ZANU-PF Endorses Mugabe for 2008 Presidential Bid

The thousands of delegates of the ruling Zimbabwe African National Union Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF) who assembled in Harare, Zimbabwe, didn’t even bother to vote on President Robert Mugabe’s bid for re-election. The president won by acclamation. ZANU-PF seems determined to kill Zimbabwe.

The litany of disaster in Zimbabwe is well-known to regular readers of this journal. Inflation is officially running at 8,000% per year (yes, eight thousand percent). Unofficially, independent observers calculate it at 90,000% (that’s ninety thousand percent). Roughly 80% of the labor force is out of work. There are food shortages. There are fuel shortages. There are water shortages, and as a result, cholera in the capital city. There is no hard currency for foreign trade. Roughly one-third of the population has left the country. One-third are infected with HIV/AIDS, and 2,500 die of the disease and its complications every week.

Any government that presides over such disasters is incompetent. Mr. Mugabe’s regime has not just presided over it – it has caused the disasters. To fight the inflation that its unbridled printing of money caused, the government last June banned price increases and ordered business to roll back all prices 50%. The result – businesses shut down production of everything. When it took white-owned farms away from the people living on them, it gave the land not to black farmers, but to urbanites connected to ZANU-PF, who didn’t farm.

Yet, there was Big Bobby Mugabe on stage telling his Kool-Aid drinkers, “"I dare not abandon them [the people of Zimbabwe]. Every one of them matters to me. Can I let them down? No. Their welfare is my welfare. Their suffering is my suffering. I dare not abandon them.” The crowd cheered. Why not? He had commandeered state trains and buses to bring them there, leaving travelers stuck.

Sadly, Pedzisayi Ruhanya, programs manager of the pro-democracy civic group, Crisis Coalition in Zimbabwe, noted, “the issue is much bigger than Mugabe. Even if Mugabe was replaced today, as long as the next leader inherited the existing political structures, with a culture of violence and intolerance, then we might create somebody even worse than Mugabe. What is needed is a democratization of all state institutions and the political parties themselves.” Getting rid of President Mugabe would only be a start.

Editor’s Note: Two very fine websites covering Zimbabwe are www.zimbabwesituation.com and www.thezimbabwetimes.com.

© Copyright 2007 by The Kensington Review, Jeff Myhre, PhD, Editor. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written consent. Produced using Fedora Linux.

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