Mugabe: Zanu-PF's Old Ox

Those of us who grew up in rural Zimbabwe know what it is like to have an old ox that you trust and love so much. Everytime you inspan oxen to plough the fields, the old ox would be tathered to lead the team. It's age and creaky bones would be ignored.

It's back would be innured to the constant whiplashes to try and get a faster pace out it. Onlookers would wonder, often very loudly, whether the old ox could take another step without dropping dead. But the family, stranded with no other oxen to turn to, would keep prodding the plodding grand old sire into taking a few more steps, no matter how laboured.

Zanu-PF have got their old ox. Weathered by old age, many believing it can't take another step forward. However Zanu-PF, for lack of choice it seems, have tathered their old ox and brought it to the yoke again. They hope to prod it into plodding a few more years in power for them.

Their old ox, its ears inured to the constant whiplashes of criticism assailing it, has risen to the occasion and promised to plod forward a few more years of rule. That the old ox stumbled badly the last time they yoked it, seems relegated to realm of blissful oblivion. The herd of young steers snorting with impatience in the periphery seems ignored.

That the field ahead is littered with stumps that require more pulling power than old bones can muster seems to be totally absent from the party's future vision. They insist that their old ox is actually an old fox - willy and full of the necessary tricks to keep them ruling.

Us outsiders can only look and but wonder how many more steps the family can get out of the old ox. Sometime we pity the old ox, that no young steers seem ready to take the role of furrow leader (forosi). We can see that the ox is now old and tired, but it is the owners who will choose when to let it rest.