The Sunday News
Rutendo Nyeve, Features Reporter
THE country is fast approaching the end of the election period with the appointment of Cabinet ministers and their deputies as well as election of Mayors and council chairpersons being some of the last events of the process.
It has been a peaceful election period which saw President Mnangagwa retaining his seat after garnering 52.6 percent of the vote compared to 44 percent received by opposition leader, Mr Nelson Chamisa, his main challenger.
With a Parliament of 280 MPs and 80 senators, Zanu-PF managed to get 176 while Citizens Coalition for Change (CCC) got 103.
In the Senate, Zanu-PF has 33 senators while CCC has 33 senators with 18 being senator chiefs and two senators representing people with disabilities. One MP is still to be elected after the death of a candidate postponed the Gutu West National Assembly poll. The Gutu West election has been set for 11 November.
The Presidential vote showed some real change, with President Mnangagwa gaining extra support.
As before, the major divide in support was between the urban and the rural areas. CCC won the two metropolitan provinces of Bulawayo and Harare as well as most seats in the other eight that had an urban majority, while Zanu-PF won the popular vote in the eight non-metropolitan provinces, although in Matabeleland North it came second in seats won by CCC. In Matabeleland North the revolutionary party got four seats out of 13.
The dominance of the CCC in most urban areas has been viewed by political analysts as a result of the modus operandi of the West, to sponsor co-opted political organisations into the Global neo-liberal agenda.
Additionally, urbanites have been viewed as people who are expressing frustrations because of the economic challenges.
In fact, soon after leading the Zanu-PF Bulawayo provincial leadership in congratulating President Mnangagwa at State House recently, provincial chairperson Cde Jabulani Sibanda urged Zimbabweans, particularly in the urban areas, to refuse to swallow the bait and realise the broader political and intellectual ramifications of sanctions and imperialist systems that are the authors of the country’s economic meltdown.
Cde Sibanda said in rural areas, people can survive with what they have but in urban areas they depend on employment.
“Previously people used to leave their homes and go to work now they leave their homes to go and sell whatever they have. This is frustrating a number of people in the urban areas. Fortunately, the country has a visionary President who is working on bringing water to Bulawayo, who has also seen the establishment of a steel company in Mvuma which is going to enhance the resuscitation of the National Railways of Zimbabwe.
“Remember, we are talking of a company (NRZ) that had more than 18 000 workers and the City Council had more than 12 000 employees. So you will realise that during the paydays of these companies, money would circulate around the city. However, because of sanctions and other factors, big companies like NRZ collapsed. Everything in that company was British made even the bolts.
“You will realise that sanctions from any other country would have not impacted us but the fact that all our systems are structured in an imperialistic manner, if they interfere it impacts negatively on us,” said Cde Sibanda.
Responding to questions from Sunday News, former Cabinet Minister Cde Makhosini Hlongwane said people in the urban areas suffer the most from the impacts of sanctions as they led to de-industrialisation, loss of jobs and migration of skilled labour among other effects.
“A Government commissioned study in 2016 found that the Zimbabwe economy had lost US$42 billion due to the adverse effects of sanctions up to 2017. A drop of such a large amount of money in such a very short period clearly shows how sanctions as a tool of imperialism, neo-imperialism and a tendency of being hegemonic by Western powers can destroy economies of the global South for spurious reasons.
“These sanctions have clearly led to economic contraction, loss of jobs and stimulated a massive wave of migration of skilled labour into the region. Bulawayo has seen de-industrialisation as a result and the national formal economy has morphed into informality at all levels and in all sectors. The economic misfortunes of Zimbabwe are largely due to the West’s attempt to economically, culturally and politically subjugate Zimbabwe in order to force it to yield to a voluntary surrender of its resources, itself a continuation of a pattern of plunder dating back to 1890,” said Cde Hlongwane.
He said after de-colonisation, the West invented novel ways of continuing with neo-colonisation at various levels including but not limited to the economic, intellectual, cultural, and through a reordering of the global geo-political structures after the Second World War.
“It is the modus operandi of the West, to sponsor co-opted political organisations into the Global neo-liberal agenda. After de-colonisation, the West invented novel ways of continuing with neo-colonisation at various levels including but not limited to the economic, intellectual, cultural and through a reordering of the global geo-political structures after the Second World war.
“The static version of the Comparative Advantage theory, for example, is part of economic epistemology designed to continue an extractive North-South relationship wherein the South continues to supply raw materials to the north at the instance of deceitful economic intellect. In order to perpetuate the neo- colonial agenda, the West works through and sponsors opposition parties, Civil Society Organisations, various forms of so called non-governmental organisations, who in reality are an attempt at parallel governmental organisations and the intelligencia. This is true in Zimbabwe as it is everywhere else in the Global-South,” said Cde Hlongwane.
He said urbanites should support the Second Republic in its efforts to wade off the full impact of sanctions adding that import substitution industrialisation is a key intervention to bust the impact of sanctions.
“Government will do well to promote and activate new source markets given the refashioning geo political order. Capital markets are migrating from the West to the East, geo-political power is migrating from the West to the East, there is a restructuring of the global power curve from steep verticality to a more redistributive model of global power, migrating from uni-polarity to multi-polarity and therefore Zimbabwe must situate itself correctly in the global power matrices, and time itself rightly to not lose out on its advantages in the global supply chain,” said Cde Hlongwane.
Meanwhile, other political analysts are of the opinion that while the rural-urban divide dominates Zimbabwean politics, it is not absolute by any means. —@nyeve14
