By Professor Mufaro Gunduza
All human beings, Chamisa, included have faults and inherent weaknesses as Mavedzenge outlined. At the same time in a shipwreck, for instance, human ingenuity dictates that any piano top floating your way can become a fortuitous life preserver, yet under normal circumstances if we want to design life savers we won’t consider piano tops in the equation! In the current scenario, despite Chamisa’s seemingly horrible sins of omission and commission, he appears to be the fortuitous piano top to certain sections of the electorate judging by his surprising victories in by-elections.
Mavedzenge is worried that the absence of formal structures negates the concept of democracy and good governance, where decisions are a product of robust engagement and consensus. It appears to me that Chamisa could be the proverbial gambler who knows what to throw away and what to keep in his political gamesmanship, thereby keeping his competitors miserably and desperately guessing in terms of his next move. He has given up conventional, predictable and orthodox politics and has gone guerrilla to inflict massive surprises and confusion.
At a recent public function, the opening of The Sprout Restaurant in Harare, we saw former First Lady Grace Mugabe moving within the same orbit as senior ZANU PF figures, her presence neither resisted nor theatrically embraced.
In this second and final part of the article, I continue to examine the potential outcomes of ZANU-PF’s succession politics, focusing on whether Kudakwashe Tagwirei (whom I metaphorically refer to as “Mamvura”) will succeed in his presumed bid for the presidency, whether General Constantino Chiwenga will recover his political standing and take over, whether someone else will ascend to the throne, and whether President Mnangagwa will ultimately retire in peace.
Rutendo Benson Matinyarare, long celebrated as the chief acoustics engineer of Zimbabwe’s most delicate economic sculpture, the ZiG—now appears to have discovered an inconvenient truth: even the most beautifully crafted clay cow cannot moo indefinitely without cracking.
