A Photo Essay by Cont Mhlanga 

When you see the Bulawayo daily Chronicle start to run the ‘…….this and this and so and so endorse President Mugabe….’, before any Zanu PF party congress then you know the plot and the story is not what you are reading. Pay attention to the sub plots. Look at the picture and you will see an interesting pattern with the story headings.

Every day I come across this headline I ask myself what exactly is the story here? Who is telling the people what here?

Imagine a Head of State and his Cabinet runs the country’s economy to the ground and drives the population of its lovely nation to alarming levels of poverty and suffering, yet the story headlines scream that he is being endorsed for another term! No race. No challenger. The question,….any other nomination…’ is never asked or heard off. It’s considered taboo. All you read is President endorsed! Mayebabo!!

So what is the really story and what is the plot about this hype of the President endorsed articles?

The really massage is that the President has decided that he is not going any where and he will do anything in his means to stay at the State House. It is a warning of some kind to those that may dream to stand on his way. When those story headings start running, every one in Zanu PF runs scarred like little chickens when the mighty eagle is stretching its wings in the sky! The President has laid down his path and nor one dare cross it.

The story has nothing to do with anyone endorsing anyone. It is a warning of dirty, ruthless and even violent times ahead. We have seen and heard it all before.

So the conclusion is that the President is going back to the State House because he has no opponent both inside and outside Zanu PF since in my opinion he finished with the MDC a year or so ago and he is keeping it just for Public Relations. Inside his party he politically built every one, some if not all he also built economically from nothings after the war to some of the wealthiest individuals in Southern Africa in just a few years and of course not on any business projects, salary or savings.  No one built themselves. So all they can do is just endorse him. Finish. Clara. If they don’t they are finished. No wonder why the country is in this mess.

There is how ever one opponent that will bring down the President and his Cabinet sooner than all Zimbabweans realize. More so if he runs for President next year and wins which all signs are pointing to at present. That opponent is the black market, parallel market, informal market or what ever you want to call it. It is the only opponent that will give the President sleepless nights in the run up to the 2008 elections and after.

In 2008 after the elections and after he has won the elections the only worker who will be able to stay in formal employment will be a worker who uses their job to run private deals. There will be no way an honest worker in an honest company will be able to make enough money to sustain their families. They have to quit and join the informal market to deal. The hardest hit formal sectors will be the civil service and local government. Offices will close or they will be used for private deals and parallel market activities. What company in the formal sector can afford to pay a worker today’s living wage racing with the parallel informal market prizes when it is producing at 15% capacity? For any company to survive it has to follow the parallel informal market forces and not political rhetoric. The warning massage with the ‘endorsed publicity’ is that the formal sector should embrace for an increased wave of resignations by professionals.

While government thinks that the uprising will come in the form of people running into the streets Zimbabweans noticing that it would be suicide to do that have chosen to up rise in a different way buy shutting down the formal sector where government gets its money.

Even now unemployed informal dealers who do not pay tax make more money than those formally employed. What kind of country is this that rewards the non productive activities of the economy more than the productive sectors? It’s now unwise to be employed is Zimbabwe. Only the desperate stay in formal jobs. This is sad.

Very few companies will be able to open in 2008 after the annual X-mass shut down. Unemployment will worsen and more will be forced to go into the informal sector to deal. Some companies in the interest of saving their machinery will be forced to do two things; produce a few goods and find ways of exporting them through unofficial means and trade the money in the parallel market to have enough to maintain a small workforce just to keep the machines oiled; or push the goods into the parallel market living the formal shops empty. For those little goods that get to the formal shops, the queue agent service operators, most of whom are the uniformed police will buy everything and resale it at the parallel informal market. This is the President’s greatest opponent in the 2008 elections if he continues to scheme his return to the helm of Zanu PF and State House instead of retire ring himself and V.P.Msika.

No President how ever genius they are can come out of the situation like the one that endorsing the President withought considering past performance has created in Zimbabwe. The only way the country and the President will ever hold on is by printing money every day at the Reserve Bank witch any where will never go back to the formal banking system as all business is in the non formal sector. This will take the government’s economic revival program back to square one at the beginning of each year. Who will work in the formal sector if they are not making enough money to survive?

The people through the parallel informal market are game with the President, his Cabinet and his ruling party. We wait to see how he and those that are currently endorsing him will overcome this fast growing form of uprising.

Very soon they will be only two options for the President; One to quit and hand over the leadership of Zanu PF to some one elected transparently by the party membership which I suggest he should be doing sooner than later or; Two leave it too late and just stress himself to dearth. After all he is human like every one else! Parallel informal market is a bigger threat to the President than anything else and the good thing is that he creates and fuels it himself. You can’t beat the people all the time.