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Shall it be the ballot or the butt . . . sorry, the bedroom?
The MDC-T leader has been away, will be away for a whole week, and his mouth-man says we should not force his boss to stay in the country while President Mugabe is allowed to be out of the country at will.
Was the President not in Iran recently for the Non-Aligned Movement, added Mwonzora, sounding like a man who has lost charge of both mind and mouth.
We all sound like we are wrongly and wrongfully asking the Prime Minister to stay at home, indeed to stay closer to the country he is so desirous of ruling! Staying in the country now seems like a heavy burden on our Prime Minister.
And for Mwonzora, the whole matter reduces to a tit tat! It is about evening out of foreign fixtures, evening out numerically, which is why attending a 120 country-strong NAM is comparable to attending a convention of a party in America, albeit a governing party — for now! In my world such -
I am very mindful of one rule of life, namely that distance simplifies things. I am watching events in South Africa from across the Limpopo, and of course there is a vast distance between the great Limpopo, itself the margin or the helm for our two sister republics, and where I stand as I write this piece.
Much worse, however nearer we are to each other as neighbours, there is a vaster distance by way of our distinct histories, however comparable these may be. Of course, our cultures and languages do intersect in a variety of ways, factors that my lessen that distance. But only lessen. -
Before I get into matters of the week, my humble acknowledgement to one of my alert readers. Two weeks ago I mistakenly suggested that the late Zanu-Ndonga leader, Ndabaningi Sithole, sought and got through Ian Smith’s Ken Flower-led CIO money from the CIA to support his electoral fight against the Patriotic Front in the watershed 1979 elections.
The alert reader corrected me through the Herald that in fact, the CIA money which Sithole got through Morocco’s late King Hassan was meant to help him fight the bogus Internal Settlement -
Zanu-PF has just completed its review of the Copac constitutional draft. Already, this exercise has raised acute anxieties in the two MDC formations; something good political players must always do to their adversaries.
You do not transfer comfort to your opponents, do you? Nor do you make yourself readable, as has just been done by the two formations by publicly declaring their love for the Copac draft so early in the whole process.It has turned out to be deep love, very deep love that ungainly betrays the formations’ political inflections both in the draft and in the whole political and electoral process. And considering that the two formations view the constitution-making process as the juridical phase in their quest for power, it must be pretty obvious to Zanu-PF what the formations’ electoral planks are or should be.
With the acute anxiety exhibited by the formations to have the draft steam-rolled, this should not be very difficult. Which by the way greatly -
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Talk to those involved in the mired draft constitution and they will tell you that the endless parleys between Zanu-PF and the two MDC formations over the constitution amounted to a relationship between rulers and the governed. The MDC formations took the obsequious and obeisant posture of oppositional subjects petitioning for greater concessions from those in power, Zanu-PF.
They sought what really amounts to standard provisions in the bill of rights, but with the supplicatory tone of people well outside the circuit of governing, never as sharers, never as co-governors. And it -
Is Zimbabwe a victim of the Babel Curse? I wonder. But first, Tendai Biti. Quite a humourous guy, is he not? So humourous that he does not mind laughing at himself even. I am of course referring to his unremitting weight loss and his claim that veterans of the liberation war are behind it!
As indeed are girls he can’t phone anymore! Food for thought. His right to happiness has been squandered by those who liberated him, those who loved him. Where would he rather be, rather be -
The beauty about running a muscular column is that oftentimes you sting your opponents into an ungainly self-display. My bad friend Muckraker did just that this week. Stung by my exposé on duplicitous post-colonial white thinking, Muckraker warned The Herald against carrying such critical opinion on the white establishment.
The consequences are enormous, Muckraker helpfully intoned. “Oh bow-wow. So, if you are not a sharer (in the racialised Rhodesian economy), you will understand if a growing number of people who are sick of the racist posturing emanating from Manheru don’t want to place their -
“I move that the House take note that tomorrow (Thursday) I will move a motion to nationalise and prescribe all Marange diamond fields.” The year was 2011; the month was October, slightly over the first week of October. The speaker was Eddie Cross.
