By Fungi Kwaramba
At a time that there is much excitement within sections of the ruling Zanu PF over some hotly-contested resolutions which were presented at the party’s annual conference in Masvingo last weekend, President Robert Mugabe has — wittingly or unwittingly — fuelled the former liberation movement’s raging tribal, factional and succession wars.
In ordinarily innocuous comments that were contained in his foreword in the Zanu PF central committee report, which was prepared ahead of the Masvingo gathering, Mugabe expressed general concern about the slow pace of implementation of the party resolutions — which, as would be expected, has fed oxygen to the ruling party’s lively conspiracy mill.
Zanu PF insiders who spoke to the Daily News yesterday sought to interpret Mugabe’s comments as supportive of subsequent moves at the Masvingo meeting to have one of the party’s two vice presidents’ posts reserved for a woman.
This comes as the ruling party’s faction which goes by the moniker Generation 40 (G40), the youth league, a section of war veterans and the women’s league — which is headed by powerful First Lady Grace Mugabe — are surprisingly pushing anew for a woman to be represented in Zanu PF’s presidium.
“The party should ensure that its policies and resolutions are being implemented. Unfortunately, I have noted some yester-year resolutions that continue to come back every year.
“May the responsible departments attend to this because procrastination and lack of action should not be tolerated in the party,” Mugabe said in his foreword in the central committee report which was prepared ahead of the Masvingo conference.
However, the wily nonagenarian did not mention any of the outstanding resolutions that he may have had in mind, with the party’s legal department saying in its defence in the same report that it was financially-constrained to deal with the numerous cases it still had to dispose of, including implementing all past resolutions.
“Resource challenges are militating against the ability of secretaries for legal affairs to effectively discharge their duties,” the under-fire department that is headed by Finance minister Patrick Chinamasa said, adding that it was still to pay some of the lawyers it out-sourced work to in 2013 — in comments that gave a sneak peek into the parlous state of Zanu PF’s finances.
Chinamasa was not picking up his phone yesterday when the Daily News sought to get clarification from him on both the number and nature of the party’s outstanding resolutions, which some Zanu PF insiders said went as far back as 2012.
Every year, Zanu PF brings to its annual conference mountains of resolutions from its provinces, the party’s wings and thematic committees which are then read out before they are either passed or rejected when they are taken to the central committee.
According to the Zanu PF constitution, the central committee acts as the supreme body in between congresses, with the key politburo organ in the mix as its secretariat.
A Zanu PF politburo member said yesterday that given what had transpired in Masvingo, it was “difficult to say” that Mugabe’s concerns over the lack of implementation of the party’s resolutions were targeted at any particular issue.
“From where I stand, you have got to look at all this hullabaloo in terms of the party’s factional and succession wars, which have sadly split our movement into two bitterly-opposed camps,” he said.
In a move that was widely interpreted as aimed at scuttling Vice President Emmerson Mnangagwa’s mooted higher ambitions — the Zanu PF women’s league revived its 2015 resolution at the weekend to have the former liberation movement’s constitution amended to reinstate the women’s quota clause.
This was despite the fact that in the run-up to the Masvingo conference, the women’s league had seemingly made a dramatic U-turn about this demand, saying repeatedly that it was no longer pursuing the resolution which was supposed to have been implemented by the end of this year.
According to the women’s league resolution, the party is supposed to drop either Mnangagwa or Mugabe’s other deputy, Phelekezela Mphoko, to make way for a woman — a call which has put Mnangagwa’s camp, Team Lacoste, on the edge as the G40 faction slowly regroups after months of being on the back foot in the party’s seemingly unstoppable tribal, factional and succession wars.
The resolution also piled pressure on Chinamasa to finally kick-start the process of the party’s constitutional amendments, to enable the implementation of the contentious resolution, as was demanded at last year’s Victoria Falls gathering.
“The women’s league is committed to defending the party and the gains of the revolution. It will continue playing its pivotal role as the party’s mobilising machinery by implementing programmes and projects that empower women at grassroots level.
“It will also ensure that women in Zimbabwe have equal representation as their male counterparts in key decision-making positions. We are concerned with the lack of implementation of the resolution as we made it clear that we wanted the constitution to be changed to allow an earlier provision that one of the two VPs should be a woman,” women’s league deputy secretary Eunice Sandi Moyo said.
Analysts have also since said that another proposal to have Mugabe declared life president could signal the “coming to fruition” of a long-held ambition by the nonagenarian to die in office.
Mugabe, 93 in February, is the only leader that Zimbabweans have ever known since the country gained its independence from Britain in 1980.
However, academic and political analyst Ibbo Mandaza said Zanu PF would need to face the legality of this demand which required constitutional changes. Daily News
