Editorial Comment: Demos counterproductive, ignore them

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Politically, Morgan Tsvangirai is finished.The MDC-T leader lost a free and fair election on July 31, 2013. The United Nations, Sadc, African Union, Non-Aligned Movement and to some extent, the European Union accepted the results that gave President Mugabe a 61 percent mandate and his party, Zanu-PF 197 parliamentary seats.

Tsvangirai’s party has split. Former secretary general Tendai Biti wanted him to step down after elections last year saying he no longer had any ideas on how to defeat Zanu-PF. Tsvangirai refused to go, so Biti sacked him, at least on paper.

Compounding Tsvangirai’s misery, western donors, who held his party together through generous handouts and moral support, are holding on to their money and goodwill.

Also, his recent attempt to concentrate power in his hands in response to two splits in nine years which he says were masterminded by his secretaries-general were rejected by his own party.

After 14 years of failure, Tsvangirai looks and sounds worn out and ready to give up. But it is important to watch the last kicks of a dying horse.
He declared two weeks ago that he was organising protests to force Zanu-PF to create jobs and revive the economy. He said the demonstrations would begin next month.

Our constitution permits peaceful protests.  However, we are not naïve to think that Tsvangirai wants to demand jobs and a working economy and end there. The not-so-hidden agenda is to trigger a national uprising to undermine the people’s mandate that Zanu-PF and President Mugabe got last year, and possibly nullify it.

Tsvangirai has to know that only peaceful protests are permitted under our national laws.  Those that seek to overthrow a democratically elected government as the ones he is planning, are illegal. These should and would be condemned and stopped. Zimbabweans demand that the full force of the law be necessarily applied on those responsible for organising them; that means Tsvangirai and his cabal.

We are the first to acknowledge that many people are out of work, under-employed and underpaid, in some cases unpaid. Many of us are desperate to secure jobs that can give us a decent existence. That the economy is not doing well is self-evident. But these ills are not deliberately caused by Zanu-PF.

Tsvangirai is finished, as we said, but a man of his boastful kind cannot slip away quietly. He thinks the demonstrations can divert public attention from internal troubles in his party and give him relevance. Most crucially, they are meant to scuttle the recently clinched Chinese and Russian investment deals, which even he knows will create hundreds of thousands of jobs and get the economy on the path to recovery and growth.  The $3 billion platinum project at Darwendale should create 15,000 jobs. Hundreds of thousands more would be created when Chinese money starts flowing into infrastructural projects after billions worth of deals were signed in China three weeks ago. At least 1,6 million households would be supported through the government farm input scheme and these are jobs in the agriculture sector too.

The EU promised to lift sanctions in the next month or so. We are confident that the Chinese and Russian investment in infrastructure, government’s input schemes and lifting of sanctions will transform the economy.

Therefore, the protest plan is a sinister rejection of these serious efforts to revive the economy.
We note that Tsvangirai’s previous attempts at using demonstrations and job stayaways to unseat Zanu-PF failed. But they hurt the economy.  They left some people dead and injured in terror attacks when MDC-T militants threw petrol bombs through home windows as people slept.  Policewomen, Busani Moyo, Pretty Ruswaya and Brenda Makamba are now permanently disfigured after attacks on their homes in Harare in March 2007. Inspector Petros Mutedza died in a MDC-T mob attack in 2011. These are the more prominent victims of MDC-T’s politics of chaos; hundreds more have been similarly affected countrywide.

Zimbabweans must not let Tsvangirai’s evil schemes succeed; they must not allow themselves to be used to help him to attain by undemocratic means what he failed to achieve democratically on July 31, 2013. We can’t let a man who created the prevailing economic challenges through his active campaign for illegal sanctions, to now turn around to call for demonstrations to protest against the effect of the same while blaming that effect on someone else.

Prophet Emmanuel Makandiwa, speaking at his Tuesday service in Harare, is right to tell Tsvangirai to stop. Demonstrations will only worsen our unpleasant economic and social conditions.

Accordingly, our message is that our people must ignore the MDC-T protest call and continue working towards sustainable socio-economic recovery to fulfil the development agenda that Zim-Asset enunciates. Law enforcement agencies need to be on top of the situation too to punish leaders of illegal protests and their followers.

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