A RECENT lead story in one of our local dailies linking the suspected murder of a two-year-old boy to ZANU PF political violence demonstrates the extent to which an attempt to paint the campaign environment leading to the July 30 polls as bleak as possible.
Based on rumours, the alarming story was splashed on the front page, even before police had started their investigations to establish the cause.
The MDC-Alliance and their regime change partners are sensing inevitable defeat.
The best way to sully ZANU PF’s expected victory is to prepare the grounds to contest the imminent landslide, so they have decided.
But this has happened before.
Elsewhere in this edition, we chronicle similar unverified stories.
The opposition and their regime change allies have found these alarmist false stories delicious tools to achieve their objectives.
It is such toxic reports and ‘researches’ by civil society organisations like Human Rights Watch (HRW) that are used to convince the gullible that no credible elections should be expected.
At the same time, we have characters like Dewa Mavhinga who, for expediency, are not ashamed to paint this picture of an unpalatable political environment.
Yet this character, who claims to be a neutral human rights advocate, is a well known avid supporter of the MDC-T and its regime change allies.
Here is a case of an interested party opting to referee a game in which his team is playing. And of course, there are other so-called NGOs like Heal Zimbabwe Trust and Election Restore Centre that have joined this ‘unholy’ alliance.
Unholy in that they are agreed to make their cause, to discredit ZANU PF, sellable.
Meanwhile, the MDC-T is presented as a saintly organisation, yet the intra-party skirmishes reported by the Zimbabwe Peace Project show that the party’s appetite for violence is still very sharp.
What seems to give MDC-T and civil society encouragement in their bid to throw spanners in the election process is the apparent support from some quarters in the US.
Recently, US Senator Chris Coons stood in the opposition’s corner accusing President Emmerson Mnangagwa of ‘empty promises’ on reforms to the disadvantage of the opposition.
This was backed by US members of observation groups from International Republic Institute (IRI) and the National Democracy Institute (NDI).
They concluded the country was not ready to hold credible elections.
This is in line with recent MDC-Alliance’s petition to the Zimbabwe Election Commission (ZEC) demanding, among other things, the premature release of the electronic voters’ role and free access for all and sundry to BVR servers.
Some of the demands were ultra vires the Constitution as they would necessitate the enacting of appropriate legislation.
ZEC dismissed most of them.
No wonder President Mnangagwa has advised foreign observers to familiarise themselves with the laws of the country and the operations of its institutions.
This will put them in a better position to comment knowledgeably.
For even the MDC-Alliance can be among the first to bear witness to the ‘concrete steps’ taken by President Mnangagwa towards democratising the country.
We know American billionaire George Soros has always been keen to fund regime change attempts to rid Zimbabwe of a Government of a former liberation movement.
Chamisa is aware of this.
This was evident on the day he launched his party manifesto.
The US is at odds with the rest of the world by moving its embassy to Jerusalem before solving the Palestinian problem.
When Chamisa invited the Israelis to open an embassy in Harare, he was doing it for the Americans.
Maybe more Americans will support him and his NGO allies in his bid to have the July 30 elections fail the credibility test.