We shall be migrating to a new blog in the next few days, which will focus specifically on day to day political commentary on issues pertaining to politics in Zimbabwe. While we do this, we will direct to this blog some of the commentary that we have been posting on our Facebook page. This blog will remain focused largely on legal and constitutional issues. This blog is from yesterday:

Normally, one post would be enough but how could we let this one go? Newsday, the private paper, reports that the women of Bulawayo, always brave and independent enough to go against the grain, walked out of Grace Mugabe’s rally and she could not restrain her show of displeasure.

“You are disorganised, Bulawayo. This is disrespectful. We are about to finish. Sit down, where are those women going?” she is reported as having said.

“Anyone who doesn’t sit down will not receive the farming inputs I brought,” she said, clearly trying to bribe them, an indication that the price for ‘free’ farming inputs is rally attendance. One might say a rented crowd – and in this case a crowd that thought the rent was disproportionate to the efforts they had to make.

Grace Mugabe does not seem to realise that things are tough and that people are very busy trying to make a living and that attending a rally is not one of the most productive activities. She may be the First Lady but she seems to be oblivious of the challenges that the other and Last ladies have to endure in their daily lives. Instead, she wants them to sit until the end of her self-serving speech, having spent all day waiting for her.

But Grace Mugabe is not alone in this. Politicians are generally an arrogant lot and in this case I speak of politicians from all sides of the political divide in our country. Of the senior leaders I have had the pleasure of working with in the MDC, I will not mention names, but there was one man who was always on time, sometimes well before the appointed time. I admired that commitment to time. It showed respect for other people. There were others, though, who would convene a meeting but choose to come at their own time, hours after or sometimes never pitch up at all and when you next met them, they never had the decency to apologise. It is very hard to respect the leadership of such people, because making people wait for you shows a lack of respect. And worse politicians do this to ordinary people at rallies. They come early in the morning and they sit in the sun, enduring the scorching heat on empty stomachs – waiting for the leaders. It is worse when they have been forced to attend.

Then later, much later in the day, the leaders start trooping in aboard their big cars – pushing big stomachs and bottles of mineral water in hand – after having had a sumptuous lunch. Then they start with a line-up of speakers from the ward Chairman all the way to the top – each often saying nothing useful apart from extolling the perceived virtues of the leader, each hoping to be seen and heard by the leader, saying the most beautiful things. And only later, when people have been baked by the sun, and harassed by empty platitudes directed at the leader, does the main speaker take to the podium. By then people are tired. They just want to go. It is a big problem in our political environment. Too much sloganeering and emptiness directed at empty stomachs that by the time the main speaker comes in, the people will be tired. This is the fate that Grace Mugabe suffered – taking people for granted and delivering nothing to a rented and hungry crowd.

“If you stand up while I am speaking, you are inferring that I am speaking nonsense,” an upset Grace Mugabe is reported as having said, clearly catching the drift. As any public speaker would know, it’s very upsetting for the audience to start grumbling or leaving the room while you are speaking. Even if someone is going to relieve the body and you don’t know that, you just think in your mind, that people are leaving because you are talking tosh. And that, quite often is the case. People tend to vote with their feet.
“I love you, women, and I mean it, yet you walk out while I speak,” she pleaded.
“It’s unfair. Come back and sit down. It’s Gamatox spirit. I do
not lead fools. You think I am fool? If you stand up when Amai is speaking, you are showing that what I am saying does not make sense. I love you, women.”

Already she is speaking of herself in the third person! Respect is not demanded. It is earned. Someone ought to remind her. But, at least she got the message that maybe what she was saying did not make sense to the women. Maybe they were telling her that they are not foolish. And that she had been truly Gamatoxed by the women of Bulawayo …

We said a few weeks ago that Grace Mugabe had descended from the balcony and had come down to the dance-floor. This is what happens on the dance-floor, madam … You can hog the limelight at first, because people have never seen you dance before. So when they see you making those kwasa-kwasa moves, they are mesmerised and quite amused. But too much of the same style, and it begins to wear off. The crowd gets tired and moves on to the next point of fascination …