By Patrick Guramatunhu| “We appeal to all political actors to respect the will of the people….we need to appreciate at every level that in the Second Republic the economy comes first before politics and as members of Zanu-PF you should make sure you lead the cadres in Government to do what we would have agreed here.

It becomes imperative for all of us to be aware that we work for the people and national good before those of individuals,” said VP Chiwenga.

Chiwenga was speaking at the Zanu PF Annual People’s Conference, in Goromonzi. 

This is as cynical as the village bully who keeps trading on everyone else’s toes and feelings and yet insist he is the peacemaker! 

Zanu PF blatantly rigged last year’s elections. The party denied 3 million Zimbabweans in the diaspora the vote, Mnangagwa says he won the elections with 2.4 million votes. ZEC failed to produce something as basic as a verified voters’ roll, for Pete’s sake. 

The EU, Commonwealth and all the other nations and organisation with a democratic record have all condemned last year’s elections as a farce. “The electoral commission lacked full independence and appeared to not always act in an impartial manner.

The final results as announced by the Electoral Commission contained numerous errors and lacked adequate traceability, transparency and verifiability,” stated the EU Observer Mission final report. 

“Many aspects of the 2018 elections in Zimbabwe failed to meet international standards.”

So, last year’s elections process “failed to meet international standards of transparency, traceability and verifiability”.

Zanu PF, as the party in government, was responsible for making sure the elections process met all the international standards and thus passed the free, fair and credible acid test with flying colours. It is nonsense to suggest such a flawed and illegal electoral process could ever produce a legitimate result. 

In other words, Zanu PF can claim it was the winner of last year’s elections and therefore has the people’s mandate to govern; this will not change the facts on the ground that last year’s election process was flawed and illegal and therefore this Zanu PF regime is illegitimate! 

Zanu PF has blatantly rigged elections in the past and we have, foolishly, allowed the party to get away with it setting a very dangerous precedence.

As we can see, the party has not only rigged elections but now considers it as its right to rig elections! 

After 39 years of rigged elections, the disastrous economic and political consequences of the decades of misrule and the country now in economic ruins, the need to break the vicious cycle of rigged elections and bad governance is now a matter of life and death.

Zanu PF rigged last year’s elections and the party must be forced to step down so the nation can implement the necessary reforms to stop vote rigging – this is not negotiable. 

To get out of the economic mess the country is stuck in, we must cure ourselves of the curse of rigged elections and bad governance.

The politics must lead the economy. A pariah state ruled by corrupt, incompetent, vote rigging and murderous thugs will never deliver economic recovery. Never!