THERE was nothing unusual about opposition ‘leader’ Nelson Chamisa’s racist slur that ‘…Zimbabweans opposed to his party are baboons’.

Opposition parties in the country have, since the ill-fated September 11 1999 formation of the MDC, failed to mask their shameless ties with their racist Rhodesian and Western masters – the very same people who have always referred to blacks as baboons.

And Chamisa’s quest for the country’s presidency has been blighted by his now legendary indecisiveness and dictatorial tendencies — something which his traditional but frustrated allies are now bringing to the public domain — and a chronic lack of financial support from his party handlers.

With its traditional funders’ provocative funding manoeuvres having been recently exposed by the country’s security, insiders within the embattled opposition say the party resorted to extorting citizens by embarking on unethical conduct in Harare’s Central Business District, with the project meant to spread to other cities.

The West, founders, funders and owners of CCC have been having a nightmarish time after almost all of their efforts to release funding to their party, including using a neighbouring country as channel for the funding having been foiled.

Several meetings, including with the country’s unstable neighbour, which have been held by several Western embassies in Harare since June last year to explore ways of channelling funding to CCC without falling foul of the country’s laws, in particular the PVOs Amendment Bill which, among other things, gives Government the right to assess activities of NGOs, most of which are owned and funded by hostile foreign governments, have all come to naught.

These NGOs have often been used by Western countries as conduits for channelling funding to opposition parties in the country.

With their party staring an embarrassing thumping in the forthcoming elections, Western embassies, the sources said, recently endorsed the ‘plan’ by CCC-led local authorities to swindle the masses of their money through their parking fees project which has incurred the wrath of Zimbabweans.

The Harare City Council currently charges US$1 per hour for parking but their marshals have been coached to disappear from parking bays only to appear with clamps and tickets when the drivers have left their vehicles.

They then charge vehicle owners US$132 clamping fees for non-payment of parking fees.

Not even the announcement by embattled Harare Mayor Jacob Mafume that HCC had ‘listened’ to the concerns of the people doused the inferno.

Mafume said HCC would give a motorist a 30 minute grace period for not buying a parking ticket before clamping while those whose tickets would have expired would be given an hour grace period.

The Ministry of Local Government and Public Works last week appointed a committee to investigate the nature of the partnership between HCC and a mysterious company called City Parking, with sources in CCC saying some of the money generated from parking revenue is finding its way into the pockets of the party bigwigs.

It has been one blunder after the other from HCC which has seen its vociferous claims of a smart city falling flat due to their shocking incompetence.

For instance, they deliberately frustrated energy giant Sakunda Holdings’ plan to give the neglected Rufaro Stadium a massive face-lift to match world class standards, with the company citing ‘toxicity and a lack of political will on the part of the Council’ as reasons for terminating the contract.

Mafume, who has failed to provide Harare with clean water and collect refuse, claimed at the time that HCC had both the financial capacity and technical expertise to renovate the stadium.

Having failed to do so ahead of the 2023 Castle Lager Premier League which begins tomorrow (Saturday March 18), Mafume and his cohorts have resorted to extorting motorists to raise funding for the project and the party’s election campaign.

“They realise that with the elections now on the horizon, they have to be seen to be doing something to manipulate the voters,” said a source familiar with the goings on in CCC.

“This project was endorsed by Western embassies since funding is no longer flowing as smoothly as in the past.”

While Zimbabweans are still smarting from the CCC’s extortionist project, Chamisa adds salt to the wounds when he said he would ‘deal’ with what he referred to as ‘baboons who are trying to frustrate the electoral process’.

Since time immemorial, whites have equated black people to baboons and monkeys in order to highlight the purported inferiority nature of blacks.

It, therefore, did not come as a surprise that Chamisa drew from the same old book to lay siege on Zimbabweans choking under the relentless onslaught of his Western handlers’ illegal economic sanctions on the country.

“I can assure you that we will not announce what we are going to do to baboons that have become troublesome but I want to tell you that these baboons are not going to be troublesome anymore,” said Chamisa while addressing a press conference on Thursday last week in Harare.

But the erratic nature of CCC can no longer continue to hamper the massive development that has been going on in the country.

The ballot will respond to their shocking incompetence and seal their already wretched fate for good.