ZANU PF Desperate and Very Dangerous

By Levi Mhaka

Phone text messages and emails being circulated among many Zimbabweans are describing the political situation as follows: The two major soccer teams, Dynamos and CAPS United, are playing a cup match at the National Sports Stadium. By the end of the match, the score board is reading 4-0 in favour of CAPS at the end of the match. The match officials, commissioners, special guests and fans are satisfied with the peaceful environment that has prevailed during the match.

Supporters of the winning team are then told not to celebrate until the match results are announced on Sports News on both radio and TV. Before they are announced, the nation realises that the losing team is meeting the national football association (ZIFA) by itself. Later the losing team issues public statements that the football association should simply announce a draw and therefore there a need for a rematch.

We are then told that it is only ZIFA that should announce results and soon after that Dynamos tells us that the captain for CAPS team wants to be the Vice Captain of Dynamos.

(Bhora rotambwa kuNational Sports Stadium pakati pe Dembare neMakepekepe. Makepekepe wins 4-0 kobva kwanzi imbomirai kufara kusvika mawona Sports news pa ZTV neparadio. Zvonzi vakuru veDynamos vamboita meeting nevakuru veZifa kumaoffice avo. Kwozobuda pa ZTV zvichinzi yaita zero zero and there is supposed to be a rematch. Mozonzwa kuti referee nema linesmen acho vasungwa. Kuita here ikoko?Pave paya, zvavekunzi Captain weCAPS United ari kuchemera kuita Vice Captain weDembare. Manje so!!)

In the State-owned Herald newspaper front page story on Wednesday, April 9, 2008, ZANU PF has claimed that MDC President Morgan Tsvangirai has “begged” to become the Vice President of Zimbabwe “in a government of national unity after being told by his advisors that a possible run-off with President Mugabe was not in his best interests”.

One wonders how MDC can approach ZANU PF for possible talks for a coalition government when results have not been released at the behest of ZANU PF and when all the indications are that ZANU PF will lose in a peaceful and fair electoral re-run or runoff.

In a marginally won election, the winner must approach the losing party to form a coalition government. ZANU PF is not the winner and currently there is no winner without results having been made public!

The Zimbabwe Electoral Commission’s (ZEC) lawyer, George Chikumbirike made a submission in the High Court on Wednesday, April 9, 2008, that releasing presidential results is "dangerous”. Why it is dangerous, he did not elaborate.

From the information slowly filtering into the public domain, the danger is that people will get to know the extent to which Robert Mugabe got far less than the combined votes of ZANU PF candidates for House of Assembly (HA) or Senate. A lot of people who voted for ZANU PF legislative (HA or Senate) and local authority candidates, did not necessarily vote for Robert Mugabe to become president. They voted for either Morgan Tsvangirai or Simba Makoni.

A constituency based results for the presidential election will clearly show this view. It is wrong to use the parliamentary results as a basis to make people expect a re-run or run-off.

This is the level of embarrassment that ZANU PF cannot stomach being made a public matter.

ZANU PF’s strategy is to render the release of results useless and meaningless by focusing on the very insignificant anomalies as a result of the arithmetic work of its thoroughly vetted ZEC election officials, most of whom are employees or informers of CIO. All these arrests are stage managed because if ZANU PF is the complainant, then it had access to the results on its own. Statements being made by ZANU PF prove beyond reasonable doubt that it had receipt of the actual results by itself by coercing ZEC.

If there were simple arithmetic errors, they would have been corrected by going back to the source document – the results form for each polling station. It becomes a logistical/administrative matter rather than to conclude that the behaviour by election officials was driven by a criminal intent.

The full accounting for ballot boxes and ballot papers was done at polling station level collectively by representatives of contesting parties, observers and election officials. Signatures were appended to the forms that clearly showed the serial numbers of the ballot papers used, spoiled and remained. Such polling station records were brought together to constitute the total for each ward; and likewise all the wards at one constituency centre.

All the current ZANU PF efforts are bereft of legal guidance because the pronouncements and actions forced on ZEC defy the procedural requirements in the constitution and electoral law.

As ZANU PF make wide claims about Tsvangirai, some people have been named as emissaries for Tsvangirai. Let us look at who the people are.

Elton Mangoma is the MDC's Deputy Treasurer General. He is said to have generally supported the party financially. A Chartered Accountant by profession, he is the owner of a beneficiary of cheap RBZ loan funds through his company, Mowpower, which is involved in manufacturing of lawn mowers.

Mangoma is the managing Director for Corporate Excellence and a former partner with Kudenga & Co, an accounting firm until end of 1999. he served in various capacities for Delta Corporation since 1987 until 1992. He rose from being a Financial Manager of Delta's subsidiary, Chibuku Breweries, to become Group Finance Director. Earlier, in the early 1980s, he worked with Ian Makone at Agricultural Finance Corporation - AFC (now Agribank) as a Financial Manager

Ian Makone is a member of the MDC's National Executive Committee. He is the National Director for Elections and Special Advisor to the MDC President. He is a former chairman of the Agricultural Finance Corporation (AFC) now Agribank, and thus his connection with Mangoma goes back in time.

Joe Mutizwa is the chief executive officer of Delta Corporation. He is a founding director of Zimbabwe Allied Banking Group (ZABG), a banking institution created by the RBZ out of remains of some indigenous banks Gono caused to close. He is also a trustee of the obscure Simon Vengai Muzenda Scholarship Foundation. In June 2007, Mutizwa was one of beneficiaries of the RBZ funded farm mechanisation programme.

