More questions than answers

If so, will you vote? And if so, how will you vote?

We know it can’t be free or fair, so why does anybody contest it? Doesn’t that give it a spurious credibility?

If Tsvangirai wants to cut his own throat, I won’t sharpen a razor for him to do it with. On the other hand, given the extent of rigging, the number of people refused registration, the number of dead people on the rolls and all the other tricks that Israeli company NIKUV have been preparing with Zanu (PF) for months, it seems more sensible to vote if they’ll let you and insist you don’t want to be helped, unless you are really blind or illiterate and you can choose your own helper. The more votes there are against the riggers, the harder they must work for the result they want.

One good thing is that this time the world won’t stand by and wait while Joyce Kazembe and her CIO stooges take six weeks to massage the figures into shape. At this stage it doesn’t matter if your party’s posters will be torn down, or their broadcasts refused by DeadBC. We know who is doing those things and we know what we think of them.

Misinformation about when, where and whether to vote would be more serious, but we all seem to have cell phones, so it is easier to spread the right information. It is more difficult to be sure that everything you hear, even that way, is correct. It may not be what it claims to be. We need to be careful.

Even Baba Jukwa may not be what he claims to be. Older readers probably remember the National Observer and how in 1975 or ‘76 it became as popular as Baba Jukwa is now. It said what we didn’t dare to say out loud and it seemed to have good inside information on things we wanted to know, but when people saw it was very cleverly feeding us disruptive and divisive stories, it vanished without trace. Some of the results of its deceptions are still with us, but we escaped just in time from the worst. Are we any more alert now than we were then? We can’t be sure; we must examine every story carefully.

Then there are other signs of hope; does the special vote fiasco mean that they can’t rely on their troops, whether military, police or Chipangano, to do their dirty work? SADC and maybe the AU won’t be so easily fooled this time, but what can they do if the Old Man decides to defy them? The SA army couldn’t sort us out in a morning as they did with Lesotho, but our guys have made us so dependent on imports that real trade sanctions would produce results in a week if Zuma is serious.

That would work even against a military coup – if our troops were still ready to support one. Does the failure of the special voting suggest the security chiefs would meet the same kind of resistance from the lower ranks if they tried to stage a coup? Or did they plan that failure?

Any fool can ask more questions in 10 minutes than the wisest man can answer in a lifetime, so we can’t answer all of these. Right now we can’t even predict when Zanu (PF) will disintegrate, but we know it’s splitting. Will that be good news for us or the opportunity the military are waiting for? We can only watch and if you pray, pray as you never did before.

Don’t look further afield for help. The Brits and the Antwerp diamond merchants don’t like to see the Chinese snap up our diamonds cheaply; they might try to buy our apostles of ‘sovereniti’ back to the loyalty they showed when they stashed their loot in Western banks and sent their kids to British and American schools.

We must be our own liberators. And if the enemy makes so much noise and confusion – they must be running scared.