there to fix it and we all know he will. Soon we will start to hear screaming voices from the Zimbabwean forests. Transport-Obert Mpofu fought the battles of minerals before our eyes and we saw him fix that sector.
Screams came from across the world as he set a new mineral ground plan for Zimbabwe. Someone moves in to manage that dispensation now while he moves to fix the messy transportation and infrastructure sector. No economy can turn around with dead transportation and infrastructure such as ours and Mpofu is headed there to fix it.
I can already hear whispers of confidence that he would fix it.
Finance Patrick Chinamasa, I call him the “negotiator”, fixed the messy political arena through his Justice ministry.
We saw how he pulled the strings for his party during the inclusive government using the old Zanu PF strategy of swallowing the opposition and then finishing it off.
They did that with Joshua Nkomo’s Zapu and recently with the MDC. He is now moving to the messy financial sector to fix it. This is the very man who was a minister for less than two months and sent the Zimdollar to the grave yard never to come back again.
Those banks that have destroyed the banking and saving culture of Zimbabweans, you better have a better deal for the negotiator when he lands at your door step.
Justice minister Emmerson Mnangangwa the security godfather, moves up to Justice to secure what Chinamasa negotiated.
This could also spell the end of senseless invasions of land and or businesses.
I can go on and on, but I think I have made my point that there are no demotions yet here, but top fixers moved to trouble areas that did not get adequate attention during the era of the inclusive government.
One such ministry that did not get adequate attention is Agriculture and they have responded by giving it two deputy ministers to fix it. Here I see an emphasis on short and long-term interventions to get agriculture working again minus the white farming community if they continue playing to the world the human rights card on land acquisition instead of climbing down to joining the government in making agriculture work again.
It’s not clever for white famers to make the land acquisition a human rights issue given the history of land acquisitions in Rhodesia.
This Zanu PF team must win or it’s the end of Zanu PF as a party. It does not want to blow away the chance of ruling for a 100 years as predicated by some Sadc observers.
I find this prediction funny, but it may come to pass given the simplistic Facebook activists’ attitude that is currently prevailing in the opposition.
There are already talks in the air about forming a new broad-based opposition party to substitute both MDCs.
That is an indication of how playful people in our opposition politics are against Zanu PF, a party that Jabulani Sibanda likes calling a “revolutionary party”.
One does not play games against the word revolution. So the Zanu PF team cannot fail. They must fix this mess to remain in power for the next 100 years and I am sure they want to remain in power for the next 100 years. Given this background and the fix-it people focused programmes sanctions or no sanctions why should Zanu PF change Home Affairs minister Kembo Mohadi’s playing position?
Or that of Forein Affairs minister Samuel Mbengegwi, Tourism minister Walter Mzembi or Local Government minister Ignatius Chombo and many other veterans. There is also the Liaising in Psychomotor Activities in Education ministry!
May be this one was proposed by the robotics professor as it is just too high for a layman like myself to place it within the pressing needs of the people like other ministries.
It’s common knowledge that rules of any team building prohibit the substitution of the whole team at a single stroke. A team must always have a solid backbone.
As I said in the beginning that Zanu PF’s next stop is its December conference where its ground plan for the next five years will be fully unleashed, the only force that can stop them is what those that are outside the party will spin into the political landscape of the country in the first twelve months after the December conference.
I am afraid I don’t see and hear any seriousness from outside the Zanu PF ranks that will change and excite the political landscape to a point of unsettling this now ruling new Zanu PF party.
The more I read and analyse the new fix-it Cabinet the more I wish we could get an adequate rainy season and a bumper harvest this year. I can only conclude by saying GOD SAVE ZIMBABWE and its lovely ever smiling people.