As written by a correspondent of the Zimbabwe Times in January 2008, Gono forged close links with Delta Corporation's Joe Mutizwa, in a bid to wrest control of the industrial conglomerate from SABMiller. Mutizwa is alleged to have received funding from Gono to take up a horticultural project at Kintyre Estates, along Bulawayo road. The Ruwa-based Delta's subsidiary, Mega Pak Pvt Ltd, was one of the beneficiaries of the RBZ cheap funds named 'BACOSSI" by receiving US$1 million, which was the largest chunk of the foreign currency portion.

As it turns out, Gono had a meeting with Joe Mutizwa as a way of discussing the political dynamics as information filtered that ZANU PF was loosing the elections. Gono mooted an idea of sounding up to MDC for talks to protect their personal business interests and the political career of Gono as a ‘unifier” for the two political sides.

Mutizwa then contacted his former subordinate, Mangoma, for a social chat and made indications for a possible coalition talks between the two parties, without making explicit who was driving the initiative. Mangoma in turn contacted Makone, Tsvangirai's advisor. This personal contacts was then leaked to the foreign media on April 1, 2008 as if there are talks between ZANU PF and MDC. It is still not known if Makone played ball by talking to Tsvangirai but it is possible that Makone might have not known where it was coming from. He could have ben surprised when the foreign media went into frency about it.

What is background to all these manipulations and machinations?

The ZANU PF Electoral ‘A’ Team was created to become the ‘War Cabinet’ and deliver a win to the party. Reporting to only President Mugabe and unaccountable to the ZANU PF Politburo, the core group consisted of Elliot Manyika, the party's Secretary for Commissariat; Patrick Chinamasa, then Minister of Justice, Legal and Parliamentary Affairs; Gideon Gono, the RBZ Governor and the main electoral funder; George Charamba, the Presidential Spokesman and Permanent Secretary for Information and Publicity, and the 'Editor-in-Chief' of government owned mass media. The party's information and publicity department was made redundant by this ultra-nationalist cabal, whose personalised agenda is being driven dressed as anti-colonial/anti-imperialist.

To give semblance of the security establishment factor, the Zimbabwe Defence Forces (ZDF) Commander, Constantine Chiwenga was brought into the political game. Chiwenga wants to protect his own business interests and his wife, Jocelyn, who attacked Tsvangirai in August 2007, without having been unprovoked.

Chiwenga, like all the other senior military officials, have been some of the biggest beneficiaries of the RBZ funded farm mechanisation programme, while their spouses have received cheap funds for their small businesses. Chiwenga’s wife owns Zimsafe, a company in the business of manufacturing protective clothing and a recipient of lucrative ZDF contracts.

Anyone who would disagree with the approached and tactics of the 'A' Team was to be branded as against the electoral victory of President Robert Mugabe and actually was seen as a "Simba Makoni sympathiser". This is the same basis now being used to deal with Henry Muradzikwa, the ZBC Chief Executive Officer, who was implementing the electoral law requirements. A media survey released during the campaign period in actual fact exposed the extent to which ZBC was biased against the opposition. How Muradzikwa is now said to have been biased against ZANU PF is laughable.

The Electoral ‘A” Team created the campaign message and used RBZ staffers and funds to make the necessary payments for both ZEC and the ZANU PF costs.

This team manipulated and held Mugabe hostage and caused the release of concocted electoral survey by a CIO-aligned political scientist at the University of Zimbabwe, Dr. Joseph Kurebwa, who “predicted” that Mugabe was to win marginally.

From ignoring the economic realities on the ground, the ZANU PF electoral campaign team resoundingly delivered a loss to Mugabe because one cannot deliver an anti-colonial message to a population desperately seeking for a basic survival according to the Maslow hierarchy of needs. If there is a re-run or run-off, ZANU PF will still lose. Since it has recalled its violent machinery, the MDC should not participate.

The latest ZANU PF gimmick is to create a fake a document detailing alleged transitional arrangements from the office of the MDC Secretary General, Tendai Biti. The RBZ being taken over by Germans and the other lies being peddled by the Herald were produced by the CIO’s counter-intelligence department based in Harare suburb of Highlands and uploaded on the CIO online “research” organization called Global Analysis (http://www.glob.co.zw/) run from Mt. Pleasant in Harare. There is no meaningful research work on the site apart from articles uplifted from the Herald (especially the ones written by Caesar Zvayi and Mabasa Sasa), Sunday Mail and New African magazine and other foreign sites.

Desperately trying to survive from an electoral defeat, ZANU PF is getting dirtier and murkier. The Chinamasa-led self-created committee as become the de facto Cabinet and will continue to mislead Mugabe, the nation, region and the world. They will continue to be in denial and talk about everything JUST to illegally stay longer in power.

We are dealing with a very belligerant person of Robert Mugabe. The High Court judgement on April 14, 2008 will likely order the release of results. ZEC will likely claim that they were ready early in the week to release but were being held due to the court process instituted by MDC and will then release them. They are likely to be the doctored version because the arithmetic has been completed without the presence of contesting parties since the dismantling of the command centre mid-week.

As MDC contests the doctored results, ZANU PF will focus on the runoff which the MDC will ill advisely boycott.

Meanwhile the violent and rigging machinery has been sharpened and oiled....