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A girl's presidential guide
Everjoice Win, Mail & Guardian (SA)
March 21, 2008

http://www.mg.co.za/articlePage.aspx?articleid=335130&area=/insight/insight__africa/

I've had it with elections. Zimbabwe has been in election mode since 1999. No fundamental change seems to come from any of it. So I am changing tactics. I have looked at everyone's manifesto for 2008 and it's all same old hot air. I am tired. But I am still going home to vote: this time for the man who will rev my engine. Yes, I am voting for a presidential candidate who I can bear to look at for five years.

We have three presidential candidates, Bob, Morgan and Simba. This whole nonsense in Zimbabwe of calling the leader of a two-person party "the President" is what gets to their heads.

Three years ago I parked my car outside Harvest House (MDC HQ), only to be shooed frantically away by a rather aggressive pimply youth: "Get away, that's the president's parking spot." I wondered why Bob needed yet another parking spot, but I discovered this is what they call Morgan. Similarly, Arthur Mutambara had barely led his MDC faction for five seconds when I heard a friend in his party say: "Let me talk to the president first."

As another friend put it in utter frustration, when a country has three presidents and none of them can end this mess you know you are f*$%*d! But I digress, back to the line-up.

Bob
Bob is just too ancient. Despite guzzling Lucozade and obsessive exercising, he has become terribly unattractive to look at. Not that he ever was, with that little Hitlerite moustache. Saville Row suits -- or is it now Shanghai flea-market row? -- won't make him look better. As they often do on terribly old men who can't behave their age, the suits look oversized and ostentatious in the middle of such poverty.

Around election time though, Bob dons those awful Mobutu-style shirts with his mug all over them. I will never forgive Bob for foisting this style of dress on women in his party. Somehow the tailors who make those clothes always manage to get his picture smack in the middle of a woman's ample bosom, or worse, on equally ample buttocks. Though it must be said there is something quite satisfying about squashing that face as one sits down after being forced to attend a long rally in the 37-degree heat of Muzarabani.

Failed governance aside, Bob as a man is quite frightening. His tendency to bang tables like Nikita Krushchev doesn't say "come closer". Neither does his foul mouth. Seven university degrees just haven't bought him good manners.

The most important reason I am not voting for Bob is the way he never acknowledges his wife in public. Notice how he often leaves Grace a few steps behind. Granted Bob was born in the days when men had to walk in front of their wives so they could protect them from lions, but now?

Morgan
Let's look at Morgan. A president should dress well, so Morgan please lose the ugly cowboy hat. Morgan just hasn't got the message that those hats are so . . . thuggish, so tacky. They don't do anything for us girls.

They make short men look like ducks with a disability. By the time the man emerges from under that hat -- after talking interminably on his cellphone -- I, for one, will have lost any inclination to listen to his economic plan. Those hats breed cowboyish unilateralism; we saw it with George W, Jonathan Moyo and now Morgan.

Coupled with the Papa Doc routine that Morgan and his security men have now adopted, my heart just sinks. He will arrive at a rally in a convoy of 4x4 vehicles - a statement of the party's values if ever there was one -- with a dozen or so young men hanging out from open doors, wearing dark flea-market shades. Dreadfully unattractive. These same tontons macoute will proceed to shoo the poor working masses out of the way. Even some of us who still regard him as our "Comrade Boycott", former chair of the NCA (National Constitutional Assembly), are too scared to come anywhere near the tontons.

Morgan has an equally foul mouth, especially at his rallies, and in Shona. There is something quite crass about a president "shouting," as we say at home, like that.

Thankfully some of Morgan's rough edges have been smoothed by a glammed-up wife. Susan looks ever so refined thanks to facial treatments from Theresa Makone, Morgan's mate's upwardly mobile wife. But, like Bob, Morgan always forgets that Susan is right beside him. Not a touch. Not a smile.

One who got away
I am so sorry Arthur dropped out of the presidential race. If nothing else the fellow knows his Pierre Cardin from his Yves St Laurent. I am sure he took the grooming and sartorial elegance module at university.

Oh, and our prof can use power point! I don't think Bob can turn on a computer. Can he? Every time he goes to donate computers to schools he always stands a safe distance from the critters. Arthur so loves his laptop. Takes it everywhere. His presentations might lack substance, but they are so well accessorised his audience is always agog.

Sadly there is not much electricity in Zim these days, so he has to resort to his student politics ways of shouting -- too stridently. Perhaps it is a good thing Arthur has dropped out, he needs to grow up a bit. The last thing Zimbabwe needs is a Thabo Mbeki. Too much book is not good. Look at where Bob got us having "eaten so much book".

Simba
The man of the moment is Simba. I for one don't care how many gallons of Zanu-PF milk he was reared on. I will ignore that his manifesto barely talks about women's rights. I just want his picture hanging in my office for the next five years.

Who doesn't want to walk into a government office and be greeted by that smile? Those funky little glasses just do it for me. Arthur, please pass on to Simba the power-point skills, and I am sold. And he ate just the right amount of book.

Simba speaks calmly. Diplomatically. As a president should. He acknowledges his wife, Chipo. Since that day he lovingly held her hand as he went into Parliament to present his first budget as minister of finance, I just knew this man was going to go far. At his campaign launch the message I got was, this is my partner and we share a life.

My big problem with Simba is his so-called backers, who love the Morgan-like big hats. Their looks and their politics just scare us girls off. Lose the men with the hats and big tummies, they are bad for your image and your future, Simba.

On the plus side Simba has so far eschewed the convoys and the insignia with his visage and other undesirable paraphernalia on women's anatomy. Long may it stay this way.

Ideologically, the men on that ballot paper are interchangeable. So technically, Bob has nothing to be afraid of.

There is no regime change in the offing, just a photo change. I am voting for the man whose looks and habits I can live with for the next five years. At least when he messes up, I have set the political bar so low it won't matter.

After 27 years of the ugly and ancient one, give me a younger and better-looking man, in a PINK shirt. Got ticket, will vote.

* Everjoice Win is a feminist

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