By Nomusa Garikai| “After swimming around in Alice’s pool of tears, the animals need to dry off, and the Dodo recommends a caucus race. There are no rules; all of the participants run haphazardly around in no particular direction, and everyone wins.”
Lewis Carroll: Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
Ever since Zimbabwe’s rigged July 2018 elections (why MDC has disputed the result beggars belief since they knew Zanu PF rigging the elections and they, like all the other opposition parties participated regardless) the country has grappled the challenge of the economic meltdown.
(MDC leaders like Tendai Biti insisted the economic meltdown was worse under Mnangagwa than it was under Mugabe, a bit of self-indulgence nonsense as futile as comparing cobra to a black mamba – they are both deadly snakes.)
How to revive the nation’s economy has therefore become the country’s primary concern – the equivalent of getting wet animals to dry off.
Alice questioned the logic of a race in which there is no starting line, no finish line, no rules. But even the Dodo would question Zimbabwe’s caucus race for not only are there no rules but worse still, after one and half years of running around like headless chickens the economic is sinking deeper and deeper into the abyss.
Someone has seeded the idea that getting Zimbabwe’s main political leaders, Emmerson Mnangagwa and Nelson Chamisa to meet will solve all the nation’s political and economic problems. There is nothing to support this, indeed all the evidence show this is a waste of time but that is exactly why it is a caucus race. The race has been gathering momentum as more and more people joined in.
“Like SADC, the church also tried to cajole the main political protagonists to put the people first and their interests behind, but met a brick-wall from the politicians who now stand accused by political observers of being selfish and myopic,” reported one of Zimbabwe’s leading papers, Daily News.
“A deadly cocktail of high unemployment that stands at over 90 percent, the devastating effects of a drought that has left more than 5,7 million people exposed to extreme poverty and inflation that stands over 500 percent only means that for nostalgic Zimbabweans the past where a unity governance brought some stability to the economy is more ideal.”
Zimbabweans have had two national elections post the 2008 to 2013 GNU in which to reflect over the events of that period. The primary purpose of the GNU was to implement the raft of democratic reforms agreed in the 2008 Global Political Agreement.
Lest we forget, the GNU was necessary because not even SADC and the AU, known for endorsing dodgy elections, would accept Zanu PF’s claim of electoral victory of the 2008 given the blatant cheating in the March vote count and the wanton violence in the run-off that followed. The raft of reforms were designed to ensure there will be no repeat of the same cheating and violence.
The 2008 GNU failed to get even one reform implemented and hence the reason Zanu PF was able to blatantly rig the 2013 and then 2018 elections.
The economic “stability” the 2008 GNU brought was transient, as we can now see with the economic meltdown. There was no significant inward investment because investors and lenders were disappointed with the failure to implement the political reforms.
“According to the World Bank, Zimbabwe’s economy is expected to have contracted by 7,6 percent this year with prospects for growth dim due to a number of factors, such as endemic corruption and failure to attract foreign direct investment,” the Daily News acknowledged.
The WB, IMF and all the other international financial institutions have just told the Zanu PF regime that they will not give it any financial assistance because the regime’s reform programme is “off-track”.
We can be 100% certain that the WB and investors will not be trouping back into Zimbabwe just because Mnangagwa and Chamisa shook hands and formed a new GNU, especially when they know it will not implement any democratic reforms, just as the 2008 GNU failed to do.
There is no cause for all this “nostalgic” hysteria over a new GNU; just a continuum of the pointless caucus race of the last 40 years.
What Zimbabwe needs is to finally stop wasting time and treasure and implement the all important democratic reforms and end this curse of rigged elections and bad governance. Zanu PF and MDC will never ever implement the reforms, a new GNU will not change that. We need to get a new body that will.