Zimbabwe is suffering from lack of leadership

The country lies in ruins, its citizens are dying from the cholera outbreak and hunger at an alarming rate. To say the situation is pathetic would be an understatement because it is more than that. It was with this situation in mind that I started analysing why the GNU leaders allowed the country to deteriorate to this alarming level without taking any action to stop the sorrowful state. The fact that the GNU leaders were concentrating on brokering an equitable power sharing deal and ignoring the dying ordinary people shows that they value power more than the lives and well-being of the people they want to lead. They should not use the fact that they haven't reached an agreement on equitable power-sharing as an excuse to ignore the plight of the people they want to lead. As aspiring leaders of this country, Zimbabweans expected them to run around looking for maize meal to feed the nation as well as medicine to fight and eliminate the cholera outbreak. It all boils down to their leadership qualities, that is if we can at all call the way they are carrying on leadership.

Mugabe is the type of leader that practises the blaming game. He always has someone to blame for everything that is known, believed, or perceived to have gone wrong, and thinks that by so doing he invariably distracts attention away from his shortcomings. It doesn't because people always question why he as a leader failed to see what was being done wrong and then stop it before it had caused any damage. This need for someone to blame always encapsulates an overwhelming lack of organisational and managerial integrity and is always recognised as such by most people. When he was in power this cholera was planted into our lives by the problem of water supply cuts which went on unaddressed for years and the hunger is partly because of the misuse of donated farming implements like seeds, fertilisers, diesel and tractors by the new farmers which went on unpunished for years. When the damage caused by all that had become prominent in the form of cholera & hunger he turned around and blamed it all on the imposed sanctions. He keeps on blaming sanctions for everthing and when he does that people look back to what caused the sanctions in the first place. It was because of his unfair and undemocratic practices during election times. What he doesn't know is that if you are a leader the only person to blame when things go wrong is yourself because you will be in charge of ensuring that nothing goes wrong. So the minute you open your mouth to blame someone you will actually be saying, "I am a bad leader."

Tsvangirai on the other hand is the type of leader that practises the "White Knight" method of leadership in which he allows problems to happen and then ostentatiously tries to solve them. This attracts attention to himself whereas he thinks that making sure the problems do not arise in the first place is likely to go unnoticed. He let the hunger and cholera reach unprecedented levels first before trying to seek help to eliminate these two scourges in the country. He is the man who campaigned for sanctions against Zimbabwe to the Western countries when he lost elections five years ago. A move that he thought would speed his ascension into power but is now backfiring on him because it is now causing cholera and hunger to the people he wants to lead. Because of sanctions the country is failing to get enough foreign currency to buy chemicals to clean the recycled water used in all towns as well as to supply electricity to the water pumps all the time, which explains the water supply cuts and the resulting cholera outbreak. Because of sanctions people are dying of hunger yet had there been no sanctions some Western countries who use maize meal (which happens to be Zimbabwe's staple food) as fodder for their cattle would have been willing to donate the maize meal to Zimbabwe. We all remember Tsvangirai five years ago when he unfairly lost elections saying, "Zimbabweans you think you are suffering now, well, you are not because you are going to suffer even more than you are doing now." That wasn't a prophetic statement, he was talking about the results he expected to get from sanctions he had asked Western countries to impose on Zimbabwe. He denies this but it is the truth. He probably thinks everyone else has got a short memory like his but some of us have got very sharp memories. Here is a man who is intent on using the suffering of the people as a leverage to get himself the Presidency post by blaming it all on the ruling party and not being honest with his part in it which is using the people he wants to lead as sanctions sacrificial lambs.

I have no idea what Mutambara is all about so I can't comment on his leadership qualities or lack of them all I know is that if he had some I would know about them. He just seems like a leader without "portfolio" to me, serving no particular purpose but to increase the numbers.

So honestly speaking with such a calibre of leaders trying to rule the country it is no wonder that nothing is coming out of the GNU equitable power sharing deal.