HARARE - When a green file cobra flies over your homestead, it portends a
dreadful mishap; when an owl perches near your home in broad daylight,you
better seek the services of a traditional medicine man. These are beliefs
that the superstitious among us live with.
But a phenomenon more precise than scientific meteorological forecasts and
that has guided peasants in predicting freak droughts or bountiful seasons
merely requires checking how high the raucous weaver birds have built their
nests above the river’s normal water level.
Peasants can deduce the chances of the river breaching its banks from the
height of the nest and make contingent evacuation plans.
When a weaver bird constructs a nest at a low height, there is bound to be a
drought.
Just as the height a weaver bird’s nest is a precise barometer, so is the
trite con-trick of parading opposition party supporters defecting to Zanu PF
ominous of impending national polls.
These stage-managed defections, involving people of little or dubious
political virtue being “born again” portend an election in the offing,
particularly when abetted by a state media blindly retailing a ruse long
past its sale-by date.
When Zanu PF abuses the sole broadcaster to parade people that have revised
their political preference, publicly reciting reasons cloned from a
prototype for their change of heart, “to join the only revolutionary party
that has the people at heart,” Zimbabweans have concluded, without much
persuasion that elections are round the corner.
Greater wisdom dictates that an angler needs fresh bait to catch bigger
fish. Zimbabwe boasts of one of the highest literacy rates in Africa,
second only to Tunisia where the poverty-stricken and jobless citizens
recently hounded enduring leader, Ben Ali, into exile.
The high literacy rate means the majority of Zimbabweans can easily notice
counterfeit reports on events in the state media.
They see and read reports that do not bear any relation to facts, not even
the relationship which is implied in an ordinary lie.
They also see the state media publishing untruths and eager “political
analysts” building emotional super structures over events not likely to
happen, although these intellectuals would want them to happen the way they
portray them.
As polls loom on the horizon, the only propaganda line open to Zanu PF is to
present itself as a victim of Western imperialism which has become a perfect
scapegoat for its legendary failures. The party sees the electorate as
biddable and unable to withstand “tushuga netumasweets from the British” to
make rational political choices of their own.
Post-independent Zimbabwe has witnessed defections from the late Ndabaningi
Sithole led Zanu Ndonga; from Edgar Tekere’s Zimbabwe Unity Movement, (Zum)
from the late Joshua Nkomo’s PF Zapu and from Margaret Dongo’s Zimbabwe
Union for Democrats (Zud).
Currently, there are defections from the Movement for Democratic Change
(MDC) although we have yet to witness abandonments from Simba Makoni’s
Mavambo/Dawn/ Kusile (MDK) fringe party.
Zimbabwe is yet to witness Zanu PF’s cherished pipedream of a one party
state despite all these defections, libraries of songs clamouring for its
establishment along with the ineffectual million men and women marches.
One cannot help but snigger when a party cleaves to the old-hat claims that
it is the only revolutionary party that built school, clinics, hospitals so
on and so forth.
One cannot fail to notice politicians struggling to remind a seemingly
ungrateful electorate of their benevolence and agonise over its reluctance
to appreciate all that has been done for their benefit.
The signal for polls becomes more ticklish when the Head of State and
Government and Commander-In-Chief of the Armed forces offers a whooping
US$33 million in the form of agricultural inputs to rural peasants
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