Zimpapers Logo

everyone will recognise that reasonable steps had been taken and exhausted, to resolve the matter in a dignified and civilised manner, as befits love between elders, one of whom holds a big public office. There must always be a halo around the mating of gods and goddesses. Not the uproarious cries of us mere mortals.

Everyman does not seek office
Nor will the latest attempts at quiet settlement stop us from questioning the Prime Minister’s amazingly weak sense of judgement and propriety. We never stop asking why the Prime Minister went through the embarrassing motions in respect of a matter that goes to courts prematurely, only to run away from the same courts after full, matured damage. We never stop asking why the Prime Minister thinks his official position does anything to his civil liability in matters of law; why he thinks affording lawyers defeats the rights and entitlements of small people so hugely unfairly hurt. As we say in Shona, gudo guru peta muswe kuti vaduku vakutye.

Which translates: Even the big baboon curls its tail to win the respect of little ones. We never stop asking many other questions, including his putting up a defence whose strange logic seems to be that having so many like him, citing so many like him, naturalises his own misdemeanours, his own weaknesses. Well, if he wants to be like Everyman, then he must know Everyman does not seek office, does not seek national leadership. If so, how else how then would he become Everyman?

Walking out on the big man
But the Prime Minister is not yet past the hump. He is set to go through more trying times, especially if he picks on a staff contingent which guarantees that he shall remain poorly served. As he settles with Locardia, he must remember Elizabeth will not be indifferent. She has an interest, a direct interest given that whatever terms of settlement that decides the matter have a direct impact on the obligations and resources available to them both as a new couple. It gets worse when it emerges that Locardia is not seeking divorce but her place as one of the wives, nay as the first wife, of the Prime Minister. That creates a headache, does it not? Elizabeth is bound to be involved, emotionally involved in a manner sure to entangle the already messy matter further.

Rattled right from the incubator, she shall, quite naturally, be anxious to assert her place and role as the “sole” wife, both against the true position at law, and possibly against his husband’s innate behaviour and predilections. Her father might think her immature politically; Tsvangirai may find her very mature in bulwarking her marriage and her husband. And because she knows the Prime Minister cannot afford another round of national spectacle, she will blackmail him, including threatening to walk out on him, assuming that has not happened once already. She will want to make herself felt, again assuming she is not in that mode already.

Not as needed by GWP
And since the Prime Minister has given his office this despicable image of a nest for dodgy relationships, indeed a setting for pimp-related activities, Elizabeth has every right to have that office firmly in her sights. Already there is a lot to indicate that she is moving in that direction. She does not like a few in the hierarchy, does not trust lady officers in the Premier’s office, men who sought proximity by feeding the man’s carnal tragic flaw.

The recent changes in the Prime Minister’s office, we are told, were triggered more from home than by the demands of GWP, Government Work Programme. Or by MDC-T’s electioneering needs. Elizabeth does not want any woman rumoured to have had a past with the Prime Minister near him anymore. Or any man who played pimp to the Prime Minister in the past.
Which is what triggers a bit of mirth regarding Muriritirwa, one of the Prime Minister’s directors rumoured to have met grief in the recent changes. He was responsible for getting the Prime Minister the South Africa girl of Legend of the Seas fame. But he was also responsible for securing Elizabeth for the Prime Minister through her ambuya who sought Jesus and God through Muriritirwa’s ministry. So?

So lovely a hate
Well, to indicate that the changes picked by the media are partly occasioned by home politics, and partly a consequence of the MDC-T’s electoral strategy. Before joining elections, Ian Makone was the MDC-T director for elections. He must play the same or similar role without bureaucratic encrustations or strictures. An appearance of reorganisation, particularly one with a misleading ring of demotion, creates a smokescreen for changes MDC-T wants to believe will be a decoy for maximum surprise to Zanu-PF.

Ghandi knows too much to be dropped. If the party could not sustain all these young officers for the duration of the Inclusive Government, it needed the State to carry the financial load, but for the party. Now that the inclusive period is coming to an end, the party needs to redeploy the same cadres for a programme that allows it to capture the State through elections. All these so-called “dismissed or demoted” officers are key cadres in the MDC-T. Only a fool takes the dismissals and demotions too seriously. After all, were the Tsvangirais not at the birthday party of one of the Makones only recently? That indicates very deep animosity I suppose. What a lovely hate!

From Eros to Zeros
But all this does not discount the home front. It is decisive and is sure to keep our Prime Minister inattentive and tired enough to drop both spittle and pen during Cabinet sessions. Legend has it that he snoozes, emitting the deep snore of mindless contentment. From a new-found toy, Elizabeth can very easily turn to a new-found torment for the Prime Minister, depending of course on how well he handles his amorous affairs.

