By Patrick Guramatunhu- The root cause of Zimbabwe’s economic mess and political paralysis is the failure to hold free, fair and credible elections. The country has been stuck with a corrupt, incompetent and murderous dictatorship for the last 40 years which has remained in office all these years by rigged elections. 

Zanu PF has stifled all meaningful debate by creating a monolithic system in which only the voice of the leader, his cronies, flatters, apologists and propagandist are heard. All other voices are considered a threat to the regime and are ruthlessly silenced. It is therefore no surprise that the nation has again and again found itself wasting time and resources chasing the mythical five-legged hare.

The sanctions imposed by the West are not the root cause of Zimbabwe’s economic meltdown; there is a mountain of evidence to show that corruption, mismanagement and lawlessness are the real problems.

The Zanu PF dictatorship did not want to deal with corruption, mismanagement and lawlessness because the only way to end these problem is by dismantling the dictatorship itself. This is something the regime did not want to do and so it has imposed sanctions as the cause of all the nation’s problems. 

It typical Zanu PF style, the regime has loaded sanctions as the root cause of the country’s problems on one hand and then made a big song and dance about the measures the regime had lined up to mitigate the ill-effects of the sanction.

Starting with Mugabe’s “Look East!” policy launched 20 years ago to Mnangagwa’s recent claim that the country has devised local solutions to spur development regardless of the sanctions. 

Mugabe’s look east policy have not worked, as the economic meltdown has only got worse. Mnangagwa’s solutions will accomplish nothing too because the economic meltdown is not caused by sanctions. 

Zimbabwe is in a serious economic mess and it is not going to get out of it by wasting time and resources addressing imaginary sanctions problems whilst the real problems, corruptions, etc. 

Sanctions are not the target we want to end the economic crisis; corruption and mismanagement are the targets we want. ”Kupedzera miseve pamakunguvo haga dziripo!” (We just wasting arrows shooting at crows instead of the guinea fowls!) as one would say in Shona.