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Reason Wafawarova on Monday
BEING truthful is one of the hardest things to do for politicians, much as it is a general problem that bedevils humanity in general. I hear our politicians are telling villagers in Chimanimani West that they have some kind of a plan to make up for the looted diamonds of Chiadzwa, and some senior politician has been specifically reported expressing disgust at his sudden “discovery” that the villagers were still poor despite their proximity to the diamond mines in their area, and that they still had the poor old colonial roads.

Well, we also hear that Temba Mliswa has very little regard for the MDC-T and its support base after his victorious joint campaign effort with Advocate, or is it now Pastor Nelson Chamisa in Norton recently. Mliswa actually asserts that the opposition party is pathetically unpopular and has no grassroots support at all, belittling Nelson Chamisa with unparalleled ease. This is despite the fact that on March 16 this year, Mliswa had this to say about Morgan Tsvangirai’s perceived support base:

“The only people who could stop Tsvangirai are war veterans and all indications are that Tsvangirai will win the elections again in 2018 without the need for a coalition with Mujuru’s People First.”

It is true that the MDC no longer has the grassroots support it used to command at the peak of its fluke rise, but why was Temba Mliswa pretending otherwise in March this year? He just wanted to spite Zanu-PF after being ousted from the revolutionary party.

So bitter was Mliswa that he even misrepresented facts by saying Tsvangirai would “win the elections again,” as if the MDC-T leader ever won any election before.

Indeed he led the first round of votes in the 2008 presidential race and he must be credited for that. However, that election was obviously inconclusive and its end result was a Robert Mugabe presidency — never mind the debate around how Tsvangirai faired in the run-off election and the perceived reasons thereof.

Temba Mliswa says he is a politician, and he is only accountable to himself, occasionally pledging accountability to the voter when it suits him. He is an honest man. Anyone who has even glimpsed a newspaper or watched television would have seen some kind of dishonesty involving one politician or the other.

Apart from defence lawyers, politicians have the worst reputation for honesty. For us Zimbabweans, there is this double tragedy of having too many lawyers in politics. It is like electing the witch to treat your ailment.

Mliswa is a former sports personality, and he has also made his name in politics, and also to his foolhardy bravery that has worked in his favour in the rough Zimbabwean political terrain. The man is simply unreliable and dishonesty and he is honest and frank about it.

He is a survivor who will lie, cheat and betray to get his way. But he is not the only dishonest politician on the political scene. In fact he easily counts as a novice in the gruesome art.

Prof Jonathan Moyo crafted and celebrated the Zanu-PF constitutional amendment 32 (1) that gave appointment powers to President Robert Mugabe in 2014, arguing that this was the only way to prove that President Mugabe “was the only leader in Zanu-PF”.

Now the ever flip-flopping professor says centralising power around President Robert Mugabe was “a mistake,” only because he happens to dislike some of the people that the President went on to appoint. In fact he happens not to like the way the appointing powers have taken his strategic advantage as the chief manipulator in the party.

To put it politely, the reputation of politicians as shady characters is not applied without reasonable grounds. The kind of corruption like the Zimdef fund looting we have been made privy to as the public is only a small proportion of the corruption that exists and permeates through the bureaucratic system.

The implicated culprit has openly told us that there are a bigger fish in the game than himself. Dishonest as the man is, one is tempted to believe his assertion that corruption is more rampant than his “petty” stealing, motivated by the desire to corruptly acquire bicycles for vote buying in his home village.

Many if not most of our politicians deserve to be called “thieves,” “rogue,” or even “robbers”. Of course this by no means applies to the hard working and cleanly behaved characters trying hard to make things work out for the better in our country.

It is not academic to generalise and say every politician is a money-grubbing, close-fisted, good for nothing rogue to be treated with contempt, but frankly such an assertion is not exactly divorced from the undeniable truth, especially in Zimbabwe. I worked in Government very closely to Cabinet ministers for four years, and this was when the country still had a semblance of conscience. Even then, almost everyone I worked with was deadly corrupt, from permanent secretaries to Cabinet ministers, down to runners like transport officers and accounts clerks.

I am not professing messianic holiness at all, but the truth is I hate corrupt people with murderous passion. I want them exterminated after ruthless brutalisation. These are honest feelings of a man highly angered.

But I am writing here not in expression of my uncontrollable fury, but in order to explore the reason why our politics appears to be such a fertile breeding ground for dishonesty.