To date he has not shown an ability to put raging hounds to sleep.  In the meantime, we have another glimpse into the manner and mind of the man who would be a president. I dread to be under a leader for whom reforms are occasioned by madame back home. Much worse, I hate to serve a Government which cannot protect its own officers.

If the dismissed or demoted officers were truly directors in Government, how come they can be tossed from post to politics, from eros to zero, as if the Prime Minister makes out a cheque to them? Surely they are not his employees; are civil servants, have been since the inclusive Government?

Check where the exit door is
I said a lot also depends on the team the Prime Minister builds. In the past two successive weeks we have had two telling instances. The Prime Minister’s trip to Nigeria did not have to be announced through denials. Someone needed to have proactively told the media the Prime Minister would be away on whatever business, including receiving covert funds from a hostile foreign power, much like Sithole and Muzorewa did in the late 1970s. After all what is amiss? Tsvangirai is a sequel to both men, is he not? Even by mien. Just look at his face again. But his trips did not have to get as messy as they became eventually.

Secondly, details of the Prime Minister’s re-organisation of his office because of pressures from home was known, had been known for quite a while.
I myself wrote about it two weeks back.

And for more than two weeks the office of the Prime Minister had no script for the eventual changes when they came? And in the middle of a whirlpool is frenzied speculation on the whys and wherefores of the changes, all the office could do was to assert the Prime Minister’s right to reorganise his office. Precisely the more reason the reasoning behind that reorganisation should have been tendered naturally, without the grotesquery of a forced fart, sorry, forced disclosure.

You wait and see, this coming week will see the Prime Minister embroiled in another regional trip about which not much communication has been done. It is a very fishy trip, both by procedure and purpose. The Prime Minister shall be visiting a neighbouring country at the direct invitation of a deputy president of that country. It does not make protocol sense. It gets worse when you look at the agenda. The rule, the rule: before you get into a room, check where the exit door is. You never know how and when you shall leave the room!

Inane speculation
What is all this hullabaloo on Chinamasa and Gumbo all about? Chinamasa told the BBC some week or two ago that Tsvangirai would be asking for “trouble” if he undertakes to reverse the gains of our struggle, or seeks to act and to work against the national interest. Gumbo weighed in, similarly. And in the case of Chinamasa, he was very specific; he referred to reversal of land and the dire consequences which that would visit on whoever does that.

He made references to the sacrifices made during the liberation struggle, and how a challenge to those sacrifices would trigger a hefty backlash within the veterans of that war whose biggest concentration happens to be with the military presently.

In my view, the hullabaloo should have been on why the two very senior officers ever dare speculate on a Tsvangirai win at all. It is unlikely, very unlikely. Secondly, it is plain impolitic to entertain any thoughts that speculate on your party’s defeat. Apart from suggesting your own self-doubt, you are inviting a negative debate on a speculative scenario. Why?

When land founds its own army
Now, both Chinamasa and Gumbo are actually guilty of minimising the scope of a frontal rejection of a politician who goes against the national interest, indeed who goes against land. The rejection is sure to go beyond the barracks. It may not even start there, the same way land occupations never started in the barracks. In Zimbabwe, land is a causa belli, a reason for war, a popular war at that. It has always been, which is why it loomed large in the First Chimurenga, Second Chimurenga and Third Chimurenga.

And in all the three revolutions, blood was spilled, lives were lost. Why is it likely to take any less to bring about a situation ante, to bring about a reversal?
I thought it was that simple, that logical? And the land revolution did not take place in the past because there was the military. The land grievance founded its own military structures by way of the sheer militancy it engenders. You don’t need a standing army, an army in the barracks to trigger popular resistance founded on lost land. We should know that from our near history, unless we are brain dead.

Regaling Rhodesians in Australia
And there is a lot that has happened, and that is happening to make this matter much more than idle speculation. A lot to excite militancy ahead of elections. From the land issue first couched as the fight for the Sadc Tribunal, right through to the latest petition by white farmers to the British government through one Hague, there is every indication that the forthcoming elections are being viewed by Rhodesians as another opportunity to stake their claim on lost land.

And they see the MDC-T as their vehicle for reasserting that claim. That automatically puts the MDC-T at odds with the ossified politics of this country, at odds with this country’s bloody history, does it not? Similarly, we have just read news from Australia indicating an ambassador from the MDC-T who stands for this country in Australia, yet attends a function at which ex-Rhodesia soldiers are part of a grand parade.

