Joice Mujuru: A leopard and its spots

Source: Joice Mujuru: A leopard and its spots – NewZimbabwe 22/04/2016

AS the wise saying goes, the future is a continuation of the past modified by the present. Applied to Zimbabwe, we have an individual who has been with us for the past forty-five years, beginning her adult life by serving in different capacities in government.

Currently, she is in the less illustrious ‘no-man’s land’ but wants to ascend to the highest office in the land come 2018.

Her recent utterances betray someone who has learnt nothing and forgotten nothing since her long Zanu PF days.

Joice Mujuru rose to prominence as a gallant soldier of the liberation struggle in the late 1970s. Her liberation exploits aside, her role in the (mis)governance of the country after independence needs close analysis to gauge whether she in fact merits being given the job that his one-time mentor, President Robert Mugabe has dismally failed to handle.

Upon attaining independence, Mujuru was appointed to cabinet and given the community development portfolio. She took it upon herself to further her studies which she had abdicated during the 1970s in order to participate in the liberation struggle.

Her output in the portfolio was as obscure as the portfolio itself. During the period, most people were still excited about independence and were not too keen to put the new black government under scrutiny.

Sometime in the 1990s, Mujuru was transferred to Mashonaland Central province as its governor. She again never excelled enough to win the hearts of her home people.

Came another cabinet recycling in the late 1990s and she was given the Ministry of Information. It is then that she showed that she harboured deep hatred for the Ndebeles by her apparent disrespect for then Vice President Joshua Nkomo in a case that involved the now successful Strive Masiyiwa’s bid to launch a mobile communications.

Her disdain for free market enterprise also surfaced. The licence was subsequently issued against her will though. During the war victims compensations, Mujuru brazenly claimed that she was 98% disabled by the struggle and claimed huge amounts of money.

Fast forward to the new millennium, the liberation heroine found herself heading the water development portfolio. A propagandist that she is, she started advertising the Matebeleland Zambezi Water Project, Tokwe-Mukorsi Dam and Kunzvi Dam. To date, the MZWP is just a pipedream as is the hope that Zanu PF shall investigate Gukurahundi!

Kunzvi Dam is still work-in-progress. The project that was supposed to be Tokwe-Mukorsi is the source of the current misery for those living on its banks as flooding has become a reality. Needless to say that Mujuru and her godfather Mugabe routinely shunned the poor of Tokwe-Mukorsi during their hour of need.

As if her horrendous performance in the various portfolios was not enough, her boss and godfather “El Chapo” Mugabe kicked her upstairs this time to vice president, following the death of then vice president Vengai Muzenda.

Her rise to power claimed the scalps of many of her rivals who were confined to political Siberia for allegedly plotting to block her then inevitable rise. For the next ten years, nothing positive happened in the country despite the hype of having a woman vice president and frequent speculation that she was going to inherit the throne.

It was during her tenure as vice president that the Zanu PF government showed that it abhors democracy in the country as epitomised in changes of government, detests a good legal system, has revulsion of protection of private property, lacks monetary discipline and loves excessive regulation and lavish spending.

The central bank governor Gideon Gono printed trillions of worthless Zimbabwean dollars under the supervision of Mujuru who was also leader of government. The whole cabinet showed it lacked appreciation of the post-Ottoman logic of human development when they went to kneel besides rocks in Chinhoyi to witness diesel cascading off a rock with her as vice president.

The jatropha project which was a decoy of the government’s failure to procure fuel at the turn of the century was popularised by none other than her. When the economy was bleeding and multitudes were voting with their feet, Mujuru survived on grabbing farms, mines, buildings as well as securing loans from CBZ with no viable projects envisaged.

Do you still remember the bloody 2008 elections? Are leaders that participate in such levels of torture of own citizens reminiscent of Gukurahundi forgivable, let alone given more chances of doing the same?

Due to lack of shame, Mujuru hanged on a vice president during the GNU enjoying the fruits of the economic initiatives by GNU coalition partners in the two MDCs. Oblivious of her pending government exit, she still led government business when Zanu PF flatly refused to implement electoral and legal reforms in order to level the playing field ahead of the 2013 polls.

As if it was not enough, she participated in the peddling of propaganda and the rigging of the elections giving Zanu PF a hollow resounding victory. Now she is also complaining of the skewed political terrain. What a hypocrite?

With her throwing out of the government some of us thought that she could be of help by providing us with information on the heinous acts of the cult Zanu PF. Mistaken, she only provided us with international public knowledge that Mugabe sleeps like a tout high on bronco during meetings.
On the contentious topics of the torture of opposition figures and the rigging of elections by the rag-tag Zanu regime she professed absolute ignorance. On top of that her equally disgraced sidekick Rugare Gumbo insists that she is like cremora, thus cannot come second to anyone in any coalition. Zanu PF nostalgia at its apex!

She is now claiming to be the champion of the same Ndebeles that were butchered by her party under her nose and proposes to investigate the Gukurahundi massacre. This goes contrary to the Shona sayings that says one should not be happy consulting a witchdoctor that will implicate his or her mother. That Solomon Mujuru is one of the prime suspects is widely known.

Now that she is out there in the cold, she is claiming to be reformed and prepared to rescue the nation from the throes of socio-politico-economic problems. What makes her assertion hollow is that like previous Zanu PF outcasts, she displays the same level of nostalgia.

First of all, they are not prepared to work with the mainstream opposition the MDC-T. Dumiso Dabengwa and Simba Makoni pulled the same trick in previous elections resulting in the delaying of people’s will through the ballot.

Secondly, she has even named her party ZimPF to remind us of her undying love of the her former party. Thirdly, she has completely failed to articulate an economic recovery programme that is different from the Zanu PF when she was given the platform to do, for example on South Africa’s SAfm few months ago.

We were told by the late clever Einstein that the level of awareness that creates a problem cannot be the very same level that solves it. Mujuru was instrumental in creating our current misery and has not even reformed to the extent of extricating us from the woes she helped create for the country.

What is further nauseating about Mujuru’s claim to the throne is that she is basing it on the tired Mugabe chicanery of ‘people’ wanting her to lead, thus not emanating from her own desire per se.

A few months down the line before she was thrown out of Zanu PF, she claimed not to harbour any presidential ambitions. Who is fooling who here and why? A look at her ZimPF team portrays a combination of dubious characters who have either looted the country’s resources dry, terrorised people and or are totally clueless spent forces. The following line up is not aspiring even to grade zero pupil, Mutasa, Gumbo, Nguni, Matonga, Mutezo, Makova, Mutambara, Mavhaire, Bhasikiti, Kunaka and Jabulani.

If there have been a circus in town, it is the alleged Mujuru presidency. The lady behaves like a chameleon just like her mentor Mugabe. The bottom line is that the lady hasn’t delivered anything in her thirty-five year flirtation with the government at the top and what new will she bring this time round that she failed to in the past three and half decades?

Apart from seeking to protecting her ill-gotten wealth and probably trying to deny Tsvangirai the presidency yet again through vote splitting, there is no substance in Joice Mujuru’s claim to the state presidency.

For those seeking to preserve the status quo, Mujuru is your candidate come 2018. Mujuru is the snake in the trap that might be hiding and of which one needs to be careful of according to Hosiah Chipanga in his song Nyoka Muriva.

That she recently presented a party manifesto like a chimpanzee holding a kamikaze vase is an abhorrent ritual she was used to performing with Zanu PF’s ZimAsset!!!