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Prof Madhuku

WE wish National Constitutional Assembly chairman Professor Lovemore Madhuku all the best as he throws his hat into the political arena.Zimbabwe is a constitutional democracy, and any and everyone is free to pursue their dreams in any area of endeavour.

This is what the gallant sons and daughters of this land paid the ultimate price for as they fought successive Chimurenga Wars to win us the democracy we enjoy today.

Our heroes and heroines, however, did not sacrifice life and limb in order to have their ideals pilfered by dwarfish thieves in giant robes who profess respect for their ideals while supping with the devil.

We salute Prof Madhuku for professing respect for the liberation struggle and saying his party will uphold the ideals of pan-Africanism but we hasten to remind him that talk is cheap.

Anyone can say any words, but it is the actions that speak loudest.  This is why we find it odd, very odd that Prof Madhuku appears keen on having his cake and eating it.

After having been at the helm of a lobby group that Westerners not only funded since 1997 but which, along with the ZCTU, was used as a launch pad for the MDC-T, we find it odd that Prof Madhuku talks nationalism while holding onto donor coattails.

We would have thought sincerity would bid Prof Madhuku to break with the past, and launch a new party and not merely announce that the NCA is no longer an NGO but is now a political party, which is effectively what Saturday was about.

The NCA has a reactionary history, it was used by Morgan Tsvangirai, its first chairman, as a springboard to politics. And it appears Prof Madhuku — while keen on avoiding the pitfalls of puppetry that claimed Tsvangirai — is indicating left while turning right as he effectively retraces Tsvangirai’s steps.

The NCA as a nationalist organisation is a hard sell akin to attempting to sell sand in the Kalahari Desert.  This organisation was launched as an antithesis to the Government’s Constitutional Commission which sought to entrench the land reform programme in the Constitution.

The NCA campaigned for a No vote in the Constitutional Referendum of 2000, not because of any perceived weaknesses in the draft produced by the Constitutional Commission but because the Western donor community was opposed to Section 57 that provided for the acquisition of white-held farms without compensation.

Thus, the NCA has been fighting the very cause that Prof Madhuku now claims to respect — land — which was the raison de’tre of the liberation struggle.

As such while we respect Prof Madhuku’s right to form a political party, we take exception to his attempt to pull wool over the eyes of the electorate.

It is not too late for him and his crew to rectify their mistakes.  The NCA should be disbanding because Zimbabweans wrote their Constitution, which they subsequently overwhelmingly endorsed during a nationwide referendum in March. As such, the NCA has no role to play in that regard.

We also find it odd that Prof Madhuku, who predicated his advocacy on the claim that politicians had no role in constitution-making, claims he is entering politics to pursue the issue of a new Constitution?

He needs to come clean and say, in the wake of the MDC-T’s disastrous loss, and amid growing calls for leadership change in MDC-T, he sees an opportunity to occupy that space; alternatively the powers behind the MDC-T are keen on an alternative project that speaks Zanu-PF’s language, which was the MDC-T’s Achilles heel.

Be that as it may, the NCA has simply vindicated Government’s position that we do not have much by way of civil society but quasi-political organisations masquerading as NGOs.

Today it is the NCA that has come clean, we wonder who else is waiting in the wings. We advise Prof Madhuku to break with the past, and demonstrate real transformation.

Our nation is highly literate and discerning.