Richard R. Mahomva Correspondent
Following the appointment of the Cabinet by President Emmerson Mnangagwa about a fortnight ago, there were some decidedly pessimist and unhelpful sentiments that came from some sections — not surprisingly the opposition. President Mnangagwa was accused of “recycling dead wood” and rewarding factional loyalists and military men. These misgivings are not well grounded.

First, it is not logical to argue that the new Cabinet is an exercise in “recycling dead wood”. This was President Mnangagwa’s first opportunity to appoint a Cabinet. This narrative would prudently apply if he had been a President before and has appointed a crew tainted with some previous term failure under his direct leadership as President.

On the contrary, this was his first opportunity to appoint a Cabinet as it was his first time to be in office as the President of Zimbabwe. Blaming him for appointing ministers from the Mugabe era is a bit unfair considering that this was the only pool he could choose his Cabinet from.

After all, having served in Government both as a minister and later as a Vice President, President Mnangagwa appointed individuals whose respective competences and ability to deliver he is mindful of. It is also critical to consider that some of the ministers in this Cabinet might not have been given enough room to thrive during Cde Mugabe’s term in office.

For instance, it is on record that Finance Minister Patrick Chinamasa was vilified for his lean budget allocations to programmes which had a trivial impact to national development. It’s also a fact that he was also keen on depoliticising the Treasury. This made him unpopular to opportunists in the party.

President Mnangagwa’s appointment of ministers belonging to the Mugabe era is not flawed. Government has to have continuity and institutional memory which the retention of old work horses helps. Besides, these ministers are Members of Parliament whose initial appointment was through the ballot in 2013. This buttresses the point that many of the critics of the Cabinet are people who never voted for ZANU-PF and indeed the party’s supporters are happy with their representatives.

Another wild and misplaced conspiracy relates to the appointment of the military elements as President Mnangagwa is accused of “paying back” to loyalists in the war veterans sector and the army. It’s clear, this is propaganda espoused by defeated factionalists who belonged to the old and divided ZANU-PF which was under siege owing to Grace Mugabe and her cabal’s defiant dismissal of the party’s trinity of unity, peace and development to enrich their ideologically baseless usurping of power.

This G40 faction’s undermining of the liberation legacy and its custodians has also been immensely deployed to discredit the role of the army since the start of Operation Restore Legacy right up to the appointment of Air Marshal Perrance Shiri and Major-General Sibusiso Moyo as Cabinet ministers.

The key argument to support this notion is that the army belongs to the barracks and that it has no right to be at the fore of core politics. What these pessimists forget is that the military is a distinct nerve cord of real politics. The dismissal of the army in this respect only comes from those who are ignorant of history and those who selectively choose to disregard the intravenous relationship of the gun and politics.

We are a country born and bred from a struggle for liberation, therefore in our context politics naturally intermingles with the gun. An attempt to rethink or suspend this reality is a mischievous attempt to de-construct what informs our political culture. None of the two (the gun and politics) leads the other, but the two complement each other. It’s only in colonial captured minds where politics and the gun exist in two worlds apart.

In fact, the idea of separating the gun from politics undermines the need to make practical follow-ups on the gains of the gun in eradicating and burying colonialism. Therefore, the appointment of Perrance Shiri as the Minister of Lands, Agriculture and Rural Settlement is in touch with the revolutionary creed which from the outset was anchored on restoring land to the black majority following the gruesome imperialist looting and plunder.

Therefore, having a Minister of Lands with undoubtable liberation credentials is a symbolic realignment of historical property black and white relations and a restoration of our political reason to a perpetual tradition of anti-colonial resistance.

Furthermore, challenging the appointment of Major-General Sibusiso Moyo (Rtd) as Minister of Foreign Affairs and International Trade because he is from the army is a bit absurd if not ridiculous. Besides his military background, Moyo is a Doctor of International Relations and a logistics diplomat during the struggle and after independence. This made him a befitting candidate for his ministerial portfolio.

The military had a hallmark contribution in carving out the outcomes of the current political transition. On that note, the appointment of the new Cabinet must reflect that particular mark of the army’s role in what the entire nation is celebrating as an opportunity for increased political-economy development. After all, this has been the best opportunity rewarding distinguished service to the country by refined cadres who have only served in one branch of defending national interest and are graduating to another stage of service to their motherland.

It is disappointing to witness these cadres’ patriotic credentials being narrowly touted around their sole proximity to the gun at the same time erasing the fact that they joined the Second Chimurenga as “politicians” and not as “soldiers”. They went into the training camps in Tanzania, Mozambique and Zambia to achieve African political interests which they have a right to defend as Government Ministers in post-independent Zimbabwe.

Denying them the right to take up ministerial portfolios betrays their involvement with the gun as politicians in the first place. Even the current President was a man of the gun during our war for liberation. This is why he has no fear of inviting other former men of the gun like him to the discussion table to tackle matters of governance.

It’s only bookish technocrats and defectors who are threatened when men of the gun are to share boardrooms with them to discuss issues of national policy. This is why General Tongogara was an isolated element during the Lancaster discussions. He negotiated freedom from the barrel of the gun more than he engrossed in politics.

This was the same politics he contested which resurfaced in post-independence’s negotiated settlement as it sought to replace cadres whose tutelage emanated from the barrel of the gun with those who posed as thought-power figures of our liberation.

To date, this neo-colonial thinking has been sustained to conserve the interests of politicians with no iota of organic revolutionary orientation who confused their appointment to render their soft-skills as the apex political intelligence which could outsmart intellectuals confined to the barracks. These are the same comrades who spent a greater part of their time in the former Cabinet trying to clone a scatter-brain First Lady to the iconic leadership and intellectual enigma of Cde Robert Gabriel Mugabe.

Therefore, Major-General (Rtd) Sibusiso Moyo and Air Marshal (Rtd)Perrance Shiri belong to politics in as much as they have played their part in defending national interests through the gun since the time of our struggle. They should be sent back home to politics because that is where they belong. And that is not wrong. It is the right thing to be done.

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