It all starts with our election process. Nowhere else is dishonesty more prevalent than in a candidate’s bid for election. Our election campaigns will always attract all sorts of deception and dishonesty. It is simply time to be lied to.

Mliswa had real nasty things to say about Saviour Kasukuwere during the campaign leading to the Norton by-election, throwing terrible undisputed accusations in the direction of Zanu-PF’s Commissar, and profusely thanking the opposition MDC-T for its unsolicited solidarity support the time.

After winning, he is all cosy with the man he says badly wants a sexual relationship with him, and he tells us that he received no support from the clueless MDC-T at all. He even wants the miserable Tsvangirai to go finish himself in the burning fires of hell.

Jonathan Moyo did the same thing to win the 2008 Tsholotsho seat after convincing the MDC-T not to contest him as an independent. He won, ditched the foolishly led political outfit, rejoined Zanu-PF after spending four years telling all of us that only people afflicted with insanity would find it reasonable to be part of the Mugabe-led party.

The question is why would anyone flip-flop this much? Why would a candidate lie in a speech or add something to their platform that they know to be false?

The simple answer is votes. Temba Mliswa lied for the vote, he betrayed for the vote, pretended for the vote, scolded for the vote, slandered for the vote, misrepresented for the vote, compromised for the vote and so on and so forth.

Jonathan Moyo hailed Morgan Tsvangirai for the vote in 2008, slandered President Robert Mugabe for the vote, lied for the vote, did everything dishonesty for the vote. He did get the vote then, albeit by default.

Let us face it; whatever a politician may define as his personal goal, he or she knows that the goal cannot be achieved without being voted into a position of power or authority. Our politicians have a very simple answer as to what a person needs in order to be elected into power.

It’s not character, it’s not substance, it’s not vision, it’s not passion, and its not even love for the country. No. It is votes. This is our problem. The connection between lying and votes has become like that between mating and procreation.

The easiest way to get the most votes is to appeal to the widest variety of people possible and convince them that only you are concerned about all the things they are concerned about.

The easiest way to do this is to pretend, and pretending is the most basic way of dishonesty. Simple.

You then just tell the people that if enough of them vote for you, you will do something drastically significant about whatever it is they are concerned about, like roads for the poor villagers of Chimanimani, jobs at the nearby mines; you freely throw around crowd arousing statistics like 80 percent of workers at the nearby mines will be the hapless villagers, and so on and so forth.

You can just tell the voters that you will be giving them free land to build urban homes, or that you will be giving them shares in the big foreign-owned companies they see around, or that you will be creating millions of jobs for them, anything on education, health, food, shelter, transport and so on.

Realistically, no person can feel the same way as the majority of the voting populace does on every single thing, and this is how the dishonesty comes into play.

Even if we had that omni-empathetic person to vote for, it is very hard to believe that the person could upon being elected make significant advancements towards everyone’s problems, or even in fulfilling his or her own election promises.

Even the maverick Donald Trump is now busy backing away from his humongous election promises. He might build a token wall somewhere on the US-Mexico border, a fence here and there, but he will not rid America of immigrants, he will not bring any jobs back from wherever he thinks the jobs went and so on and so forth.

Sometimes politicians genuinely feel as passionate as we all do about things we do not like and they genuinely believe that once elected they can rescue all of us. I believe Joseph Chinotimba and Donald Trump are good examples of such politicians and I might be totally wrong. Such politicians will learn the hard way once elected that it is impossible for one person to effect meaningful change within a government system.

There is no point being voted into power just because you believe an issue is important, or that it is pertinent and of concern to the majority of people. You cannot be elected to represent or to lead people simply because you feel passionate about the gravity of a matter. You cannot be voted into power simply to become the custodian of people’s feelings.

Voters are looking for concrete plans for bringing change to what is bedevilling them, not for someone who simply feels the way they do. Well, it can be argued that these lies from our politicians are not only inevitable but necessary in an election, and that might be true in a context.

The challenge we have is that honest politicians often lose elections because their truth and honesty are not as impressive as the lies peddled by the more successful politicians. Many people doubt someone like Barack Obama really supports gay marriages, and it is hard to believe Melania Trump’s husband really disdains foreigners in his country when he just married one.

Some of these claims are only made to attract the vote of a targeted group of people. Zimbabwe we are one and together we will overcome. It is homeland or death!

Reason Wafawarova is a political writer based in SYDNEY, Australia.