Zanu PF succession wars a major worry

via Zanu PF succession wars a major worry – DailyNews Live. 8 June 2014   STAFF WRITER

HARARE – As we have reported countless times in all our inimitable newspapers — the Daily News, the Daily News on Sunday and the Weekend Post — the extent of factionalism within President Robert Mugabe’s Zanu PF party has reached such dangerous levels that some in that vaunted party are literally prepared to commit murder to advance their interests.

And for those who don’t follow our toxic national politics closely, this infighting within the ruling party — which is a thousand times worse and more ominous for Zimbabwe than the petty chaos bedevilling the MDC — is a result of the vicious succession gerrymandering inside the party that has been occasioned by Mugabe’s advanced age and failing health ahead of the 2018 national polls.

It is in this light that Zimbabweans ought to view the public shellacking that our politically-indefatigable information minister Jonathan Moyo received at the hands of Mugabe on Wednesday, Friday and yesterday.

It became worse following the death of veteran politician Nathan Shamuyarira.

In other words, the party’s factional battles have become so bad and untenable that once again our long-ruling nanogenarian leader felt obliged to intervene in the mess this publicly, in a desperate endeavour to bring some semblance of sanity within the party — bearing in mind Mugabe’s own strange comment of a few weeks ago that none of his top lieutenants was guaranteed to succeed him.

This is why all right-thinking Zimbabweans ought to be very worried, not just by Zanu PF’s legendary misrule of the past 34 years, but also by the party’s toxic succession wars that threaten to cause a complete implosion of our ailing body politic altogether.

Part of the crisis for the party and the country is the fatally-erroneous belief within the senior echelons of the party that Zimbabwe would implode without Mugabe and Zanu PF — and hence the rabid intolerance of opposition forces in the country, as well as the party’s public disdain for its own ambitious cadres, where ambition is almost equated to treason.

This is not just a girnomous error in terms of the management of dissent and ambition within the party, it has also meant that our country as a whole has paid dearly for this archaic politics over the past 34 years, as this culture now manifests itself in every facet of the country’s life — with obvious dire consequences.

Not only can anyone not tell the emperor now that his fine garments are fictitious and that his private bits hang cruelly exposed, it has spawned the terrible culture in politics, as well as both the public and private sectors that “chefs” are always right.

What a terrible shame for a country that craves to be seen as educated and smart!