HARARE - Robert Gabriel Mugabe's re-election strategy has been leaked, and is supported to the hilt by the state-owned print and electronic media, NGOs, religious groups, the security forces - including the military, the Central Intelligence Organisation and the police - the state-sponsored youth movement, and self-styled war veterans.The leaked pilot campaign scheme is carefully tailored to counter MDC, and involves state and other sympathetic newspapers, religious groups, war veterans, sections of the military, new farmers and party stalwarts.
And more importantly, it encourages the scorched earth policy of poking fingers up the nose of the west, albeit with a futile drive to remove the slight inconvenience of personal “smart” sanctions.
It has nothing in items of resuscitating Zimbabwe’s ruined economy, its current inability to feed itself, but instead recommends continued state-sponsored violence. It also tacitly encourages corruption.
The wily octogenarian leader’s strategists plan to blatantly manipulate events and the law in his favour in the run-up to the next vote, reneging on or “reinterpreting” every agreement made and undertaking given under the global political agreement, and directing many vile things about his opponents.
Shocking
Revolving around the so-called three Ds, the Zanu (PF) strategy is anchored on the ‘DESTRUCT, DESTROY and DISMANTLE’ strategy. The prose in the voluminous dossier is shocking.
While the SADC’s election roadmap is recommending reconstruction and social stability “within a context of national unity”, Mugabe has his own plans. The dossier, crafted by the party’s Commissariat, shows the long-time Maoist’s plan to press ahead with his discredited elite empowerment programme, a Nazi-like scheme to strip foreigners of their shareholding. He has already done the same in agriculture where he grabbed commercial farms and hand them over to his supporters on the historically correct pretext that it had earlier been taken by conquest from indigenous Zimbabweans.
The strategy document recommends:
Demonising Prime Minister Tsvangirai and MDC ministers looking for inherent weaknesses of the MDC;
Taking the sanctions and indigenisation campaigns everywhere; indigenisation and empowerment for the urban and middle class;
Equalisation strategies dirty campaign, corruption in local government, service delivery failure; use of the public media demonising the MDC,
Targeting civil servants and setting them up against the MDC
Making use of the margin on terror violence, harvest of fear,
Disruption of MDC local government structures targeting councillors,
Electoral manipulative strategies targeting the voters roll,
Creation of electoral buffer zones making it virtually impossible for the MDC to campaign or field candidates in some areas particularly constituencies where the MDC had small majority,
Fragmentation of the MDC vote granting tacit support, if necessary, to regional political parties in Matabeleland; new farm and mine seizures
Effective deployments of our trained youths, MID, CIO, war veterans
Making a visible presence in every village evoking the memories of the liberation struggle and the evils of white imperialism and colonialism; take charge of the correct teaching of history in schools especially high schools, tertiary institutions and universities. Selective visits would also be made to shrines in
Angola, Mozambique and Zambia to acquaint the youths with our history.
Making use of traditional leaders the custodians of Zanu (PF) support in the rural areas
Making use of Zanu (PF)s superior understanding of regional politics SADC and liberation struggle links,
Infiltration of the MDC candidate selection, low and high-level leadership
Security sector – the role of the military candidate selection raise money from everywhere: vendors, small traders, small
Mass mobilisation Apostolic and evangelical churches, ordinary members one million members in Masvingo, Mashonaland Central, Manicaland, Gokwe in the Midlands and other parts of the country.
Food handouts, farming inputs and donations from friendly embassies.
Parallel NGOs
The party plans to counter Zimbabwe’s vocal civil society by forming parallel NGOs such as Zimbabwe Congress of Student Unions, Journalists for Empowerment, Lawyers for Justice, Upfumi Kuvadiki, Destiny for Afrika Network, Zimbabwe Revolutionary Volunteers Front, the Federation of Civil Society Organisations, the
Zimbabwe Children of War Liberators Association, the Zimbabwe Coffin Makers Association, Zimbabwe Exhumers Association, Youth in Natural Resources Management Zimbabwe, and the Millionaires Cashflow Club.
As famine begins to bite, areas that voted for MDC leader Morgan Tsvangirai can expect no food aid from the state. They can expect more repression at the hands of Mugabe’s thugs. Grim warnings are already being made against those who dare not vote for Mugabe.
The MDC, the labour movement and other centres of resistance are already under attack by way of tough policing and laws. Several MDC ministers have been arrested along with their legislators to stampede them into an early election. Tsvangirai faces a treason charge on flimsy evidence leaked in WikiLeaks cables and the Attorney General is studying whether he stands accused of “plotting” to topple Mugabe with help from the Americans. For him the noose, jail or exile beckons. His party and its MPs face an equally bleak future if Mugabe’s plan flies.
Nothing but increasingly ill health or death prevents Mugabe from standing for re-election again or simply just abolishing the polls.
Clad only with a thin veneer of legality he has done all this in plain view of the world. Soon no legitimate way to oppose him will remain. He is secure in his country from the threat of actual civil war and his neighbours as well as allies will help secure his borders from any possible guerrilla threat posed by expatriate groups and refugees.
Post published in: News