Nation at a crossroads

BY STAFF REPORTER

HARARE

Around 10.30am on Saturday, the first outrider burst from Simon Mazorodze Road into Willowvale Road, following behind were four more outriders and then a cavalcade of 19 vehicles.

Robert Mugabe was on his way to Mhofu Primary School in Highfield. To the surprise of all and sundry at the school, Mugabe was accompanied not only by his wife. Grace, but also by all his three children, eldest daughter, Bona and sons Robert and Chatunga, who both do not yet vote. Observers wondered why the young boys had come along.

looking deeply worried and weak, Mugabe went through the routine and cast his vote. “We will accept the results even if we lose,” he retorted when asked by journalists after he had cast his vote, albeit with a suspicious grin on his face and also struggling to utter words coherently, something that had marked his campaigning all along.

Around the polling station, stone-faced Zimbabweans stood frozen at the spectacle of the hundreds of police and military personnel who invaded the school just before the leader arrived in his long convoy. They were not under any illusions about the consequences of crossing the path of the convoy, or of the man it was designed to protect.

After talking to the group of mainly state-controlled journalists, Mugabe and his entourage left the school.

Along Wollowvale and Simon Mazorodze Road, traffic police officers were on standby to clear traffic for the Mugabe motorcade almost until midday and still there was no motorcade. Some of them must have wondered whether the old man had decided to do a Tsvangirai, meeting and greeting people at vegetable stalls, or whether he had collapsed in the ballot box.

Mugabe and his family had actually used another route to Highfield, and, according to unconfirmed reports, left for Harare International Airport, then on to a destination in Asia, probably Malaysia.

He would be leaving behind a nation at a crossroads; the majority of the electorate with high hopes and expectations that Saturday’s voting would be the first stage towards repairing the tattered country.