Mugabe Using Tried & Tested Tricks To Dominate Elections

Mugabe's history goes back well beyond the 1980 Independence of Zimbabwe.

During the chimurenga - the armed bush struggle that raged in Rhodesia from the late 1960s until 1979 - he used terror as a weapon against the population at the time.

The vast predominance of people that were killed were the black people who lived in the rural area. Since independence in 1980, the vast predominance of people who have paid the price of Mugabe's totalitarian rule are exactly the same people.

Why? Because you can't teach an old dog new tricks.

So, when we read that Mugabe was considering going back to the bush and perpetrating more violence, death and destruction had Joshua Nkomo won the election in 1980, we should not express any surprise, but we have to accept that the old man has not changed his intent.

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"It came as a nerve-racking shock to the suffering Zimbabwean to be told that five opposition politicians will be locking horns in their quest to lead our country, Zimbabwe.

For too long, Zimbabweans have had to endure the agony of seeing their hope of emancipation dashed by the ruling cabal of rabid thugs. They have done everything that the citizens of any other country would do to rid themselves of the villains whose only argument for imposing themselves on the defenceless people is that they hold the guns bought from the tax payers' hard-earned money."

You don't have to hold a degree from some university to recognise that Mugabe is at it again. You don't have to live in Zimbabwe to know what is going on.

Indeed, recently, I met a Zimbabwean who had sadly lost his mother. Given that he was living in a foreign country at the time, the powers that be refused him entry into the country of his birth.

He was forced to have to sneak into the country to attend his mother's funeral and then to sneak out again.

"ZANU PF has never won an election legitimately in Zimbabwe. In case anybody thinks they won the 1980 election against Joshua Nkomo's PF-ZAPU, the truth is that they won ot for two reasons. Firstly, the war veterans threatened to go back to the bush and continue fighting if ZANU PF did not win the election. People were tired of the war with all its horrors and they wanted it to come to an end at all costs.

Secondly, people, especially those in the rural areas, were cowed into voting for ZANU PF. According to the Lancaster House agreement all ex-combatants were supposed to be at the assembly points, but ZANU PF mostly sent the mujibas (their collaborators and informers) there instead and left the real ex-combabtants to raom free, terrorising the people, a thing they are still doing thirty years after independence, because for them it is a tried and tested method that brings results."

Mugabe touts Zimbabwe as 'independent' and 'free' - but since when does independence and freedom take the form or terror and destruction?

Robb WJ Ellis

The Bearded Man