Zimbabwe: Patience tested to breaking limits.

The patience of the Zimbabwean people is being tested to breaking limits. Understandably the waiting for a solution for their economic and political woes is unnerving, they are simmering and bristling with resentment over the negative results of the recent GNU talks which were held on the 19th of January 2009. Zimbabweans had hoped that finally their problems were going to be resolved by those two leaders once they agree on equitable power sharing. None of the two leaders, Tsvangirai and Mugabe was willing to come to a compromise concerning their different stances so the country remains in limbo while ordinary Zimbabweans continue to suffer in the ruins that Zimbabwe has become. While the Zimbabwean people wait ad infinitum for a solution these two leaders are wallowing in their riches which make them immune to this suffering. They are both waiting patiently for each other to give in, yet the pathetic situation in the country they are bickering over is such that their patience has become not a virtue but a vice.

Tsvangirai is being treated unfairly by Mugabe and SADC is allowing it for reasons best known to themselves (we can only make assumptions) and so all he can think of doing is wait patiently for the situation in the country to deteriorate to such low levels that Mugabe will be left with no option but to call him and submit to his demands since he holds the key to the positive renewal of this country. But in the game of waiting, Mugabe is the maestro of patient vultures. He will not be hastened. He never backs down, and he has all the aces up his sleeves; like the Armed forces for a start. He also has a lot of pride that may never allow him to submit to Tsvangirai's demands even though they are very reasonable demands that are in line with the correct definition of equitable power-sharing. So it seems Tsvangirai and Zimbabweans have a very long time to wait to exhale. To be precise, knowing Mugabe, he will make them wait until hell freezes over. On the other hand Mugabe has got a hold on SADC leaders that puzzles me and which I am failing to pinpoint and he is utilising it to the maximum. He doesn't want to give Tsvangirai enough power for them to reign together in an inclusive government and this begs the question; what is Mugabe afraid of? He seems to be gripped by a nagging fear, a mortal foreboding that his time is up, with the knowledge that surrendering power spells not only political demise, but maybe physical! There might be another reason, more personal and heart-renting to the old man for his desperate grip on power. Like his marriage to a woman almost 40 years his junior for example. He probably knows very well that she married him mainly because of the power he weilds as President and secondly because of his money. It therefore follows that if he cedes that power in his wife's eyes he would have fallen from grace and Mugabe probably fears that the result will be his marriage will end up on the rocks. Rumour has it that the other reason for his grip on power might be because he is afraid of his military junta who are threatening him to stay put. Stay put or else what? Nobody is sure how exactly he is being threatened but everyone knows that his military junta have a lot to loose if he cedes power. Whatever reason his old brain has for clinging on to power is making him prefer to wait patiently to die in power.

This waiting game between the two leaders has gone too far and is bound to explode in their faces. I want to believe that there is a limit to what the passive and docile Zimbabweans can tolerate. Tension is rising among ordinary Zimbabweans, it seems they are being left with no option but to resort to violence. It seems the river of blood on which Mugabe cruised to the helm, is the same conduit through which he wants to swim or sink out of it. As Zimbabweans suffer from cholera, hunger, hyper-inflation problems, dollarised economy problems when they are paid in Zimbabwean dollars and the epileptic fits of electricity cuts and water cuts on a daily basis will they continue to retreat in powerless silence, behind a bulwark of state oppression? I doubt that very much but then again with Zimbabweans and their fear of the repressive force of Mugabe's crushing machinery I am not very sure if they will rise up in protest, they might choose to suffer silently.