The MDC-T is already giving militancy to its anti-land stance, is it not? She did more, worse. She followed them to a follow-up function and regaled them, the same way they regaled her. An ambassador of Zimbabwe hobnobbing with Rhodesians who use her presence to make existential statements about this nation! And you expect that kind of politics to be embraced, all in the name of democracy, free and fair elections?

Boundaries of national politics
Nations do have taboos. So do churches, homes and even clubs. You do not go very far in Israel if you start a party that repudiates the holocaust. Or make a case for the Jewish evacuation from Arab lands, from which was carved the State of Israel. Even after the fall of the Soviet Union, you dare not start a communist party in America.

Or a party that asserts the rights of the Amerindians. Not even politics that suggest the break up of America as we know it today, for greater autonomy and justice. All these taboos rest on founding myths of these nations. Or simply existential interests which are so sacred that merely questioning them invites deadly apostasy. These taboos become the boundaries for national politics and political practice. They need not be written. But they must be obeyed, obeyed unconditionally. Or transgressed upon pain of death.

So simple a debate?
I find it ridiculous, nay irresponsible, that we debate the right to political life, even the right to actual life in respect of a politician who has crossed the national line, whose politics imply the death of the nation. What is worse, debate those who remind us even in poor English of our obligation to enforcing the protection and observance of our sacred rights as a people, a nation, an economy. The reality of nationalism and nations is that individual lives do often get sacrificed for the continuance of the nation. That is why we have national shrines, why we have unkempt graveyards for traitors. And the way to help cleanse and evolve national politics is not through a gratuitous defence of politics and politicians who go against a people’s collective sacrifices, collective interests, collective will.

Above the ballot, before the bullet
And spare me that silly arguments that equate the verdict of the ballot with the preservation of nationhood. It does not follow, which is why often enough, people do act against their best interests. The issue of national survival transcends the ballot, which is why instead of condemning the Chinamasas and Gumbos, ours should be to urge the lost ones to harken those national sensitivities, including reminding them they stand to lose even their lives should they pursue treasonable politics. Not treasonable by legal definition; treasonable by the verdict of a painful history already lived, already suffered; treasonable by gains already made, which stand imperilled by collaborative politics. I thought President Mugabe put it so well early this year

Addressing one of his many meetings, he told his audiences that the Zimbabwean flag will not be changed. It carried and symbolised the blood history of our nation. You try and change it, he added, you invite your own destruction. I thought it was a statement of destiny for the country, of fate for those who tamper with its destiny. Now if you think that such a statement of obvious fact adds a DNA of violence Zanu-PF, then know that you are living out the benefits of that DNA by the very fact of the independence you inhabit, indeed on which you now seek to stake your ruling ambitions. That DNA will condemn you, the same way it liberated you yesterday.

Adding Juice to anaemia
Minister Biti, what is he up to? Not long ago he told us the economy was shrinking, indeed that growth expectations for this year had to be revised downward. We believed him for that seemed to conform to our lived experiences daily. Things are just tough and you feel the screeching brakes of  the whole economy in your own home. Unless you belong to the genus of the gods and goddesses of Priscilla Musihairabwi-Mushonga who continue to eat prawns so far away from the shoreline.

But the good minister has since invented growth, and now incredibly suggests we will be close to double digit growth in 2013, the year of elections! In the meantime the minister forgot to bribe the Sunday Mail. The weekly blared: “Zim’s SA imports soar to $1,2bn”, adding we demanded $1,2bn worth of goods from our big neighbour, against a paltry $195m worth of goods and services we sold to her in the same seven months that have gone by.

The balance against us is huge, and only in lawconomics would a miraculous 7-9 percent positive growth follow!  
Meanwhile, away from lawconomic miracles, more bad news were being carted in. Sanctions have shrunk our receipt expectations from diamonds. More bad news, agriculture has shrunk disastrously since the start of the Inclusive Government. It has reached the negative zone of 3 percent, something unheard of since the onset of sanctions. It is much worse for the minister. Only this week did he limp back to Government to confess that all the foreign banks he has been defending all along, will not support agriculture.

Not even subscribe to Treasury Bills! Let Kasukuwere move in with his indigenisation, opined the minister, to the utter consternation of his interlocutors! And the figures are stark: total deposits in the country’s banking sector grew by 1100 percent from $300m when multiple currency was introduced, to $3,64 billion in July this year.
Much of that money is with foreign banks who will not lend to the depositing economy. Everything looks anaemic. But of course in an election year, even flatulence visits economic figures so everything looks electably stout. It is called JUICE.
Icho!

• nathaniel.manheru@zimpapers. co.zw.