That was the year when the economy was in freefall, the banks ran out of bank notes and people waited in endless queues for their own cash, for food and for fuel. By the middle of that year inflation had hit 42 million percent. Then Gideon Gono knocked 10 zeroes off the Zim dollar so that instead of 100 billion in the bank you had just $10.
From billionaire, to pauper overnight! That was the year the ZRP spent 2 million US dollars on tear gas, water canons for use, not against a foreign enemy, but against Zimbabwean citizens. For the poorest of the poor, there was nothing for it but to endure but for anyone who could scrape the fare together, there was only one direction and that was out. Upwards of three million people have left the country.
The most striking feature about this foray into the past was that the principal players are still there today. Mugabe still calls himself president; Chihuri is still Police Commissioner and the Service chiefs are all still in place; still saying they will never salute the opposition. In 2008 paid war vets and youth militia roamed the countryside inflicting horror on innocent villagers, first to intimidate them into voting for Zanu PF and after the poll to punish them for voting against Zanu PF.
Teachers were branded ‘enemies of the state’ on the grounds that they had rigged the vote in favour of the MDC. The education system collapsed as did health care with patients having to find their own food and pay upfront for everything from surgical gloves to operations. That was all just three years ago; the year diamonds began to make the chefs even richer.
What the scenes inside parliament did this week was to remind us that Mugabe’s violent followers respect no one – and certainly not the rule of law. Under the very noses of the police, mobs of Zanu PF supporters burst into parliament and beat up parliamentarians, journalists and innocent bystanders while the guardians of law and order stood by and did nothing.
Contrast that with police behaviour later in the week when 13 ROHR activists were arrested for peacefully demonstrating outside the High Court in Harare. The 13 are charged with ‘public nuisance’ and nothing better illustrates the police’s selective use of the law. That disgraceful incident in parliament shows us how important it is to learn the lessons of the past and never to forget the true nature of Zanu PF. Violence is their modus operandi and always has been.
Has Robert Mugabe condemned the action of his followers? Has he, the ‘Father of the Nation’ reprimanded these unruly thugs, visibly drunk according to observers, that this is no way to behave? It was a public meeting that was so violently disrupted; ironically, the subject under discussion was a Zimbabwe Human Rights Bill and the question of a Commission of Enquiry into the 2008 elections and all the violence that took place then.
How much has really changed since 2008? True, there is a GNU with the MDC ostensibly sharing political power but in reality Mugabe still controls the levers of power; the police and army continue to do his bidding; the state-controlled media tells people only what he wants them to hear and the courts of law have been compromised by their acceptance of Zanu PF ‘gifts’.
Economists tell us that the introduction of the US$ has led to great improvements and certainly life is easier on a day-to-day basis for non-political Zimbabweans. For politically active citizens it’s quite another matter especially if they belong to the MDC. Now in 2011 as Zimbabwe faces another election there is once again evidence of violence by Zanu PF against MDC supporters.
Tobaiwa Mudede is still Registrar General and his ‘perfect’ Electoral Roll has still not been revised. An estimated 3-4 million people in the diaspora still have no vote and this week Morgan Tsvangirai has threatened to boycott the poll. It’s hard to see how that would help the country out of the stalemate in which it has been for so long.
Yours in the (continuing) struggle PH. aka Pauline Henson author of the Dube books, detective stories with a political twist.
Post published in: Top Bloggers