The tantrums of First Ladies are actually an indication of gender powerlessness. They  have no record of their own, no power of their own, they are just there because their husbands are up there. Many try to convert executive idleness into a full time job by intruding into all kinds of public spaces to remind us that they are there. That’s why some of them assume they are leaders of other women  in a kind of delusionary division of labour with their husbands who command the whole country. They are paranoid around female members of the government. – From a 2004 installment by the late Tajudeen Abdul-Raheem.

Comments attributed to First Lady Grace Mugabe that Mr. Morgan Tsvangira’s looks gave First Gentleman Robert Mugabe nightmares just show how low-brow the politics of State House can become.

Critics have long said our politics is not issue based, and Mrs. First Lady seems to confirm that.

It highlights she not only has very low regard for Tsvangirai (she doesn’t have to: Tsvangirai wants to take her husband’s job!), but most importantly perhaps, the low regard she has for her audience.

The favoured phrase for many people would be “don’t insult our intelligence.”

Imagine expecting to swing votes by telling voters that you need a more photogenic fellow at State House! That would help in international photo opportunities!

You are simply implying that your audience has no clue about the real issues that seek to address their impoverished livelihoods, but such has been the nature of Zimbabwean politics, recalling the rather unpalatable comments by one “nationalist” and “national hero” that if a baboon stood for Zanu PF in elections, you vote for that baboon.

Surely Zimbabweans deserve better.

You have to marvel at the picturesque language and the quips that have found their way into our ears as political parties hit the campaign trail.

Bloomberg wrote “Tsvangirai’s Bid to End Mugabe’s Zimbabwe Rule Fades” without showing how that bid was fading. The MDC is ‘doomed by its failure to end police support for Zanu-PF,’ said Valentia Kaseke, a security guard in Harare’s northern Emerald Hill suburb. “All they can do is wait for Mugabe to die and then Zanu-PF will be in disarray.” Turns out Tsvangirai’s bid for power is fading not because of being unpopular but because Mugabe is showing no signs of expiring any time soon!

The Daily Maverick called “Mugabe, the hot favourite” and a wise crack appeared on Twitter “literally or figuratively.”

The Herald not to be outdone by the incendiary headlining wrote: “Revolutionary party ignites star rallies” a headline that came a day after a Harare garage went up in flames with the Harare fire brigade reportedly failing to put out the fire. Next time the fire brigade must be on stand-by with plenty of water outside a Zanu PF rally in case it ignites!

Another Herald headline announced rather confidently “Zanu-PF stretches election lead.” Indeed, talk about stretching it!

Then another wise crack on Twitter: When is Mugabe hitting the campaign trail? He could always use a wheelchair to go around the country kana zvaka-presser.

Another added, “Even the Zanu PF manifesto launch was not free and fair. Once inside the venue, there was no exit until Mugabe’s speech ended.”

It’s going to be a beautiful few short weeks to 31 July.

The frenzy for presence on social media platforms by politicians as we approach the poll is fascinating as these folks apparently seek to ride on the back of Baba Jukwa’s popularity.

Yet the “short bursts” of information limited by a platform such as Twitter for some still cloaks ambitions to use social media space to replicate how it’s been harnessed in other countries, recalling of course that Obama’s first election into the White House is widely celebrated as being thanks to his campaign team’s use of social media platforms to reach out to younger voters.

For us here, only a while ago, Zanu PF’s Rugare Gumbo was bamboozled when asked about Baba Jukwa, responding that Zanu PF had no business being on Facebook!

Now Gumbo has changed his mind.

He says his party will use all platforms available, “everything that is there, we’re going to use,” Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and this is obviously informed by one of many recent reports.

Gumbo is no doubt a late convert, and this could indeed play against him as chief spokesperson, and also Zanu PF’s attempts to win over the youth vote, youths of course being purportedd to have a large social media presence in Zimbabwe.

But it is still curious that Zanu PF would require a World Wide Web-based campaign that targets that demographic considering the revolutionary party has long claimed disgruntled young unemployed urban youths – the born-frees the party calls them – have seen the light of British machinations as the cause of their suffering!

So why stalk them online, hmm? Or Zanu PF seeks new converts?

This youth vote has certainly been bagged going by the conflation of “urban grooves” and the Third Revolution where desperate youngsters took to the microphone to eulogise an aging politician as the source of their inspiration. Why hell, the youngsters even performed duets with the party’s political commissar slash Minister of Information! It doesn’t get any better than that surely.

Never mind that thousands of their colleagues have over the years been unable to graduate from university and polytechnics after failing to raise tuition fees and know pretty well the author of their misery.

And you should see some of the youths’ sentiments on these social media platforms Zanu PF is only embracing now.

I looked up some of the Zanu PF senior officials who are on Twitter for example and was tickled by the frugality of their “tweets.”

Years after the “invention of Twitter” a chap who fancies himself the epitome of propaganda only posted a couple of Tweets and went to sleep, surely now that a campaign for political survival is here, will these men and women be equal to the task? Or like everything else the power of social media will turn out to be nothing but misplaced hype as Zanu PF knows a better manual of “how to win an election”?

Would love to read one day that Zanu PF’s imminent loss of the 2013 election was saved by its use social media!

I am laughing already.

It’s shocking the number of people who say they have voted in all elections since 1980 but somehow find their names absent from the voter’s roll, and now these same people are faced with the prospect of not voting at all.

If ghosts can be found in the voters roll, it seems logical that the living can also be exorcised from the roll! And these stories are many.

Some are stories about people who want to vote but have no IDs, and efforts to get these important documents are being frustrated by all sorts of ridiculous red tape such as the person being told to bring parents, if parents are deceased, relatives with affidavits, if these relatives are buried deep in the rural areas, then that’s the end of it!

I watched a video of men and women yelling “they must tell us if they don’t want us to vote,” after trying for days to check their names and also register and couldn’t help must imagine that this is the kind of anger that is already known to exist by the people rushing the poll and their vote is as commonsense will have it, also already known how it will go!

It is thus increasingly becoming clear that many Zimbabweans will merely watch others exercise their franchise, and then we say bad governments are elected by people who don’t vote.

Now we know better: bad governments will make sure you don’t vote!

“Clearly, like their ZANU PF leadership these people (war veterans who in 2000 led the violent land seizures) believed no black person was capable of standing up for him or herself unless propped by a white hand. It is ironic that Ian Smith during the Rhodesia era had also believed that Blacks were revolting because some white communists somewhere were prodding them. It is the story of our lives as black (first as Rhodesian) Zimbabweans that we were cursed with political leadership that viewed us as people with the brains of gnats and incapable of thinking for ourselves. Under Ian Smith, the Chinese and the Soviets were our puppet masters and today under Mugabe, the British and Americans are the new puppet masters.”
Grace Mutandwa (From her memoirs The Power and the Glory)