via Mugabe losing grip on Zanu PF – DailyNews Live 1 December 2014
HARARE – President Robert Mugabe and Zanu PF are on the brink. For 51 years, Zanu PF has navigated choppy and stormy waters with Mugabe ensuring that it has remained intact.
This week, the party holds its congress amid shellacking and purging of senior party officials who are spuriously accused of plotting to assassinate Mugabe.
What is remarkable about the current goings on in Zanu PF is the role that Mugabe has played in widening the chasm between a group aligned to his wife — Grace, and fellow comrades loyal to his deputy, Joice Mujuru.
Mugabe has tacitly approved the barracking and humiliation of Mujuru by junior party officials whose behaviour has been consistent with the similar vituperative insults by Grace.
Yet this behaviour is at odds with Mugabe’s earned role of being the glue that holds Zanu PF and Zimbabwe together.
“Mugabe is the glue that holds the party together. The death knell of the party may await his death and/or that of the other dinosaurs at the helm,” the United States embassy said in a cable released by WikiLeaks in the run up to the 2009 Zanu PF congress.
This observation no longer has meaning especially in the eyes of ordinary Zanu PF members and the general public whose expectation was a congress that seals the future of the party and to some extent, the country, but via a smooth process.
What is obtaining in Zanu PF leaves us with no choice but to put the blame squarely on the shoulders of Mugabe whose insatiable appetite for power is driving Zanu PF towards the precipice.
The congress has lost its true value to Zanu PF supporters and pro-democracy groups whose exhortations to the nonagenarian Zimbabwean leader to nurture our nascent political democratic processes, have been largely ignored.
It is Mugabe who emerges the winner at the end of this week’s congress but without a doubt it would be a pyrrhic victory because it is being achieved at the expense of democracy.
It would be really something special if Mugabe was to pull a rabbit of out the hat at the end of the congress considering that everything done so far points to a dead rubber.
There are no more elections; Mugabe will have the pleasure of determining who gets what!
The people’s vote does not count anymore!
And a man viewed as the glue that keeps Zanu PF together, is writing history that could potentially sink the party!
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