Another view another day
“The ministry responsible for the indigenisation exercise, launched in 2007 by the then Zanu-PF government, two weeks ago published another set of regulations that would, if implemented, have effectively nationalised all firms in the country . . . -
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The Thursday judgement by the Supreme Court gives legal weight to the call for early elections, does it not? Of course the judgement relates immediately to three constituencies.
Yet its ramifications extend well beyond the three, to suggest many possibilities, all of them favourable to Zanu-PF. The floodgates have been opened and it does not require any clairvoyance to predict the direction of events henceforth. Only a little memory will help one recall that Zanu-PF has -
I am happy that lately, the management team for Copac has been making tremendous “progress” at their level. But the team is the pre-penultimate, the penultimate being the principals, the ultimate being the people who will pass the final verdict through the referendum. It remains to be seen whether or not that progress which the management committee has made stands to wash with the principals. Only then can we then say we are close to wrapping up this vexatious matter about constitution-making.
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A few months back I wrote a piece in which I drew a distinction between those who govern and those who rule. I asserted that both before and after the inclusive Government, Zanu-PF continued to produce ideas that rule, ideas by which Zimbabwe has been governed.
I was even more daring. I asserted that in the inclusive dispensation we are under, the two MDC formations were heavily indebted to Zanu-PF for the governing ideas, never mind that they were failing to implement them. I gave the example of dollarisation, a policy which Zanu-PF adopted well -
In the early eighties I had a friend who worked in the security establishment. He was in charge of VIP protection. One day he was tasked to ensure a VVIP was transported to Kushinga-Pikhelela, transported safe and sound. And because the VVIP was pressed for time, my security friend raised the Airforce of Zimbabwe for a helicopter. A while after the request, the Airforce phoned back to regret that the helicopter meant to ferry the VVIP had developed a technical fault and thus would not be available for the trip.
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I was most amused to hear Morgan Tsvangirai, the MDC-T president threatening Generals for political involvement. He, of all people! Just two weeks before, the man had met with one General Wesley Clark, former Supreme Allied Commander Europe (SACEUR), also known as FOB, Friend of Bill, following his ill-fated decision to run for US Presidency in 2004, with full backing from Bill Clinton.
Both were Rhodes Scholars, something linking the two men, and then with Tsvangirai, to the imperial settler political legacy personified by Cecil John Rhodes. All are benefactors of Cecil John Rhodes, the first two directly, the lonely last by lineage legacy. And given Clark’s dubious title as the general to
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As I write, South Africa is boiling with anger, divisive anger. Never in the history of mankind has a society debated so heatedly, has a society been divided so sharply over a matter so private, a matter so obscene, so revealing. Some white man, one Brett Murray, produced something to which one places a label as they see fit: a work of art for some; graffiti for others. Some even described it as an assault by some leftover of apartheid on a man who happens to be a president, a man who is an African.
All those multiple identities of the supposed victim gave wider meaning to Murray’s product — a giant phallus abutting, jutting out, or drooping from the made-to-fit rainment of an otherwise iconic representation of visionary, decorous leadership, a representation in the mould of the leader of the Russian Revolution, Vladmir Lenin.
With such a sensitive organ obscenely appended to this painting that clearly resembling one Jacob Zuma, President of the Republic of South Africa, Murray’s thing immediately thrust itself into a fiery din of public controversy sure to impart and guarantee immortality to it, sure to stand erect in the annals of South African and wider African history.
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As the story of TB Joshua rages on, rages towards its denouement, I have been reminded of the church politics in England of the late middle ages. And of course church politics necessarily meant the Catholic Church with its many Orders, its vast real estate, its ever swelling coffers, all set against gargantuan appetites of its supposedly holy, otherworldly inmates, starting with the Pope.
Far reaching reforms suggested for the Church in the 12th and 13th century had come to spectacular grief, as dictates of happy secular life got the better of monks and friars, got the better of church dogma, philosophy and vows to a life of devotional privation. Gone and gone for good was the devotional self-abnegation of the 8th, 9th, 10th and 11th centuries which had given these religious figures and orders a higher spiritual plinth, well ahead of ordinary men and women of their time. Wealth had slowly but inexorably driven out single-mindedness and the devotion of yore, bringing with it “the world’s slow stain”, to quote A R Myers.
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- Nathaniel Manheru